Best books on… ambulances

I HAVE only once had to call an ambulance — for a Type 1 diabetic relative who could not be roused.

It was two years ago, a wintry Saturday evening. The paramedic team arrived in my home, bringing medical machinery, but also calm, reassuring efficiency and kindness.

For weeks afterwards, whenever I saw an ambulance I’d wonder if it was that crew. The pair were devoted to their work — it is dispiriting to think of them striking.

Authors who volunteered as ambulance crews during World War I include Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, EE Cummings and John Dos Passos. Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms is inspired by his experiences on the mountainous Austrian-Italian front: like Frederic Henry, the hero of that novel, Hemingway was hospitalised by serious injuries sustained in that dangerous line of work. He was only 19.

It’s not all doom. In Sarah Winman’s Still Life, a retired ‘boneshaker’ ambulance drives a group of East Londoners across Europe to begin a new life in Florence

Elizabeth Strout’s most recent novel Lucy By The Sea paints a grim picture of New York at that time

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters is set during, and just after, World War II. It starts in 1947, in an exhausted, battered London, then moves back to 1944 and the Blitz. One of its lead characters is Kay, a heroically brave, broken-hearted gay ambulance-driver.

At the height of the Covid crisis, I dreaded seeing and hearing ambulances. In the unnatural quiet, for London, of those first few weeks of lockdown, the sound of a siren would pierce through, jerking me back to our strange new reality.

Elizabeth Strout’s most recent novel Lucy By The Sea paints a grim picture of New York at that time. Its narrator, Lucy Barton, has fled to Maine with her ex-husband William. But their daughter Becka is still in the city and every evening William and Lucy watch the television news in horror. ‘I worried about the ambulance workers, that they would all get sick, and the people working in the hospitals, too.’

It’s not all doom. In Sarah Winman’s Still Life, a retired ‘boneshaker’ ambulance drives a group of East Londoners across Europe to begin a new life in Florence.

I do hope this strike action is resolved soon. In the meantime, I recommend following the siren’s call of any of these novels.

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