Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [147]
Immediately Teddy dropped his cigarette and set off in pursuit of the thief, but he had only run a few yards when he stopped, and doubled over, clutching his chest and then collapsed onto the ground.
Grace couldn’t remember moving but somehow she was there, alongside his colleagues, who had also seen what had happened, kneeling down beside him whilst over her head anxious voices issued curt instructions.
His face was deathly pale, his lips almost blue, and beneath her searching fingers his pulse was so frail and thready it might almost not have been there.
The other ambulance men were attempting to lift him onto a stretcher. Grace reached for his hand. His eyes opened and he looked at her. Grace’s heart did a slow sickening dive that dizzied her.
‘Don’t move him,’ someone was instructing. ‘Doc’s on his way.’
‘It’s too late for that,’ another responded in a shocked voice. ‘It looks like the poor lad’s a goner.’
‘Teddy. Teddy …’ But Grace knew it was no use. She could see it in his face, and in his eyes was a look that told her that he knew it too.
She lifted his hand to her lips and pressed them against it. Don’t die, Teddy, please don’t die.
As though he had heard the words beating inside her head he gave her a crooked smile. He was trying to say something and she had to lean even closer to him to hear it.
‘Don’t you go forgetting what I said to you about you having to do the living for both of us.’ His voice was like the dry rustle of dead leaves swept aside by the wind. ‘And think on what you do ’cos I’ll be watching you from up there.’
‘Teddy. Teddy … No.’
But Grace knew even as she said his name that it was too late and he had gone.
* * *
They let her go with his body into the hospital but later she was glad that they had refused to allow her to help lay him out. Somehow it wouldn’t have been proper really, her seeing him in such a personal way when they hadn’t been like that with one another.
Matron was very kind to her, telling her she was sending her home in the care of a senior nurse Grace didn’t know but whose family apparently lived a couple of streets away from her own.
It was a beautiful evening with a clear sky and a perfect sunset, the air balmy with summer, and the evidence of living things at their fullest flowering was all around her in gardens and on allotments. Teddy should have lived to experience that fullness of life instead of being denied it.
Elspeth, the other nurse, let her walk down her own street on her own, and to Grace’s relief she managed to control herself until she was inside, but the moment she saw her mother she threw herself into her arms and cried her eyes out.
TWENTY-TWO
‘The bloody Luftwaffe were at it again last night. They got the dockers’ umbrella this time and the docks,’ Mr Whitehead told Grace gloomily as she did the morning locker round.
The dockers’ umbrella was the local name for the overhead railway that ran the length of the docks and under which dockers often sheltered when it came on to rain.
‘Yes, I know,’ Grace agreed calmly. ‘My dad’s with the Salvage Corps and they were called out, but seemingly the damage wasn’t too bad.’
‘They’ve bin bombing the south-east coast and Dover, an’ all,’ Mr Whitehead continued, determined to look on the black side. ‘Hitler wants to destroy our RAF so that he can invade us unchallenged.’
‘Hellfire Corner, the papers are calling Dover now, but the RAF will soon see them off,’ the cheerful young sergeant in the next bed, who was now recovering from his injuries, told him.
‘Them German Stukas are no match for our Spitfires.’
Grace dutifully tried to concentrate on the newspaper report they were both discussing, which explained how the German Stukas