Chrissie's Children (34 page)

As the sleeper took her back to the South Coast that night she prayed that he would come back safely – and for her mother and her mission.

Helen Diaz looked up from stooping over the wounded man in the cot. The rifle-fire seemed to rattle all around the big old house that was serving as a forward field hospital in
this Catalonian village. She thought she caught the odour of the firing, a whiff of cordite mingling with the hospital smell of disinfectant and the pungent cigarette smoke of the patients. When
she, Matt and the rest of the medical team first arrived at the house, the front line had been five miles away at Gandesa. It was closer now.

They had found the house without working electricity or running water. They had all – doctors, nurses, orderlies, ambulance drivers – laboured to turn it into a forward field
hospital and succeeded. It was far from perfect but it worked. The operating theatre was below on the ground floor, in what had originally been the slaughter house, because it had a concrete floor
which was easily washed down. The handbasins for washing, and the steriliser, stood in one corner with the water tank outside. The ambulance drivers, Matt among them, had to keep the tank filled.
Water was brought up to the house in tanks on the backs of trucks. They had become used to hard conditions. Before they came to the house they had slept in the open and Helen had hated the
scampering of the rats. Now she had a tiny cupboard of a room she shared with a Spanish nurse.

She had finished replacing the Spanish soldier’s dressing and now she patted his shoulder, her smile crinkling the corners of her dark eyes. He looked up at her apathetically, exhausted.
He was one of six men on the narrow cots crowded into the room. The few small, weak lightbulbs made the ward a place of shadows. Helen was the only nurse, in her white uniform and a white cap that
covered what was left of the glossy, black hair she had cut short soon after arriving in Spain.

She washed her hands in a dented tin bowl, dried them on a scrap of towel then moved to the window and looked round the edge of the black-out curtain. The sun had set, and fat-bellied black
clouds hung low overhead. She could just make out the village square below, its dirt surface churned into mud by soldiers’ boots. The rain fell steadily, dripped from the eaves of the houses
and the blackened branches of the trees. The road that ran through the village passed across the far end of the square and a constant stream of men trudged along it. Then, as she watched, the men
scattered and a battery of guns galloped through. The horses tossed their heads, the men on their backs lashing them on with whips, while the guns bounced on their iron wheels and hurled up sprays
of mud. When the fourth and last gun passed the men returned to the road and trudged on.

‘That’s very heavy firing.’ Luis Zamora, the young doctor, spoke behind Helen. As she turned to face him he said, ‘And those soldiers have been going through for the past
hour. I’m going to find out what’s happening. Are you all right here?’

‘I can manage,’ she said with confidence: Helen had learnt a lot in a very short time since she came to Spain.

Luis smiled. He had come to rely a great deal on this girl. He left her now and Helen heard him tramping down the stairs. She had a sense of unease born of her experience since she came to
Spain. It had taught her that anything unusual might spell danger. In recent months she had seen enough of death and destruction, pain and grief. But duty called and she went to another man and
started replacing the dressing applied hastily in the field.

Luis returned ten minutes later, breathless from running up the stairs. He panted, ‘It’s a retreat! I spoke to an officer. He wouldn’t stop but he told me that Franco’s
men attacked under cover of an artillery barrage. The line held for an hour or two but then it broke. He said their troops were right behind him. You’ve got to get out. Grab what things you
can but be ready to move in five minutes. I’m going to tell the others.’ Then he was gone.

Helen ran to her little room, tore off the white uniform and pulled on the clothes she wore off-duty: a soldier’s trousers, shirt and boots. With her short hair she looked like one of the
troops now. She picked up her pack and threw some clothes into it. As she stepped into the corridor again she heard shouting in the hall below, echoing up the stairwell.

When she reached the head of the stairs she saw that the hall, lit by a single swinging bulb, was filled with soldiers, but they were strangers in strange uniforms. The little corporal who had
sat at the table in the hall that was the reception area was being hustled out of the door into the street. Luis Zamora in his white coat stood with his back to the wall and a rifle muzzle was
pointed at his chest.

One man, an officer from the insignia on his tunic, looked up the stairs and saw Helen. He shouted at her to come down and pointed his pistol at her. She descended the stairs, realising that she
was now a prisoner, but in her shock and fear her first thought was for Matt. It seemed he had rarely left her side since they had sailed for Spain. He was always there, remonstrating, arguing,
outraged or admiring, repairing the ambulance, making her a bed, putting up her tent, cleaning her shoes, teaching her how to drive. She made sure that he ate, and drove while he slept, looked for
him when her nursing duties were done, delighted in arguing with him daily. They were a smooth-working, mostly happy team.

Now she worried: was he safe?

Matthew Ballantyne, his tall body folded into the bucket seat, clung to the wheel of the ambulance as it rocked slowly along the rutted road. The night was dark, the sky
overcast and rain washed across the windscreen as the wipers flapped. He rubbed a hand over his sandy hair, cropped to a rusty stubble now, and blinked tired eyes as he strained to pierce the
gloom. The hooded headlamps of the ambulance shed barely enough light to illumine the road for a few yards ahead. It was no more than an elderly Fiat van, roughly converted to carry stretchers and
kept running only by Matt’s constant attention.

He nursed the van now, well aware of its age and fragility. He was eager to return to the forward hospital which was both home and base for himself and Helen. He had left it that morning to
carry some wounded to a base hospital far in the rear. Helen Diaz had been safe and well when he left her but he was worried about her now. He had worried about her since they crossed the border
into Spain and shells had fallen close to their hospital in the past few days.

The ambulance bounced into and out of a pothole and he twisted the wheel to hold it on course as it tried to swerve off the road. For a second it snaked back and forth, skidding across the muddy
surface, taking up all of the road. As it straightened under his steering he breathed thanks that the road was empty.

Earlier he had passed a stream of men trudging in the opposite direction. He had thought they were returning from the front line. They had stared up at him, eyes glittering in pale smudges of
faces as they were caught in the light. They all looked startled by his sudden appearance and gaped as the ambulance swayed past. Once he had to pull off the road to let a battery of guns canter
by, the drivers flogging the weary horses that pulled the guns. Afterwards the road had been empty for a half-hour or so as the ambulance crept on, but just a few minutes ago he had passed a group
who seemed to be digging a trench by the side of the road. They had scattered when he drove down on them, looming out of the rain and darkness. One of them had fired on him as he rolled on down the
road, and automatically he ducked and cursed them but without surprise. Men became jumpy and trigger happy when close to the front line. That was another thing he had learned in this Spanish
war.

He was almost there now and could see what had once been the outlying buildings of the village. The place had been fought over before and shelling had reduced a lot of it to heaps of rubble.
There were people on the road again, soldiers of course because the villagers had left to escape the fighting. Matt could understand that. He had seen what the fighting did to combatants and
neutrals, innocent bystanders alike. He had pictures burnt into his mind that he would never expunge.

Now he turned into the little square, and there stood the house in the corner that had belonged to some big landowner but was now the hospital. He was looking for Helen Diaz already as he
extinguished the lights of the ambulance, braked it to a halt in front of the house and switched off the ignition. It was only then that he saw the flag hanging above the door. It had not hung
there when he left that morning. It was the banner of Franco’s Fascist army.

He sat frozen by shock in the seat of the ambulance. Now he remembered that his fellow Republican soldiers he had left in the village that morning had looked different, although they had worn
the usual mixture of khaki uniforms with miscellaneous items of civilian clothing such as leather or sheepskin jackets, or blankets serving as capes. Those in the village now wore different
helmets, the coal-scuttle type like those of the German army. Now he understood why the earlier traffic on the road had all been one way and why the men had been startled by his appearance. They
had thought he was mad to be heading in that direction because they knew he was driving into the arms of the enemy.

Where was Helen? He had last seen her in the hospital. Was she still there? He decided that was the first place to look. He swallowed. There was no sentry posted at the door though there might
be one inside. Soldiers occasionally came out or went in, each time letting out a blink of light as they pushed aside the black-out curtain hung inside the doors. The darkness was on his side.

He got down from the ambulance and walked steadily to the street that ran down the side of the building. He was tensed, ready for the first shout if someone challenged him as an enemy, ready to
run, though he did not know where. But no one yelled at him to stop, and here was the side gate. The house was built in a square and this gate opened on to a passage which ran through the ground
floor of the house to the courtyard within. The gate was wrought iron and he could see through its ornate twinings. The passage inside was empty.

He pushed open the gate and walked through the passage, his boot heels clicking on the paving, echoing under the arched roof of the passage. The courtyard was also paved, with tall shrubs
standing like sentries in the darkness. Matt walked around the courtyard, peeping through cracks at the sides of windows where the black-out curtains did not quite cover, looking into the wards on
the ground floor. He did not see Helen.

He stopped at a door that led to the front of the house and the stairs to the upper floor. Beyond that door would be light, no darkness to hide him. Only his tunic with its Red Cross armband
would immediately identify him as serving in the Republican Army, so he pulled it off and looked for somewhere to hide it. Then he saw the box standing to one side of the door. It was a crate about
a cubic foot in size with a rope carrying-handle on each of two sides. He folded the tunic so only its inside showed, laid it on the top of the crate then picked that up by its handles, lifting it
to chest height. He jammed his jaw down on the tunic to hold it in place, and that also served to hide his face to some extent. He had soon learned that his pale blue eyes were an oddity in Spain,
bound to make him noticeable, and he could not afford that. The door opened outwards. He pulled it towards him with one finger, still holding the box, then eased it open with his foot and walked
in. He wondered if he would get out again.

He crossed the hall, heading towards the stairs. This was the reception area for the hospital. When there was a battle it would be filled with stretchers bearing wounded men. Matt knew there
would soon be many. The breaking of the line, the Republican retreat and Nationalist advance, had all happened too swiftly for the wounded to be brought in. But they would be. There were a
half-dozen now, and one clerk moving among them, questioning them, reading the labels tied to them, writing down their details in a book. He was one of the enemy and glanced around as Matt crossed
the hall but saw nothing suspicious in some soldier in fatigues carrying a box, and went back to his work.

There were two sentries on duty at the front door but they stood leaning on their rifles and smoking, and did not challenge Matt. He realised one of them was supposed to be guarding the door by
which he had entered but had gone to while away the weary hours in talk with his comrade. They were surely only there to prevent prisoners escaping – why should anyone break into the
hospital?

Matt climbed the stairs and started his search of the wards up there. The wards were just rooms with five or six narrow iron cots crammed into them. Their doors stood open so the air could
circulate, held there by wedges jammed under them, so Matt did not have to enter each room, could peer in from the corridor outside. He was three quarters of the way round when he saw Helen.

She stooped beside a cot assisting a doctor working on a wounded man. Instead of her white uniform and cap she wore the soldier’s clothes she kept for off-duty hours. She stroked the
man’s brow and held his hand. Matt saw the young doctor was Luis Zamora, one of the Republican staff, now a prisoner with Helen. As Matt clumped down the ward between the close-packed cots
she looked around and her lips parted in shock. Matt stopped at her side and said softly, ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

The doctor looked at Matt, a sideways glance of startled recognition. Then he said, ‘Take her, Matthew. God knows what they will do to us.’

The next cot was occupied, the soldier’s greatcoat hanging above it at its head, but he was just a still shape under the grey blanket that was pulled up to cover his face. Matt took the
greatcoat and thrust it at Helen: ‘Put that on.’ A cap hung on another cot, its owner snoring, mouth open. Matt shoved the cap on to Helen’s head and she grimaced but settled it
there. It covered her short, dark hair.