Ambulance Girl meets Sir Claverton.

London is battered and bruised as nightly Nazi raids fail to cease. Pasty-faced Londoners climb over debris and trudge past smoking bomb sites, barely noticing anymore. Death steals a mother from a screaming infant, and Ambulance Girl meets Sir Claverton - tortoise and friend for life.
Click here for the next installment.

New life and near death for Ambulance Girl

It's the middle of October 1940 and the bombs are getting closer and closer. Fear and exhaustion grip Londoners who are beginning to wonder how much longer the Blitz will last, and how much more they can take. But they must hold on. They must show Jerry that they will not be broken.

In the midst of all the noise, debris and fear comes the miracle of new life, a baby born in the rubble during an air raid, delivered by Ambulance Girl. Days later Ambulance Girl wakes from a haze of confusion, her body throbbing, lungs full of grit, head swirling with fragments of memory to learn she is lucky to be alive after a parachute bomb exploded nearby.

Click here for the latest installment.

Dancing and drinking through the bombs

It's the second week of October 1940. London is under heavy bombardment and Ambulance Girl is witness to a deadly incident. It takes days to shake off the Charing Cross tube bombing. The best cure is dancing to Billy Cotton and his Orchestra at the Paramount Dance Hall. Oh, and a few gin and tonics help too. Follow this link to the fourth installment of the Ambulance Girl's Blitz blog.

Ack ack fire wears on Blitz Ambulance Girl

The constant noise of anti-aircraft "ack ack" fire is beginning to wear on the nerves of the Blitz Ambulance Girl as she endures the first month of the aerial bombardments on London.

Moaning minny sirens are going day and night, usually followed by Jerry bombers who drop fire from the sky. Click here to read Ambulance Girl's Blitz blog for first week of October 1940. Click here to start at the beginning in August of 1940. Click here for explanation of Ambulance Girl Blitz Blog.

Blitzkrieg!

Visit the Ambulance Girl Blitz Blog and follow the young ambulance auxiliary into the first days of the London Blitz. This second installment of the Ambulance Girl Blitz Blog documents the first two weeks of September 1940. The weather was hot and sunny and the moaning minnies were beginning to fray nerves until that fateful day on September 7th when the bombs began to drop and all hell broke loose.

To begin at the first installment click here. For introduction to the fiction-based-on-fact blitz blog, click here.

Ambulance-Girl Blitz Blog

This typist wants to draw your attention to her new blog: Ambulance-Girl Blitz Blog

It is a fictionalized account of the first Blitz on London, 1940-41. The blog explores the devastating aerial bombardments through the eyes of a young ambulance auxiliary who was based on the ground in Dolphin Square, which served as the ambulance depot for Pimlico, 1939-45.

The characters are made up, but the horrific events are historically accurate, based on archival research, Mass Observation documents and interviews with surviving members of the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service (LAAS). Many details were found in Angela Raby's The Forgotten Service, the only book detailing the activities of the LAAS. The painting above is featured on the cover of that book.

The experiences of these ambulance auxiliaries, while different in time, place and military context, have to be similar to those of ambulance personnel serving in cities such as Baghdad and Kandahar. The Ambulance-Girl Blitz blog is part of a manuscript which placed as a finalist in the HR Percy Award for Unpublished Novel in the Atlantic Writers Competition, 2004.

This typist will post bite-sized exerpts twice weekly and provide links from this blog.