Free Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys by Mary Gibson

hope.
    ‘Why wouldn’t he come straight home?’ her father said, once outside.
    May shook her head. ‘Who knows, Dad. He could’ve fallen down dead drunk somewhere.’
    ‘Well, if he was in hospital, I think we’d have heard by now. May, I think we should go to the police.’ But at the police station, they had no news of Jack. They directed them to a nearby yard, where rows of bodies, wrapped in tarpaulin, filled the fenced-in space. Bile rose in May’s throat and tears pricked her eyes. Each little mound, a shattered family. She gripped her father’s arm tightly as a WVS helper, with a grey face and tired eyes, listened to Jack’s description. She was as gentle and tactful as she could be in the face of their imminent grief, but the unspoken truth was that, by this stage, if a victim hadn’t been identified, it simply meant that there was very little left of them.
    ‘We daren’t go back to your mother with no news,’ her father said, his body rigid with anxiety. ‘We’d better go to Guy’s ourselves.’
    So, with her arm through his, sometimes feeling the whole of his weight upon her, sometimes having to rely on his strength, they made the long walk to Guy’s Hospital. No buses or cars were running. The unusual quiet added a ghostliness to streets lined with blackened ribs of buildings and roads rippling with torn-up tramlines. At Guy’s they were directed to a basement casualty centre. Here, many of the wounded from John Bull Arch were being cared for. A busy staff nurse took down details, and after consulting a clipboard, went away to check each of the many beds crammed into the white-tiled room. After a short while, she came back with the news that none of the casualties from the arch matched Jack’s description.
    ‘You could try the other hospitals – it might be he was sent elsewhere. I know St Olave’s took some of the injured.’ Her tone was almost too sympathetic and May felt the nurse was merely applying another dressing, a tourniquet for their fear. She couldn’t blame her; the woman obviously had more than enough live victims to worry about, without having to worry about the dead.
    But Jack was not at St Olave’s, and on the way home May said, ‘Dad, do you think someone ought to let Joycie know?’
    Her father swallowed hard and nodded. ‘I’ll do it.’
    *
    But after another night with still no word of Jack, May could see the anxiety was draining the life out of her parents. Desperate to talk, May went to visit her elder sister Peggy. These days Peggy was apt to leave too much to May when it came to family problems, but now she needed help with keeping her parents’ spirits up. It was too easy for Peggy to put her head in the sand, pretend all this wasn’t happening. It irked that Peggy seemed to have abdicated all sense of responsibility to her husband, who, May’s mother said, treated Peggy like a princess.
    Peggy’s council flat, on the new Purbrook Estate, was small but pristine: George had provided his ‘princess’ with a home like a palace. The curtains and furniture were new, nothing like their own hotch-potch of inherited items. There was running hot water and even a bathroom. Bermondsey Council had been systematically demolishing the old slum streets, but when May’s mother’s chance had come to move into a new flat, nothing would persuade her to leave their old Victorian house. ‘I don’t want to live up in the air,’ she’d protested. ‘That’s for the birds. I’m staying put!’
    Now, sitting in her sister’s tidy little kitchen, drinking tea from her good china cups, May explained why she’d come.
    ‘Peg, you’ve got to come over and help me with Mum. She’s just sitting there, staring into space. And Dad’s wearing himself out. He’s been tramping the streets all hours, going from hospital to hospital. I can’t be with her twenty-four hours a day.’
    ‘I’ll do what I can, love – none of us can get on with our lives, not till we know what’s