Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [12]
Whilst she stood there undecided her father looked up and saw her. Saying something to the other men, he came over to her.
‘Mum sent me down to tell you that she wants a lettuce and some toms for tea, Dad. Is everything all right?’ she asked him as she walked with him towards his plot. ‘Only it looked like you were all talking about something serious.’
Grace knew she was lucky to be part of a family in which her parents encouraged their children to talk to them rather than one that observed the traditional ‘children should be seen and not heard and speak only when they were spoken to’ rule. Since all the talk of war had started, her mother and father had included her and Luke in their discussions about what was going on. But even so, there was something in her father’s expression now that made Grace wonder if she had perhaps overstepped the mark.
‘I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have asked,’ she began, only to see her father shake his head and put his arm around her shoulders in a rare gesture of fatherly affection.
‘It’s all right, lass, you’ve done nowt wrong. It’s just that there’s bin a bit of news that’s teken folk a bit aback, and we were just discussing it.’
‘What kind of news?’ Grace asked, assuming he was going to tell her about yet another new instruction from the Government.
‘Seemingly Russia has announced that it’s entering a non-aggression pact with Germany, and we all know what that means,’ he told her heavily.
For a minute Grace was too shocked to say anything. Her throat had gone dry and her heart was pounding.
‘That means war, doesn’t it?’ she managed to ask eventually.
Her father nodded sombrely. ‘It looks pretty much like it. Now, do you think your mum will want a few radishes as well?’
Grace recognised that her father did not want to continue to discuss the shocking news.
War! Was it her imagination or as they walked back home together was there really a brassy tinge to the evening sky and a brooding sulphurous prescience of what was to come?
‘My brother reckons that we’ll be at war before the month’s out, and he says that his unit have been put on standby alert ready,’ Lucy, one of the other first aiders, was telling everyone importantly when Grace arrived at the St John Ambulance Brigade station at the local church hall for their regular Tuesday evening meeting. Originally when Grace had joined the St John Ambulance Brigade, like all the other young cadet members, her ‘responsibilities’ had included running errands and doing other jobs for local elderly people, and generally making herself useful. Grace still called to see Miss Higgins, a spinster in her late seventies who lived in the next street, knowing that as well as liking having someone to run her errands, the elderly lady enjoyed the opportunity to talk about her youth and to gossip about her neighbours.
Now, as a fully qualified first aider, Grace got to wear a navy-blue drill overall and an armband printed with the words ‘First Aid’, in addition to being issued with a steel helmet, but tonight it was so warm that she had removed the helmet whilst she and the girl partnering her prepared their ‘patient’ for her ambulance journey to hospital, having been on hand when she was ‘rescued from a bombing incident’.
A splint secured the patient’s leg, and several bandages had been applied to her torso. Moving the deliberately unhelpfully inert body of their patient in the heat of the enclosed space of the church hall had left Grace’s face flushed and damp, and now she sat back a little anxiously on her heels, awaiting the inspection of her work by one of the senior nurses from Mill Road Hospital, who had volunteered to come to teach the volunteers all the basics of first aiding.
Sister Harris’s approving ‘very nice Campion’ had Grace’s face glowing for a far more satisfactory reason than the heat of the church hall.
‘I hate this bit,’ her partner groaned when, their work inspected and passed, they set to carefully removing and rewinding the bandages.