Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [130]
‘We’re all on standby in case we’re needed to bring back the wounded from Lime Street when they’re brought off the trains.’
He wasn’t looking very well, and it seemed to Grace that he was finding it harder than normal to breathe but she knew that telling him to rest was all too likely to have the opposite effect to what she wanted.
There’d been no word as yet from Luke, and although her father kept on saying that no news was good news in an attempt to cheer up her mother, Grace could see in her eyes what she feared. For the first time since she had started her nurse’s training, Grace wished she was still in the St John Ambulance Brigade, since their volunteers were all being sent to the stations to be ready for the troop trains coming up from the south coast bringing the BEF men back to their bases.
The military hospitals down south had taken those most in need of emergency treatment, of course, but as Teddy had warned her, their own hospital was on an alert ready to take injured men for whom there were no hospital beds elsewhere.
Seb closed his eyes, but it was no use, the images were still there. Marie, her brown eyes fierce with determination as she told him that even if she could leave for safety with him, she would not do so.
‘France is my country. And if I must die for her then I will do so. I cannot do the work you have trained me for in your country, Sebastion, you know that. My place is here.’
Had he been naïve or just stupid in not understanding how the pressure of the secret and urgent work he had been sent to France to do might affect him? When he had been recruited in England, trained and then sent to France to help set up and, in turn, train cells of Frenchmen and women to use special codes and wireless equipment to report back to England, if, as now looked likely, France should fall, it had never occurred to him that he might feel like this. He had argued fiercely with Command in England to be allowed to stay on and work with those he had trained, but he had been told that his role was now over and he must return to England. Like a coward, leaving those braver than he to face the enemy and, in all probability, to die. None of them was under any illusions. The life of a member of an underground cell was more likely to be short than long. Short and extremely unpleasant, if they were captured and tortured. He could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead.
The train travelling north had been full of BEF men returning home and he had only just managed to squeeze on to it. He’d been later leaving France than originally planned and had got caught up in the retreat. When the Luftwaffe had machine-gunned the line of men he was standing in, waiting to get on board one of boats at Dunkirk, he’d ended up with a shoulder wound – nothing serious, he’d been told. He had a day in London being debriefed, with his shoulder hurting like hell, unable to get Marie’s face out of his mind, and now he was on his way to Liverpool to take up his new post at Derby House, as a member of an offshoot of what was known as the ‘Y’ Section. Their ‘secret’ job was to listen in to enemy Morse code and other messages, translate them, and then pass them on to their headquarters at Bletchley Park.
Sebastion had not wanted to recruit Marie in the first place. She had been too young, in his opinion, and too pretty, the kind of girl that men would always look at. They had been taught to look for recruits who could fade into the background and pass unnoticed. Marie, though, had been determined. She had been good as well, quick to learn, cool and controlled, where some of the recruits were too hot-headed and reckless.
Her circumstances had been perfect for their purpose as well. Her parents owned a small bar where she worked, the kind of place where comings and goings were a normal part of its daily routine. Even better had been that beneath the tabac was a series of interconnecting cellars, two of which they had hidden behind a false wall.
From that cellar Marie would report back to England.