Free Coventry by Helen Humphreys

move,” he says, and Harriet looks down and sees a man’s hand, palm open to the night, and the rest of the man covered in debris.
    She gets down on her hands and knees and begins pulling rubble off his body.
    He’s a man not much older than Harriet, but by the time they get him free, he’s dead.
    “Look at that,” says Jeremy, pointing to the medals that the man wears pinned to his chest, perhaps in an effort to save them. “Mons. Ypres. The Somme. He went through all that and he died like this.”
    Harriet thinks of the medals she was given after Owen died; the medals he had earned but never received. It felt, at the time, as though she was being awarded the medals for sacrificing her husband to the war. She gave the metal stars and ribbons to Owen’s parents.
    A man emerges from a lane supporting another man. “Help me,” he says when he sees Harriet and Jeremy. “I can’t carry him much farther.”
    Jeremy rushes forward and hoists the injured man up against his shoulder.
    “Where can we take him?” asks Harriet. She is sure the hospital has been flattened by now.
    “I don’t know,” says the able-bodied man. “But I can’t leave him. He’s my friend.”
    The injured man appears to be unconscious, his head is slung down against his chest. Dragging him through the streets will make them more vulnerable to being hit. Harriet doesn’t want to risk her own life to save a stranger’s. She knows this is selfish, but she doesn’t care.
    The two men carrying the door appear again. This time there is a young girl lying on the wooden stretcher. What happened to the first woman? Harriet rushes back to her little group.
    “Hurry up,” she says. “We need to follow those men with the door.”
    The would-be ambulance attendants do not go far. As they disappear down a passage at the end of a row of shops, Harriet follows them. At the back of the shops, sitting on the bare patch of land beyond the dustbins, is an Anderson shelter with perhaps half a dozen people sitting or lying on the ground in front of it. The men with the girl on the door tip her off onto a bit of clear ground and then shuffle back up the passage.
    Harriet runs back to the others.
    “It’s a bomb shelter,” she says to Jeremy. “Just behind the shops. Looks as if it’s been turned into a kind of aid station.”
    The Anderson shelters have been given out by the government to anyone in Coventry who has wanted one. They are made of curved pieces of corrugated sheet metal that bolt together and are meant to protect against flying debris but they are not sturdy enough to survive a direct hit.
    A young woman strides out of the shelter. She has her hair tied up in a kerchief and a first-aider’s satchel slung across her shoulder. She looks up at Harriet and Jeremy, at the man Jeremy is helping to drag toward the shelter.
    “Oh, god,” she says. “Not another one. All right. Lay him down. Make sure he’s breathing. Keep him comfortable. I’ll get to him when I can.” She kneels by the girl who has just been dumped off the door, looks up at Jeremy and Harriet in their fire-watcher uniforms. “Could you help me carry her inside? I’m all by myself here.”
    “Sorry.” The man who is helping Jeremy to carry the injured man untangles himself from his burden. “I left my family. I need to be getting back to them,” and he grimaces apologetically as he scuttles off.
    “Of course we’ll help you,” says Jeremy. He gently lowers the injured man to the ground, lays him on his back, and takes off his own coat to use as a pillow under the man’s head.
    “Are you a doctor?” asks Harriet.
    “Nurse,” says the woman. She stands up, offers her hand, first to Jeremy and then to Harriet. “Marjorie Hatton. I was taking shelter here and a bomb fell on those shops. Some people managed to drag themselves out and I salvaged some of the bolts of fabric for bandages.” She waves her hand toward the length of cloth wound tight around a man’s