Clodagh Finn: Blitz diary of an Irish nurse on Thames ambulance boat

“It was a sight I shall never forget and could hardly describe,” Aileen writes in an evocative Second World War diary discovered by her relatives after her death. Rosemary Anderson and Anne Cardew had not even known of the River Emergency Service, a fleet of small craft and ambulance ships that helped burning vessels and those trapped on the riverbank, much less their great-aunt’s role in it.

And, boy, does Great-Aunt Aileen bring her experience to life in the pages of a document that is now in the Museum of London Docklands. It seemed, she wrote on September 7, 1940, as if spreading prairie fires on an immense scale were raging on both banks of the River Thames.

“From factory chimneys, flames soared into the air, brilliant orange pinnacles & castles of flame, masonry crumbling & falling. The whole water was vivid crimson. Some barges alight & burning in the stream made one think of a Viking’s funeral rites.”

That night, 430 people were killed in London and some 1,600 others injured. The blitzing of London continued for 57 consecutive nights and for many of them, Longford-born Aileen Moore cruised the river helping casualties, while facing danger on a regular basis.

Two nights later, the bombing was so close that it seemed to be focusing on the volunteers’ boat. Then, a crashing blaze of light ripped through one of the boat’s ventilators, blowing off its cover.

“Dust poured in & filled one’s eyes & throat & there was the sound of an avalanche of masonry rushing down,” Aileen writes. “The girls, all out of bed & in their tin hats, were quite still, dumbfounded. An agitated ARP [Air Raid Precaution] woman raised her voice & repeated monotonously, “Don’t panic! Don’t panic! At last I said 'Do be quiet — nobody is panicking' & she shut up.”

If Aileen H Moore sounded calm, collected, and forthright, it was because she had seen action many times before. Indeed, her service before the outbreak of World War 2 was so prolonged and varied that one Irishwoman’s Diary was not enough to tell her story (see last week, for part 1).

Indeed, she deserves a book or a film to do justice to her Army nursing service in Africa, Greece and Turkey in World War 1 and her efforts, during the Spanish Civil War, to evacuate 4,000 children from a besieged Bilbao in 1937.

In 1938, and already in her sixties, she wrote to the British War Office to offer her services as an experienced Army nurse. At the time, she was working as a health lecturer. She was also a Lady Superintendent in the British Red Cross and an anti-gas officer, who showed civilians what to do in the event of a gas attack.

The War Office politely declined her offer, saying she did not meet the criteria (nurses could serve only until the age of 50), but that did not stop Aileen joining the war effort. She was still involved aged 70 when the war ended in 1945 and remained active until her death in 1955.

I feel a little sheepish even mentioning the age of this no-nonsense woman who took the hardships of war in her stride.

On one occasion, she and her colleagues took refuge in an unfinished shelter: “I found a dusty old ashes sieve in a corner & curled up on that with my back against a pillar.” On another occasion, they happily took shelter under a pub: “It was next [to] the beer barrels room & opposite a latrine so there were fearful smells.”

We might know nothing about her later career had her great-nieces not found her war diary among their father’s belongings when he died. Charles Edward Thomas (Tom) Moore worked in intelligence in Kenya during the war (a story for another time) and might have stayed there, but he wanted to raise a family.

His daughters Rosemary (Anderson) and Anne (Cardew) recall meeting their great aunt Aileen as young children, but little more. Anne, then about four years old, remembers her as rather formidable when they visited her home in Cheyne Walk in London many decades ago.

She probably was, an impression that comes through a diary in which she outlines the chronology of war, the efforts to respond to it and the at-times scratchy relationships between voluntary organisations and those who run them.

Aileen H Moore could be blunt and rather scathing — “He is really rather a grubby & unwashed looking person with stringy hair over his brow (sandy) & linen not in its first freshness” — but also deeply compassionate. Her descriptions of Muriel, a colleague who had heard that her fiancé was missing, presumed dead — bring the human cost of war into sharp focus.

Aileen also mentions her own nephew Dick Moore who was one of the 330,000-plus British and French soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk in May and June 1940. “They had to wade out to the little 800-ton boat up to their necks in water, but the naval men were most kind,” she writes.

She also mentions being at Greenwich where she saw all the small craft “proceeding purposefully down the river to assist in evacuation”.

On another occasion, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine waved to the volunteers.

“Mr & Mrs Churchill landed on the pontoon & we faced about on the upper deck & got a good view of them. Mr C looked round to give us “Good Afternoon” & Mrs Churchill spoke to us too,” she recorded in her diary.

And here I am again out of space, though I can just about squeeze in the opening frame of the film I’d like to see about the life of this decorated veteran of three wars.

It’s 1939 and Aileen Moore is picking her way through snow near Purfleet Wharf to climb down a very “perpendicular, very slippery with ice iron ladder down” to a barge below.

“My feet flew out from under me & Dr Bently White seized my ankles and placed my feet on the rungs again, else I was hanging by my hands & the barge some 30ft down.”

She was 61 at the time, but somehow I imagine that even without Dr White, she would have righted herself.