A few of the nurses mingled secretly with the enlisted men, which was not allowed. It didn’t seem worth the risk to Audrey and the others, just to flirt with the men, so they stayed with the other nurses.
“And here, my mom was worried I’d never find a husband,” Alex commented, and the others laughed, as they stared at the soldiers below them. “Somehow I never counted on meeting a man while I’m in the army.” But others did, and found them, for a night, or longer.
“I don’t want to meet a guy,” Lizzie said. She hadn’t gotten over Will yet, even two years later. Every man she met paled in comparison to him.
“Maybe a nice English boy,” Audrey said. She hadn’t had a date, or time for one, while her mother was sick. She liked the idea of meeting a nice man one day, but she hadn’t had the opportunity in years.
“I’d rather wait til the war is over,” Louise said soberly, and her situation was more complicated.
None of them were desperate to find boyfriends. They had too much else on their minds.
The two nurses they were sharing their cabin with had looked startled when they saw Louise, but made no comment after a quick glance at each other. The others seemed nice enough, and they decided to ignore her.
The days on the ship dragged by and there were some tense moments, when the ship slowed, and they all suspected the lookouts had spotted something or the captain had been warned. Then their speed would pick up again. The captain was pushing the ship hard to get to England in a hurry. Ships just like theirs had been torpedoed and sunk by U-boats or attacked by the German Luftwaffe, but day followed day without incident. And finally, five days later, land came into sight. More than two thousand cheers rose from the ship as they all stood on deck. They had made the journey safely, and their next adventures awaited them.
Chapter 8
When war was declared in Europe in September 1939, although they were older, Prudence Pommery’s parents were among the first to offer their home to house as many children as they could manage during the evacuation of children from London. They had three grown children of their own. Maximillian was twenty-two, Prudence was twenty, and Phillip was nineteen. Both their sons enlisted in the RAF immediately. A month after war was declared, Prudence signed on for an accelerated two-and-a-half-year nursing course at the local college, near their Yorkshire manor.
The Pommerys turned nearly all the guest rooms into dormitories and hired local girls to help take care of the children. The government urged all parents to send their children out of the cities, on relocation programs to keep them safe from the bombing. Many children had already been killed. Families in the countryside all over England were volunteering to take them in and house them. Few people took as many as the Pommerys, but they had an enormous home. They had twenty-four children staying with them, and four village girls to help them. Prudence pitched in whenever she wasn’t at her nursing classes. The operation ran surprisingly smoothly. Lord and Lady Pommery called them their adopted grandchildren and faced the situation with kindness and good humor. Four and a half years later, in the spring of 1944, nearly half the children had lost their parents, either in combat or during the bombing of London. They would be placed in adoptive homes after the war. But in the meantime, they remained with the Pommerys in Yorkshire. In some cases, brothers and sisters had been placed with them, but in many cases, siblings had been separated. The youngest child they had there was nearly six now, and the oldest had just turned eighteen and was about to enlist in the army. Running the house and supervising the children was a full-time job for Lady Pommery. The children attended the village school, and the Pommerys had acquired their own school bus. Lord and Lady Pommery took turns driving the bus to school, and thoroughly enjoyed it, almost as much as Prudence had enjoyed her nursing classes. She had graduated in February 1942, and was a volunteer nurse at the local hospital for a year after she graduated. Then she decided to enlist in the RAF Nursing Corps and went to London.
She had been there for a year when she volunteered for the Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron. She had been there for three months, in a combined unit with American air forces flight nurses, and some British and Australians. They flew on Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo planes, heavy, dependable two-engine planes perfectly suited to short flights and heavy cargo. They carried up to twenty-four litter patients, and sometimes the walking wounded. The patients were tended to by a nurse and two medical corpsmen on each flight. A flight surgeon and senior nurse oversaw the squadrons from the ground. The planes flew into areas of heavy fighting and brought out as many wounded as they could, those who could be saved and would survive the journey. They had to do rapid triage when they picked up the wounded, and there were sometimes terrible decisions to make. But they saved many lives by removing the wounded by plane instead of ambulance, which was slow going and often over rough terrain. They lost far fewer patients transporting them by air. The planes faced all the perils of battle themselves, at risk of being shot down by the enemy. And with men and cargo on board, the army was not allowed to mark the planes with the red cross and were considered legitimate military targets. They were given fighter plane coverage when possible, which wasn’t always the case.