“Save yourself for the Americans. There were about six beauties in the room, or maybe it was four, when I stopped in to say hello to them.”
“Are any of them flying with us?”
“Not tomorrow, but probably soon. We have to brief them first. They don’t really need it. They’ll figure it out as they go along, like the rest of us. Well, I’m off,” she said, handing him her beer to finish.
“I’ll drive you back,” he volunteered, setting the beer down. “You look done in. You’re asleep on your feet.”
“Not quite, but getting there.” She smiled at him.
She followed him outside, and they chatted on the short drive back to her barracks. The nurses’ dormitory was one of the biggest buildings on the base.
“See you in the morning,” he said and waved as he drove away. He was thinking about the American nurses who had just arrived and wondered if they were as good-looking as Pru said. He could hardly wait to see for himself.
* * *
—
Emma Jones was already sound asleep in her bed when Pru walked into the dimly lit room they shared, and undressed. They had been roommates for a year, and after a stormy beginning, had become fast friends. Pru had heard that Emma had had a rough flight that day and lost a patient, which was rare for her. Of all of them, she had been a nurse for the longest time before the war. Emma had grown up in the slums in the East End of London. Her father had died at the end of the Great War shortly before she was born. Her mother had died of drink when Emma was fifteen. She’d spent three years in a Catholic home for orphans after that, and had somehow resisted the usual temptations of prostitution and minor crime to survive. She had no family, had grown up dirt poor, and had all the toughness and the accent of the East End that went with it when she and Pru met in the RAF.
She had been determined to make something of herself as a young girl, and to not wind up like her mother and too many women she knew like her. By sheer grit and determination, she had gotten a scholarship to a state nursing school before the war, became a nurse and then a midwife, and had worked as a midwife in Poplar in the East End. She had remained faithful to her roots. When the bombing of London started, she had joined the army and later the Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron as soon as it was formed. She had had a boyfriend when the war started. He’d been shot down and killed over Germany in 1941. She hadn’t loved another man since, and didn’t want to. She concentrated on her work.
She was twenty-six years old, although she was so small she looked like a child at times. But she was all woman and all heart, and fought like a cat, or the street fighter she was, any time she felt she needed to defend someone or something she cared about. She fought for her patients’ lives harder than any nurse Pru had ever known.
They’d had their share of run-ins at first. Emma had a profound distrust of anyone from the upper classes, and she got into arguments with Pru constantly until she finally realized that Pru wasn’t snobbish and didn’t give a damn where Emma had grown up, or that she was from the East End. They had been best friends ever since. She teased Pru at times about where she came from, and Pru returned the favor by calling her an “East End guttersnipe.” The insults they cheerfully exchanged horrified anyone who heard them, only to realize later that the two women loved each other and would have died defending each other. Emma had punched a soldier in a pub once when she thought he had insulted Pru, and a bar fight had broken out all around them. The two women had escaped before the police arrived, and they laughed all the way back to their barracks.
Pru felt bad about the boy she’d heard Emma had lost that day. She knew how hard Emma took her losses and that she always considered it a failure on her part. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t save them all. They tried to, but sometimes the damage was so great that even extreme measures didn’t make a difference. The worst part of their jobs was the men they lost, although the time saved by airlifting them out of the battle zones and flying them back to the hospital saved many of them. It was a new fight for the nurses and the corpsmen every day.
Emma stirred as Pru changed into her nightgown and slipped into her bed across from Emma’s. Emma popped her head up, with her short bright red hair sticking up like a pixie’s. She was half asleep.
“Is that you?” Emma asked sleepily.
“No, it’s Claudette Colbert,” Pru said with a grin.
“Oh shut up, did you eat?” she asked, lying down again. They took care of each other since no one else did. They were combat buddies in the best sense of the word.