Kathleen’s Story: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces. Duncan Barrett

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      Within a couple of minutes the last spark of life had departed and Kathleen set the man’s lifeless body down on the floor. Then she went to summon Hilde, and between them they heaved him onto a stretcher and carried him out to their ambulance.

      As they drove away, she could still hear the poor dog howling, rooted to the spot in the room where its master had died.

      The bomb had left no survivors for the girls to transport to the local hospital, so instead they drove straight to Hammersmith Cemetery, where a man on the gate directed them towards the mortuary. There were so many bodies coming in that night that the building was already full, and as the corpses arrived they were being laid out on the pavement outside. Kathleen tried not to look at the faces, but she couldn’t help noticing that many of them had been terribly disfigured and some bodies were missing arms or legs.

      By the time Kathleen and Hilde had got the old man out of the ambulance and laid him out alongside the other victims of the night’s raid, their shift was coming to an end. They returned the ambulance to the United Dairies offices, and trudged back to their little flat. It was only once they were on their way home that the horror of the evening overcame them, and they both had to stop and vomit by the side of the road.

      As the weeks and months went on, Kathleen and Hilde grew accustomed to the horrors of the air raids. Collecting severed arms and legs in an old tarpaulin and matching them up with dead bodies they had found became routine, as did braking suddenly when huge craters appeared in the middle of the road in front of them. They got used to sleepless nights and uneaten meals, and to frequent stops to throw up in the gutter.

      Some of the girls’ call-outs were almost surreal. One night they arrived at a house that had been ripped open by the blast from a bomb, only to find a woman sitting naked in a bath on the first floor, fully exposed to the street below. She was covered in blood from head to foot, and was screaming hysterically as a fireman climbed up a ladder to bring her down.

      Although the work Kathleen was doing was emotionally draining, living in the capital did have its advantages, as it meant that she was able to meet up with Arnold from time to time. His parents lived in Clapham and he came down to London to visit them whenever he had leave.

      Kathleen’s dashing fiancé certainly knew how to show a girl a good time, and would wine and dine her in the smartest establishments he could find. One night they went to see a Polish orchestra perform at the Royal Albert Hall; another they took in a play on Shaftesbury Avenue. Arnold even took Kathleen to the famous Windmill Theatre in Soho, where they gawped at the tableaus of naked women.

      As time went on, however, the horrors of working on the ambulances took their toll on Kathleen, and when an opportunity arose to take on some slightly less distressing employment, she decided that the time had come for her to leave. Her mother had heard that the hospital she worked at in Cambridge was looking for nursing auxiliaries, and suggested that Kathleen should join her there. ‘You could live at home and save money on the rent,’ she pointed out.