‘They were, apart from me. I was the air-raid warden on duty when the plane crashed – Roberta Bancroft. I organised the rescue party and went up with them. Lady Sumner-Walsh can confirm that.’ She fumbled in her handbag. ‘Here. Here’s my identity card, if you need to make sure I am who I say I am.’
She felt it best not to show her press card as well, in case the matron felt the need to consult her superiors before letting her in. The snooty Wingco Bobby had spoken with before hadn’t seemed overly keen on admitting civilians, and if the RAF brass who ran the place knew that she was a journalist then they’d be even less likely to grant her visiting rights.
The matron deigned to smile as she checked Bobby’s identification. ‘Well, I suppose it was too much to believe that men might be able to organise themselves into a rescue party without any female intervention. Since you’re a friend of the patients, I think you might come in for a visit, Miss Bancroft. Topsy is with Teddy. She’s reading to him, I believe.’
‘Teddy?’ Bobby said as she followed her inside.
‘The pilot, Lieutenant Nowak. His friends in this country call him Teddy.’
Bobby walked beside her to the ward. The house seemed to be bustling with medical and RAF personnel, although as far as she knew, there were still only the two patients from the crashed Wellington here.
‘You look like you’re preparing to receive more men,’ Bobby observed to the matron.
‘We’re expecting a further eighteen patients from elsewhere in the country. They’re being sent here for the air,’ the matron informed her. ‘This place was always intended to be more of a sanatorium for convalescing patients than what you might call a hospital, although the Lord had other ideas when He placed those two young Poles here. It must have been divine providence that there was a medical facility so close by and that they were lucky enough to have someone observe the crash after their radio cut out. They’d have died otherwise.’
‘It’s a shame divine providence didn’t stop them crashing in the first place, since their four friends weren’t so fortunate,’ Bobby muttered, half to herself.
The matron gave her a look. ‘We don’t hold with that sort of godless talk here, young lady.’
‘Sorry.’ Bobby put a hand to her head. ‘That was an unnecessary remark. I’ve been under a lot of strain lately.’
The ward looked a little different from the last time she’d been in. The bed next to the gunner’s was now occupied, presumably by the pilot; the metal frames around both beds had been fitted with white curtains to give the men privacy when they chose it. These curtains were closed currently, but this didn’t stop Topsy shooting out from under one as soon as she heard her friend arrive. She made a beeline for Bobby across the ward.
Bobby saw at once what Mrs Hobbes had meant. Her friend did look improved, in both appearance and mood. She might have expected to find Topsy wan and tired after long days nursing, dealing with gruesome injuries, but the work seemed to agree with her very well. She was positively blooming, bursting with a new sense of purpose. She was dressed in her new nurse’s uniform, looking sweet and rosy in a blue dress, white apron and cap.
‘Birdy, you’re here at last.’ Topsy gave her a tight hug. ‘Where on earth have you been all this while? I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to visit the boys.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been… things haven’t been good. Besides, I thought they might not be well enough for visitors.’
‘You’re not any ordinary visitor though. You were the one who saved them. Piotr’s been asking all about you and I as good as promised you’d come to see them.’
The matron nodded to Topsy. ‘I’ll leave you to supervise your friend. You know which areas are out of bounds, Topsy. Visits to the patients are to be kept to no more than an hour, remember.’
‘Yes, Matron,’ Topsy said dutifully.
The woman disappeared, leaving them alone together.
‘She was frightfully strict when I first came,’ Topsy said in a confidential tone. ‘Gave me a terribly dull lecture about how I wasn’t to think I was above the other nurses just because I owned this place or because of who my father was, and a lot of other rot I hardly remember. Still, she’s not a bad old stick once she decides she’s going to approve of you after all. I believe she rather likes me now I’ve shown her I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in.’ Topsy took Bobby’s arm to lead her out of earshot of the patients’ beds. ‘Charlie wrote to me.’
Bobby laughed bleakly. ‘Did he? Then that makes one of us.’
‘I suppose you miss him awfully, do you, darling?’
‘Yes,’ Bobby said simply. She didn’t have any energy left to dissemble, and there seemed little purpose in it.
‘You are going to marry him, though, aren’t you? You couldn’t have meant it when you told him no. It was all a ruse, I suppose, to make him more madly in love with you than ever. Or was it to test him, to make sure he couldn’t have his head turned by any of the WAAFs on the base?’
‘If I hadn’t meant it, Topsy, I wouldn’t have said it.’
Topsy frowned. ‘But I don’t understand. You love him, I can tell. Doesn’t your father approve? Or is it because he’s just a poor vet?’
These were strong motives for refusing a suitor if you were a member of the Sumner-Walsh family, Bobby supposed, but it had never occurred to her to consider Charlie’s financial status as a factor in turning him down, or even her father’s approval.
‘It’s a little more complicated than that,’ she told Topsy. ‘I’d rather not talk about it now, if you don’t mind. It’ll only upset me. How is your pilot doing?’
‘Oh, Birdy, Teddy’s an absolute dear,’ Topsy said, grasping her two hands. ‘He’s only twenty-two, and he’s sensitive and handsome and very, very brave. His family are all in Poland, living under the Nazis – can you imagine how ghastly? He came to England to study at one of our universities and then of course the war happened, and when it was clear we were going to need all the aircrew we could get, he dropped out of his degree and joined up. He doesn’t know anything about where his family are now but he’s so worried about them. His great-grandfather was a Jew, he told me, although they’ve done their best to keep their ancestry covered up. Of course they have no idea he’s been so badly hurt, or that he nearly died in the crash.’
‘Have the doctors been able to help him?’
