Free The Love-Charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel Page B

official guidelines instructed ambulance workers to lie the patient on top of a blanket folded sideways to avoid direct contact with the canvas or metal bed portion. ‘This adds to his comfort and keeps him warm, thus reducing shock.’ She followed this advice and then joined her colleague in lifting the stretchers into the ambulance, relieved to have agency again. The hardest part of the night was always the passive waiting, when she was unable to help the rescue workers or to determine the outcome of their efforts. She cleared the dust off the windscreen and drove off, while an ARP warden shone a torch on her wheels to make sure that she did not puncture them on the rubble. Ambulance drivers were supposed to keep to sixteen miles an hour, but most of them ignored the speed limit. Macaulay tended to become more tentative once she had patients in her charge. In The Towers of Trebizond she would have no qualms in labelling herself a murderer. She did not want other lives on her conscience as well as O’Donovan’s.
     

    A London ambulance driver with patients, autumn 1940
     
    She deposited her patients at the hospital, where ambulances pulled up at the stretcher entrance. Macaulay was never an enthusiastic hospital visitor. She had experienced her share of hospitals in the First World War, when she signed on as a VAD nurse, despite her extreme squeamishness. According to Jean, this was a foolish choice given that Rose ‘tended to vomit or faint at the sight of blood or the mere mention of horrors’. Macaulay endowed Imogen, one of the heroines of her 1923 novel, Told by an Idiot , with her own nursing experience, describing her as ‘an infinitely incapable V.A.D.’ who ‘did everything with remarkable incompetence, and fainted or was sick when her senses and nerves were more displeased than usual by what they encountered, which was often’. She recorded her own revulsion during the First World War through the character of Alix in her 1916 novel Non-Combatants and Others . Here Alix is suddenly and violently sick after she hears her shellshocked cousin describe the leg of a friend which he pulled out of the trench, ‘thinking it led on to the entire friend, finding it didn’t’. Her cousin Dorothy, like Jean an efficient and successful nurse, retorts impatiently: ‘You’ll never be any use if you don’t forget yourself , Alix. You couldn’t possibly nurse if you were always giving in to your own nerves.’
    By the time of the Second World War, Macaulay had overcome her squeamishness enough to deal with her patients. Like nurses, ambulance drivers had to contend with nauseating gore. A Watford-based volunteer later recalled that the duties of an ambulance driver included tying together broken legs at the knees and ankles, and covering exposed intestines with her tin hat to keep infection out and the guts in. But Macaulay was still happier on this side of the entrance to the hospital; more at home in a van than a ward.
    Now, having relinquished her patients, she returned to the ambulance station where, after raids, male and female drivers took their turns in their respective decontamination rooms, brushing off the dust that ended up coating their entire bodies, even getting under their tin hats and into their hair. She then went home to bed, relieved to find that her own flat remained intact. Macaulay knew that she was lucky to have survived the night. In the last three weeks of bombing, eight ambulance drivers had been killed and twenty-seven ambulances or adapted cars had been destroyed. And she was always less resilient than the rescue workers. ‘It is all in the night’s work to them,’ she observed to Jean, and ‘perhaps it will be to me sometime, but I am still an amateur at it and it rather gets one down. One wonders all the time how many people are at the moment alive under some ruin, and how much they are suffering in body and mind.’
     
     
    Two weeks later, Macaulay published her account of her