The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

by Jennifer Ryan

  This will put her on a back foot for the rest of her life.

  Tuesday, 6th August, 1940

  In the bleak afternoon drizzle, our small, sobbing group huddled outside the old church, chilled and nervous, for Hattie’s funeral, the final switch on dear Hattie’s life. The proper end that was supposed to round the whole thing off, but seemed so contrary and out of place for such a vibrant, warmhearted character.

  “It’s just so hard to believe that she isn’t going to come careening around the corner, her usual beaming smile across her face,” Kitty whispered with a loud sniff, and we looked over to the corner where she might appear.

  “I feel that she’s with us in spirit,” I replied, clutching baby Rose closer, her little face smiling on this dreadful day that would change her world forever—almost definitely for the worse.

  “She doesn’t know her mother’s gone, does she?” Kitty murmured.

  “No, and it’ll be a few years till she’s old enough to understand. She’ll never have known Hattie, only Victor and the people who look after her.”

  “Who is going to look after her until Victor gets back?” Kitty’s eyes darted from the baby to me.

  It was a good question.

  Victor’s aunt wrote to say they’re too frail to have Rose. I hadn’t realized they’re in their eighties now. Sadly they couldn’t even make it for the funeral. So Rose has been staying with us—the Colonel and me—at Ivy House for now. I suppose I’ll have to find a home for her, a nice family to foster her.

  No one’s heard a thing from Victor for months, although the Colonel had his ship checked, and it seems it is doing all right somewhere in a remote part of the Atlantic. Victor probably hasn’t even heard about Hattie’s death; he might be still in a different reality where his wife and new daughter live happily in their small, snug home, while he is the one facing the bombs, he is the one risking his life so that they may live free. Oh, the wretched irony of it all.

  Before the Vicar opened the big church doors for us to enter, he crept out to have a word with me.

  “We haven’t any pallbearers,” he whispered hurriedly.

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  “There are no men to carry the coffin,” he elucidated, coughing to cover his embarrassment. We looked around. A group of mothers and children from Hattie’s school had come, but apart from old Mr. Dawkins and the Brigadier, who was clearly in no mood for carrying coffins, we were all women. The world seemed to fade in front of me. Dear Hattie, who was like a daughter to me, taken from life so early, and we couldn’t even give her a proper funeral.

  “Sorry,” the Vicar muttered. “Our usual bearers are at war or in the fields or making bombs. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Everyone’s harried these days,” I said quietly, annoyed that this wretched war is making us too busy for everything. If something needs to be done, it’s up to us women to make do.

  And then it dawned on me.

  “We will carry the coffin,” I announced.

  A sea of faces looked up.

  There was a moment of shock, when everyone seemed to look from me to the Vicar, registering the situation.

  Then, after a few whispers, a few murmurs, one by one, they all began to step forward; first Kitty, then Mrs. Winthrop and Venetia, Mrs. Gibbs, Mrs. Turner and Mrs. Poultice, then Mrs. B., and soon everyone had silently volunteered.

  “The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir will bear the weight,” Mrs. B. declared, taking charge in her usual manner, which for once was useful. “We will carry Hattie, our loyal second soprano, on her final procession.”

  As the Vicar led the way into the vestry, I realized I needed someone to hold baby Rose, and after looking around, I knew that I had no choice than to pass her over to the Brigadier.

  “Could you hold Rose for a while, please?” I said sharply, bundling her into his arms, and he was surprised into taking the infant, looking down into the blue shawl with a frown over his face. I paused for a moment, wondering whether he registered that this beautiful girl was, if my suspicions were correct, his own child. Might he have felt a shudder of remorse?

  “Lead on, Vicar,” Mrs. B. called, and we followed him into the vestry, where we caught our breath at the sorry sight of the coffin, a slim wooden box containing all that was left of our precious Hattie. What was once a vivacious, energetic young woman was now a pile of sad, dead remains without color or life, set inside a still box.

  “How are we to lift it?” Mrs. Gibbs asked nervously.

  “Everyone who feels strong can take a corner, and the rest of us will fill in around the edges,” Mrs. B. ordered.

  The mood became somber as we hoisted our fellow choir member up, at first a little wobbly, but then we straightened up and began to walk out into the entrance hall, waiting for Mrs. Quail to begin the organ processional.

  But Mrs. Quail had different ideas.

  At the precise moment we stepped out down the aisle, the ponderous introduction of “Abide with Me” began to sound forthright through the old church, the simple and yet poignant tune pouring softly from the organ, urging us to sing as a united front, for Hattie, for Prim, for our small yet resilient community, for our dear, collapsing country.

  Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;

  The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.

  Thus it was that a shuddering chorus of twelve deeply saddened women, singing at first softly, then more resolutely, advanced slowly down the aisle. We sang as if our lives depended on it, as if our very freedom, our passions and bravery were being called forward to bear witness to the atrocities that were placed before us. We were united and strong, and I knew right there and then that nothing, nothing could ever break the spirit of the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir.

  At first, I couldn’t bring myself to sing, the feeling was too immense, the extraordinary sound of our procession echoing around the empty church too tragic to eclipse the dreadful finality of death, the weight in the box making me shudder with discomfort. In front of me Kitty was struggling to hold the coffin up, her voice coming out piecemeal like fragile broken china, and behind me Venetia was inconsolable, heaving huge gulps of tears. I know that we are taught to think of death as a gentle passage of the soul from one place to the next, but the brutal bombing of a young mother seemed to contradict all of that, make it into the abominable destruction of a very real, strong spirit.

  I felt Venetia’s hand on my arm from behind me, and suddenly felt less isolated in my dismal reckoning of mankind, and found my voice. At first gravelly and croaky with tears, it soon gathered strength, clarity, deliberation, until I felt the sound of our combined voices encompass us like a warm halo of protection, making us aware of the precious life we all have—what it means, and however long it may last.

  As we reached the last majestic notes, we stood tightly at the front, breathlessly listening to the sounds of the closing song reverberating around us.

  With some effort, we gently lowered the coffin onto the low table, Mrs. B. hoarsely whispering, “Gently, Mrs. Gibbs. Gently!”

  Then we glanced around at the looming emptiness of the space. On one side were the mothers and children from the school, and on the other was only old Mr. Dawkins, the Brigadier with Rose, and now Henry, who had arrived while we were in the vestry.

  Then, at the very back of the church, I noticed that the Colonel had slipped into the row on the left—my spot, the place I always like to sit. He gave me a sad, tight-lipped smile, and I nodded in the direction of the Brigadier, hoping he would get the hint and go and collect Rose from him, which he did, remaining at the front as the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir went quietly into the choir stalls.

  Clearly upset, the Vicar led us through the ghastly service, a series of words that seemed all too inadequate to describe the grief I felt inside, and although I tried to hold them back, thoughts of David, and what I’d do if that telegram arrived, sprang into my mind, an ominous gleam of a possible future.

  I was snapped out of my
miseries by the Vicar announcing, “The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir will now sing for us.”

  We stood, and I took a few deep breaths before walking to the front, feeling unnerved and unable to go through with my task of leading, such a new endeavor to be making at this awful moment, at once stepping into a dead woman’s shoes—and Prim’s, no less, with her magical presence gone—for the sake of poor Hattie.

  And then, a sudden anger shot through me: What vicious brutes did this to them? And a new emotion overcame me: integrity, and a feeling of pride for everything we stand for. Pride in Hattie for striving on with Victor so far away in danger at sea. Pride in Prim for having the faith to take our choir to new heights. And pride in us, the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, for carrying through with our duty: to rejoice in their lives, to be strong and resilient enough to hold off our enemies, and to make sure their deaths are not in vain.

  The organ’s introduction of “Amazing Grace” filtered through the empty church, sweeping through us like a clean, crisp wind, and I took up my baton and prepared the choir to give the finest performance of our short, eventful existence. And a tragic awe overwhelmed me as the clear, crystalline voices pierced the air with all the beauty that a woman’s voice can attain, a soaring white dove in the everlasting tumult of war.

  When we had finished, the Vicar announced that the children of the school wanted to sing for their dear teacher. And my heart broke as I watched the children, most of them eight or nine, wondering what had happened to wonderful Mrs. Lovell.

  It was the most tragic scene I’d ever encountered. The children covering their faces with their small hands afterward to avoid looking at the coffin, in shock by the raw reality of death: how it could totally destroy something so warm and alive.

  —

  At the burial, our sorry group stood silently as Hattie’s coffin was lowered into the sodden ground beside her parents, before we made our way back to Ivy House for tea and sandwiches. I walked home with the Colonel, who had slipped the sleeping Rose into her pram—a black one that had been lent to me by a nurse friend in Litchfield, as Hattie’s blue one had been crushed in the bombing. She’d been so proud of it. I remembered when she brought it round to show me, pleased as punch, the first of many such memories to haunt me.

  I began pondering about Hattie and Prim and their lives, and thinking of my own insignificant time left on this planet, and how it might be shortened by bombs or invasion, or who knows what. And later that day, after our desolate assembly had left with tears and embraces, I found myself talking about it to the Colonel.

  “That could have been my funeral,” I said quietly, sitting at the kitchen table, drawing my fingernail down a crevice in the wood. “That bomb could have come a hundred yards in this direction and hit us.”

  “Yes, but let’s not think about that until it happens, eh?” the Colonel replied, and drew up a chair. It was early evening and the gloomy gray of the day was dimming into a stormy-looking night.

  “But if we don’t think of our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live?” I looked at my hands, thin and wrinkled and bony, their freshness lost. “If it had been my funeral, it would have been a sorry affair.”

  “You’re tired,” the Colonel said, getting up. “Let me make you a cup of tea.” He went and filled the kettle.

  “I’ve just been thinking about Hattie and Prim, wondering why I’ve spent my life working away to make other people happy. Why didn’t I make my own life more fun and happy, and more purposeful?”

  He sat back down. “Now look here,” he said in a very authoritative way. “You have a great life. You have a lovely home, brought up David—”

  I broke him off to say, “Who is at war and may not come back alive.”

  “You have a son,” he went on. “And you are an incredible help and support to everyone around you.” He put his hands on the table emphatically. “Can’t you see how much this village needs you? They’d be lost without you!”

  I put my head down, feeling self-conscious, and then I suddenly got up and snatched my dishcloth brusquely. “Enough of this self-indulgence,” I muttered. “I need to get on with dinner. I’m afraid I’m a little behind today.”

  He came up beside me, guiding me back to the table with his firm, big hands on my shoulders.

  “You just sit back down,” he said gently. “I can make dinner tonight.” And he went over to the larder and took stock of the contents. “Excellent news! We have some eggs, and eggs are my specialty.” He took the box out and promptly started looking for a pan. “Scrambled or boiled?” he asked, as he opened the cupboard and began banging around.

  “Scrambled,” I replied, smiling. I can’t remember the last time someone cooked me dinner, even if it was only eggs.

  “Excellent choice, madam,” he smiled. “My girls swear that I make the best scrambled eggs in the whole of Oxfordshire.”

  Albeit a little overcooked, he made them very well indeed, singing a dreadfully out-of-tune rendering of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Of course I felt obliged to sing along, as he kept getting the words wrong and coming into the chorus too soon. It was ridiculous, us singing around the kitchen while cooking the scrambled eggs, but it cheered me up no end.

  And so, dear diary, as I go to bed tonight, I feel that this war has become a turning point for me. I need to be more sure of myself, make the most of the time I have left.

  Stand up and make myself heard.

  LITCHFIELD HOSPITAL,

  LITCHFIELD,

  KENT.

  Tuesday, 6th August, 1940

  Dear Sister,

  Why has this happened to me? My house was ruddy well bombed, and I’m stuck here in bleeding Litchfield Hospital with no way of finding my money, which is buried in the rubble of my house, waiting for the looters to find it first.

  You’re probably wondering what happened. A sodding great bomb did, that’s what! Thursday night and there was I all tucked up nicely in bed, when next thing I hear the air raid going and have to hoist my exhausted body up. I was just going for the floorboard to get the money, when blam! Nothing, until I wake up in this dreadful place with the biggest pain in my hip you’d ever know, and my leg in bandages, too.

  “Please remain calm and quiet, Miss Paltry,” the nurse told me in her patronizing manner. “It’s only a fractured hip. You’ll be out in a few weeks. We have patients in with far more severe wounds than you.”

  What about my money? I felt like yelling.

  But instead, I sniveled into my hands and started thinking up a plan. And then it came to me. The woman in the next bed is one of those horrible hop pickers from Dawkins Farm, and she has a few young fellows visiting her. Yesterday I asked her if her nephew might be able to do me a favor, that there would be money in it for him. If he could be trusted. The next day she got him to come to my bed to find out what it was about.

  “What d’you want me to do then, missus?” he said plainly. I looked him over and wasn’t at all sure. He was tall and gangly, scruffy as a chimney sweep, with floppy loose hands and a pasty, moist complexion.

  “It’s Tom, isn’t it?” I said, trying not to crease my forehead. Was this really the best I could do? “Now, can I be sure you can keep your word, Tom? As I have a great task for you, but you have to reassure me that I can depend on you.”

  “You can trust me, missus,” he replied easily, hands on hips. Hardly the thing to fill me with confidence, but I proceeded nonetheless.

  “You see, I have an amount of money hidden in the remains of my house. Not a large sum, you know. But, you see, I have been saving up for my poorly sister, who is in need of a wheelchair.”

  “Maybe you’ll be the one to need it now, with your leg and all,” he said, not meaning to be impertinent. I felt like giving up there and then.

  “Maybe I will need it, and then she can use it afterward. But the long and short is that I am trapped here in hospital, and my house is likely to be looted. I need you to get the money and bring it he
re to me. I will give you some of the money for your trouble.”

  He looked at me, sucking in his lips. “How much?”

  “Ten shillings,” I said in a final way.

  “Righty-ho,” he sniffed, wiping his nose with his shirt sleeve. “Where is it then?”

  I stalled, asking him to fetch some water for me. His easy attitude unsettled me. He was fine with ten shillings now, but once he saw the thick wodge he’d change his tune as quick as a jackrabbit. Would I even see the money again? His lack of haggling made me doubt him.

  “Here you are, missus.” He handed me the water. Perhaps I’d got him wrong. Perhaps he was just a simple child who wanted to help.

  I didn’t have many options, dear sister. The money may have already gone, or been burned to ashes. This was the only possible means I had of reclaiming it. It was my only hope.

  “All right then. Listen carefully.” He bent his head closer, and I explained where the money was hidden, making sure that he understood that the bomb damage may have shifted the floor or the money to another place. He was to leave no brick unturned.

  “I’ll do my best,” he said with a lopsided, crooked-toothed smile, and my heart sank. What has the world come to?

  And so I will keep you informed as to how it goes. He promised to return as soon as he finds it, and in the meantime I can only lie here and hope.

  Edwina

  CHILBURY MANOR,

  CHILBURY,

  KENT.

  Tuesday, 6th August, 1940

  Dear Angela,

  You wouldn’t believe what mayhem and sadness has been going on since the bomb. I am shattered even thinking about it and try to stay in my room resting as much as I can, although I did make it to Hattie’s funeral, which was heartrending. I still can’t quite believe she’s gone. We’ve been friends since we were born, together as babies, then little girls, teenagers, and now grown women. Or rather, now just one woman—me. It’s as if a whole chunk of my past life has been obliterated.