Mornington

... that Monarch of the Road,
Observer of the Highway Code.

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann

They gave me the bed next to Mabel's. Yes, I might have left school, I might be a Driver (Third Class) in the Ambulance Brigade, but I still had to sleep in a dormitory. I got a shelf in a cupboard to put my bits and pieces on and a rail to hang up my clothes. It was like being a third-former all over again.

To be fair, Captain Lowther had made it perfectly clear to me where my place was in the order of things. Mabel took me to her office; the room with all the filing cabinets. She saluted and stood to attention. I gulped and did my best to copy her. I was completely taken aback. How could I have known that the woman I had asked for directions only a few minutes before was the officer in charge? I'd supposed she was a clerk. She looked up from the sheaf of papers she was studying.

'Who's this?' she asked Mabel, just as if she'd never seen me before.

Mabel told the Captain that I was an old friend who wanted to join the Service, that I was the right sort, that I was an ace driver and that she'd vouch for my good character. I smiled, glowing inside. Good old Mabel!

Captain's Lowther's Deuteronomy gave Alfie and me the once-over. Then he gave Alfie the once-over all over again. He knew all about him straightaway, I could tell. I wondered what the Captain would say about him.

She said nothing about him. Good. Instead she told Mabel to take me to the stores and get me kitted up. Mabel saluted her again - there was going to be a lot of this kind of thing, I could tell - and turned smartly on her heel. I followed her out of Captain Lowther's office. She ignored us - she had already returned to her paperwork.

'What's she like, then, Captain Lowther?' I asked Mabel as we passed the garage on the way to the stores.

'Like? She's like she is.'

'What d'you mean?'

Mabel stopped and turned to look at me. 'Isn't it obvious? She's tough. She expects everything you can give, and more. She never stops working. She never gives up. She'd die for us if she had to. She doesn't ask stupid questions.'

'Oh.'

'Look, Sunny. It's not too late. We can go back and tell the boss you've changed your mind. I'll look like an idiot, but so what?' Mabel grabbed me by both shoulders and her Hal stared at me. 'We're not playing games here. Do you get it?'

'Yes, Mabel. I get it.' I wasn't going to back out now. Mabel opened the door to the stores with the key Captain Lowther had given her.

I had to sign for my uniform. Two tunics, one pair of boots, three pairs of socks, a cap with a brass badge that I was expected to keep well polished, a belt made of canvas webbing and two pairs of trousers.

'No underwear?' I asked. I'd thought they'd provide everything I needed.

'Counts as personal items,' said Mabel. 'Get them from the shops, or wherever you found that rig-out you're wearing. Come on, now. I'll show you where you're bunking. You can get changed. Then we'll see how well you can drive.'

There were some letters I had to write if alarm bells weren't to start ringing all over southern England. I had to do something to cover my tracks. I found the time somehow. It wasn't easy.

Dear Mrs Frame,

Could you do me the most enormous favour and post the enclosed letter for me? I promise you it's nothing wrong.

Love, Sunny

Dear Miss Selborne,

It is with regret that I must inform you that I have decided, with Captain Moon's full support, to withdraw Sonya from Highdean School with immediate effect.

Yours sincerely,

Sybil Gresham

Dear Cecilia,

Could you do me the most enormous favour and post the enclosed letter for me? I promise you it's nothing wrong. Ooooh, Darren and me are having the most wonderful time! I never want it to end!

Love, Sunny

Dear Aunt Sybil,

Here I am, back at good old Highers! Glen Bruce was smashing! I do so hope you got my postcards.

Love, Sonya

My only Gerry,

I've done it! I've escaped! I'm free at last!

And I wouldn't be here now if it weren't for you. I'd never have had the nerve to run away from school, and I'd never have been able to drive if you hadn't shown me how.

Mabel took me out into the yard the day after I arrived. I was wearing my full uniform for the first time. It did feel funny, wearing trousers. I suppose you're used to it. Anyway, there was an ambulance standing there that she'd already got out of the garage. It's made by Dennis, the same people as make the fire engines, Mabel told me, so it's probably like the ones they use to put out the rick fires last year. Luckily the engine was already running so I didn't have to start it on the handle. 'Off you go, then,' said Mabel, so I climbed into the driver's seat. I looked around for the controls and I nearly died. They were all in different places from where you showed me on Daddy's Ridgeworth. The brake was on the right pedal and the clutch was on top of the tiller. The injector pump was hanging off the dashboard. I though they were all automatic these days.

Mabel grinned at me. 'Let's see you cross the yard,' she said. 'Gently, now.' I poked around a bit - I nearly stalled it - and somehow, I don't know how, I managed to lurch over to the other side and stop without hitting the wall too hard. Mabel ran after me. 'I thought you said you could drive,' she said.

'So I can,' I told her. 'Normal cars, anyway. When was this thing made? Before the Flood?'

'It's GFE,' she said. 'Government Furnished Equipment. Built to the highest possible standards.'

'When? When was it built?'

'I don't know. Within our lifetimes, I expect. Now, shove over!' I took the passenger seat and Mabel drove us out of the depot and up the Great North Road until we were well past Barnet. I noticed that both Hal and Alfie sat on the top of the dashboard and kept a good look-out to the front. Just as well, the speed Mabel drove at. We bumped off the road, though the remains of a pair of iron gates and onto a wide flat area, like a sports field with the goal posts missing and a rusty steel tower put in its place. You'd have recognised it right away, Gerry. It was an abandoned Zeppelin station, Mabel said, just before she handed the controls back to me.

Stars above, but I was mortified! Mabel soon realised how little driving I'd actually done. I thought she was going to drive off and leave me and Alfie out there in the middle of Hertfordshire to walk home by ourselves. She taught me lots of new words I 'd never heard before - no, not swearing; she doesn't swear at all, these were technical things - but she also showed me how to make an Ambulance, Dennis, Mk V do more or less what I wanted it to.

'Sonya Moon,' she said, as we drove back into London, me at the tiller and Mabel's hand hovering over the running-brake. 'You are a fraud.'

'What?' I asked, still worried that she'd have me sent back to Highdean.

'You're the biggest fraud I know. Before, I 'd have said you were just a silly little schoolgirl on the runaway. Now I know better. You're a total nutcase!'

'Gosh, thanks.'

Mabel pushed a stray auburn lock back into place. The wind had caught it. 'Slow at this junction,' was all she said.

That's about it for now, Gerry, except to say that when we got back to Mornington the Captain was waiting for us. We stopped the ambulance, jumped out and stood to attention beside it, while she walked slowly around us, doing an inspection. 'Moon!' she said suddenly. I jumped.

'Yes, Ma'am?'

'Are you in pain?'

'No, Ma'am.'

'Well you should be. I'm standing on your hair! Get it cut or put it up, I don't care which. I don't want to see it again. Do you understand?'

'Yes, Ma'am.'

She had a moan about some mud-splashes on the ambulance wheels and marched back into her office. Mabel fetched a couple of rags and we polished up the spokes. 'What was that all about?' I asked her.

'Long hair is unhygienic and it can get caught up in the machinery. It's up to you, what you do about it. Lots of the girls have had theirs bobbed.'

'I can't do that!' I protested.

'Yes you can, if you're serious about all this.' Mabel's face was stern.

'Sorry.'

'Or you can keep it in a snood, or tie it up in a bun. It's lovely hair, yours. I can see why you don't want to cut it short. And cheer up! This is what you want to do, isn't it?'

'Yes,' I said, ' this is exactly what I want to do.' And it is.

I'll write to you again soon.

All my love,

Sunny

That first month in Mornington was sheer murder. It had its good parts, else I think I'd have thrown it all in and run home to Auntie. But I had never known I could feel so tired. I fell into my bunk when my shift was over, whether it was at nine o'clock at night or the middle of the day and simply passed out. Sometimes I forgot to eat, or there was nothing to eat, and I went to bed hungry. I'd never done that before in my whole life. I'd never been hungry - not really hungry, so it felt like there was something clawing at my insides.

For the first three weeks they didn't let me out on my own. I wasn't safe. Instead, I rode shotgun, as they called it, with one of the more experienced drivers, like Mavis Pearce or Nancy Avon. It was my job to help get the wounded men in and out of the ambulance and to clean it up afterwards, while the drivers ate. I only got something to eat when the vehicle was all spick and span.

If I hadn't been so shattered with tiredness I'd have had nightmares every time I closed my eyes.

It was the patients; the men. It wasn't that they had their limbs torn off, or that their faces were gaunt and ingrained with battlefield mud. It wasn't the way their hands shook, and their voices stammered. It wasn't even the spastic twitching of their heads or the horrible sounds some of them made in their throats and the way they tore at their hair.

All those things were horrifying and frightening enough. I think I'd known that I'd have to face some terrible sights and hear some awful sounds in my new work. I can admit it now; my insides were all knotted up with fear the first time I went out on a job. I sat in the privy with my stomach churning for half an hour before we set out, not daring to move, afraid that I would mess myself. Would I be able to face it? Would I have the guts to see it through? Or would I disgrace myself; fall into a silly faint, or throw up all over the place?

Mabel told me all about it, the first night. 'It's ghastly, quite a lot of the time,' she said. 'Perfectly ghastly. It tears you up. But Sunny, you don't know what you can do until you do it. None of us do, until we have to. You'll be all right. Promise you.' She hugged me and gave me a peck on the cheek.

Alfie and I were all right in the end, but it was a near thing.

It was their daemons. That's what it was. They were alive but dead, their eyes vacant, their gaze focused who knows where. It was if they were no longer part of their people any more. They were empty shells. They had been blasted apart by the sheer horror of what they had seen and done. Many of them of them would never be whole again.

Alfie felt it more than me. We would lie in our bunk at night, holding each other and being special together, and talk about what we had seen that day. 'They were parted,' he'd say, over and over again. 'It's unbearable.'

'But we'll bear it, won't we?' I'd reply.

'Somehow, yes. We'll bear it.' And then sleep would swallow us up and we would be able to forget the pain for a while.

Sometime towards the end of that first month it was as if something clicked inside my head; as if someone had thrown an anbaric switch and turned the fear off. Mabel had told me about that, too. 'You've got to stop taking it personally or you'll go round the twist,' she told me one night as we turned in. 'They're in pain, but you can't make it any easier for them by hurting yourself. You can't take their pain away from them. Only God or the doctors can do that.'

'I know.' I sighed, and Alfie wrapped his tail around my forearm.

The place needed livening up, I decided, so I started a card school. We played poker for matches. I got a loudspeaker set up in the yard and piped the wireless into it. That upset the neighbours, but so what? They weren't working all hours, were they? And I suggested we go out to the pub when it was quiet. That was fine, so long as we all went together. They'd throw you out if there were only one or two of you, even if you were in uniform. They didn't want to get a bad reputation, the landlord said. Couldn't take the risk that their grimy little alehouse would get mixed up with a brothel, I suppose.

I even got one or two of us to go fire-watching, or putting up posters. You see, they'd taken a photogram of me when I joined, and I thought it came out pretty well, so I said to the Captain one day when she seemed to be in a good mood that we should print some posters with my face on them to encourage other girls to join up. I was thinking of the poster I'd seen in the Chthonic train that very first day.

'Look, Ma'am,' I said, and I showed her what I'd written:

CALLING ALL PATRIOTIC GIRLS

DID YOU KNOW that whenever a Woman shoulders a Man's burden
it Frees him for the Service of the Crown?

JOIN THE AMBULANCE BRIGADE NOW

and send another HERO to the Front
for God, King and Country.

Underneath it I'd stuck my photo. 'We could get that turned into a drawing,' I suggested, 'and put your name at the bottom. Get it printed it up in red and black and post it all over London.'

'Do you seriously suppose,' said the Captain, ' that having your face plastered all over the walls is going to help our recruitment efforts?'

I gave her my most winning smile. 'Certainly, Ma'am!'

Captain Lowther shook her head and her stiff, iron-grey fringe moved with it. 'If I had known, Driver Moon, what I was letting myself in for when I signed you up... Oh, very well!'

So I did, and soon my face, nicely done in pastels by an old art teacher - too old to serve, I made sure of that - who lived nearby, was beaming at the passers-by along the thoroughfares of the city. I made sure that there were a couple of spare posters tucked behind the seats of every ambulance that went out and I got the drivers to promise they'd stick them up whenever they had a spare moment.

I wasn't so stupid as to think I wouldn't get found out sooner or later. The end of term was fast approaching. Not only were most of my possessions still at Highdean School awaiting collection, but also there was the problem of Aunt Sybil. I had continued to send Cecilia a supply of letters to forward to my aged relative, but I could hardly rely on her for ever. Nor could I pretend that I was going to spend the holidays with yet another classmate. I suppose I was hoping that Aunt Sybil would be so relieved at not having to put up with any more of what she called my "adolescent tantrums" she wouldn't try very hard to find me.

Let's face it, with my picture decorating the highways and byways of the metropolis I hadn't exactly gone to ground, had I?

I'd deal with that problem when the moment came, I decided. And, duly enough, it came.

It came at a time when there was a lull in the fighting at the Front. The Eastern Alliance had pulled back to regroup, the newssheets said. That meant fewer casualties being shipped back for treatment in Brytain and less ferrying work for us. It didn't mean we had to work less hard. Far from it. This was the time of the Big Drop, when the enemy shifted their attack. While they rested their soldiers, their air force took over.

The 'sheets never told the whole story, I'm sure. They talked about Zeppelin raids on London, and how our gunners and rocket battalions were destroying the attackers faster than they could be launched against us. Every day they printed photograms of airships coming down in flames. I soon spotted that they were printing the same pictures over and over again.

The rumours said that the enemy flotillas flew westwards along the Channel, then turned north and looped back eastwards towards London, downwind at maximum height with their engines shut down, invisible and silent. Every night, but especially when it was cloudy or the moon was new, they drifted over London and dropped their cargo of death onto us. Incendiary bombs, high explosive bombs and, the worst rumours said, gas and disease germs too.

Our shifts changed. We slept during the day and spent every night at full alert, roused by the air raid sirens and straining our ears for the sound of distant explosions, covering our heads with our hands and ducking when the bombs fell closer. The crash-bangs, we called them, the near misses. Then, after the all-clear sounded - and often before - Captain Lowther would detail us off. One vehicle to Camperdown, just up the road, another to High Gate or Finchley. Mavis and me to Hackney or Fleet.

Broken houses, broken people, broken lives. So much lost...

It was worst with the children. I remember the time when we - it was Nancy and me, that time - arrived outside a ruined house, in a shabby terraced street near Marialabone. It had taken a direct hit. The roof had fallen in, the front wall had collapsed and the roadway was covered with scattered bricks, so I had to drive carefully. It would have been disastrous if we'd broken a wheel or an axle and put our vehicle out of action.

It was early morning. The sun had just come up; a pale feeble thing it was, that December day. People from the other houses had come out of their homes and were standing around in the street. Most of them had the kind of blank expression on their faces that I was beginning to recognise. It was shock - the terrible realisation that everything had changed for them and that nothing could ever be the same again. They were broken, like I said.

I jumped out of the back of the ambulance and ran across the road towards the ruins. Dust was still hanging in the air, ghost-formed. 'Come on, you lot!' I shouted. Let's get this cleared up!' I grabbed a couple of bricks to give them a lead. One or two of the more with-it women came over to me. It was always the women who recovered first, Alfie and me noticed.

'Was there anybody in there?' I asked a stout woman with a terrier-daemon cradled in her arms. I pointed towards the fallen house.

'Mary and Pat and their kids,' she replied.

'How many of them?'

'Three, I think.'

'Did anybody get out? Was anybody away from home last night?'

'No. No, I don't think so.' She turned away from me, tears washing streaks down her dusty cheeks.

I looked again at the house. It had been reduced to a pile of smoking debris. It was hard to see how anybody inside could have survived. Unless...

'Hey!' I called. The woman turned back. 'Do these houses have cellars?'

'Cellars? No, no we don't have any cellars here.'

Nancy came up to me. 'Sunny...'

'Yes?'

'Come on. There's nobody we can help here. Let's go back. The Civil Guard can come and clear up later.'

'There must be...'

'It's hopeless. Let's go back.' Nancy took my arm. I turned to go - she was right and I was wrong - when a tiny movement caught my eye.

'Wait!' I ran over towards the house.

'Sunny, come back! It's too dangerous! It could all fall down any minute!' I ignored her. I had seen something.

It was a daemon - a child's daemon, lying next to a fallen beam. She was whimpering in pain, changing form constantly. Mouse, bird, cat, bird, rabbit, mouse. Alfie slipped from my shoulder and approached her carefully, climbing gingerly over the rubble. He spoke to her.

'Her name's Minta,' Alfie told me. 'Her little boy's called Jack and he's... he's under the stairs.'

'How is he?'

Alfie spoke urgently to Minta. 'Jack's badly hurt,' he told me. 'His leg's trapped. He can't feel anything in it.'

I waved to Nancy. 'Over here! There's a boy under the stairs. Get help!'

'Alfie,' I said. ' Keep talking to Minta.' I reached out and gently picked up Jack's daemon. I was allowed to, you see. Meanwhile, Nancy was shouting orders to the bystanders. She sent a girl off to the nearest Guard station to fetch men with pickaxes and shovels.

Minta was shivering and shaking in my hand. She had stopped changing form and become a small bird - a tom-tit, I think.

'Hang on,' I said to her. Alfie looked up at me. He knew - I knew - that Minta was in agony, not only because Jack was buried under the house but also because he and she had been forced apart, probably for the first time in their short lives. 'She's getting weaker,' Alfie said.

'Yes, I know.' Minta's movements were becoming more and more feeble. Meanwhile Nancy and the men she had rounded up had formed a bucket brigade, making a pile of stone and brick on the far side of the street.

'Hurry!' I cried. We've not got much time!'

'We're doing all we can,' Nancy said. 'Are you all right there?'

We were dangerously close to the house, but I nodded. Brick by brick, board by board, stone by stone the debris was being cleared. I held on to Minta and Alfie, whispering encouragement to them. 'Stay with me, Jack. Keep going. We're nearly there.' The minutes crept by, one by one.

Then there was a roar of engines and a big lorry skidded around the corner of the street and came to a halt next to the ambulance. Three Guards leapt out, closely followed by their dog-daemons. One of the men ran around to the back of the lorry and climbed up onto it. He dropped the tailboard and started throwing tools and heavy lengths of wood into the roadway. The sergeant in charge called over to me, 'Get out of it!'

'I can't!' I shouted back. I held Minta up for him to see.

The sergeant didn't understand. He strode over and crouched down next to me. His Alsatian-daemon stood next to him, his ears pricked up, alert for danger signs. 'Get out of there now, miss. It's all going to come down!'

'No, sergeant, I can't.' I showed him Minta and told him about Jack. 'If we take Minta any further away from here it'll kill both of them.'

'All right.' The sergeant stood up and hailed his men. 'Get those logs over here. Get that wall shored up. Move it!'

But - and it all seemed to happen in slow motion, like a trick kino - it was too late. The next house shuddered, trembled and toppled into the gap that its neighbour had left. The sergeant took hold of me and pulled me bodily away from the wreckage as it fell. 'No!' I screamed.

It was too late. Minta gave a last pitiful cry, looked skyward and vanished. Pieces of grit rained all around us. The sergeant and I were nearly buried ourselves. It was a very close call indeed, they told us afterwards

Afterwards Nancy drove me back to the depot. I was absolutely filthy, covered in grey mortar and brick-dust. There were pieces of it in my hair and my clothes. I badly needed a bath.

I had to wait for it. I'd just climbed the stairs to the dorm when an off-duty nursing assistant came up to me. 'Driver Moon?' she asked.

'Yes, that's me.' I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. I'd only just stopped crying.

'The Captain wants to see you. Now.'

'Now? Look at me!'

'Now.' And she held the door open for me. I trudged back down the stairs into the yard and round the corner to the Captain's office. What could she possibly want? Couldn't it wait?

We never had to knock on Captain Lowther's door. She didn't expect it. So I walked right in, meaning to ask her if I could get cleaned up first. I was ready to make quite a fuss about it.

I never said a thing. For, sitting in the Captain's guest chair and smiling her fat, jolly, deceitful smile, was the one person I least wanted to see.

'Darling Sonya!' said Aunt Sybil. 'Thank God, I've found you at last. My dear, thank heavens you're safe!'