The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

by Jennifer Ryan

  We’ve spent all our days together since. He’s on leave to be briefed for his next job—he’s not allowed to say where he’s going, but it’s abroad, and he promises it’s not dangerous, although I can’t imagine it isn’t. Well, where isn’t dangerous these days? He’s been staying in a barracks in Litchfield and spends a lot of time here at Chilbury Manor—Mama said it’s all right as it’s good for my health.

  We’ll both be leaving next week, him for his secret destination and me for London. I can’t wait to be there with you, Angie, and be free to live my own life. I dread the thought of Alastair—I mean John, of course—leaving, so we’ll just have to keep incredibly busy, shan’t we? That’s all for now, my dear Angie. Until you see me next week.

  Much love,

  Venetia

  Wednesday, 28th August, 1940

  There was a singing show and everyone joined in. There were silly songs, like “Run Rabbit Run” and “Knees Up Mother Brown.” For that we have to do a dance. Mrs. Tilling was bad, but Mrs. B. was very good. We laughed as it was so funny.

  The Brigadier said I could stay, so I am part of the family. I call Mrs. Winthrop Auntie Lavinia, and Venetia and Kitty are my new sisters for now. Everyone is very kind to me, especially the choir ladies. Mrs. Poultice always gives me an apple and a special smile.

  I think about my parents a lot. I want to go to them. I want to see them, hug them. It is hard. I dream about them and wake up crying. Kitty comes in with her map book and we plan our trip after the war.

  I hope it ends soon.

  Wednesday, 28th August, 1940

  What a few days we’ve had! Last Saturday was the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir’s first ever singing concert, and it was a massive success. Venetia’s Mr. Slater arrived back and they had an extraordinary reunion at the concert, which quite added to the spectacle of the whole event. They’ve been virtually inseparable since, although she is going to London next week and he is to go abroad.

  Carrington was at the concert, too, and is also being sent to London. He was incredibly happy about it, whispering to me, “It’ll be marvelous to get away from the old man,” which made me laugh.

  Another amusing occurrence at the concert was that Lady Worthing was there with her appalling daughter, Lady Constance, who is so terribly bossy she quite competes with Mrs. B., who has her in mind for a daughter-in-law, just because she’s titled, of course. It’s hilarious to think of Henry with her, though. I had a chance to have a short chat with her after the concert.

  “I’ve always had a notion that marriage is not unlike getting a new hound,” she said to me, loudly and in an instructional way. “It takes a lot of whipping them into shape before you can get them to do what they’re told.” She slapped her thigh with enthusiasm, and I had to purse my lips to stop myself from hooting with laughter.

  I couldn’t wait to tell the Colonel about it when I got home, but he wasn’t there. I assumed he had to work late, but felt the chill of loneliness in the house without him, and my little story quite lost its charm. I decided to give the kitchen a good tidy-up, rather than plodding despondently to bed, and soon found myself sitting at the kitchen table, wondering how much I was going to miss him. By the time he walked through the door at one, I was quite miserable and pathetic.

  “What’s all this, then?” he said as he came in. He bent down and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Have you had bad news?” he said, anxious that I’d received a telegram about David, and I began a new set of tears.

  “If I did get a telegram about David, who would be here once you leave?” I sobbed. “It’s just me in this old house now, alone with my thoughts. They’ll kill me, you know. They’ll gang up on my brain and take over, thinking all the worst things and never getting anything done.”

  “You’ll be fine,” he said, dragging a chair over and sitting down so that he could put his arm around me. “You’re a strong woman, Mrs. Tilling.”

  “But I don’t want to always be the strong one. Who can, in these dreadful times? I’m sick and tired of holding it all in, putting on a brave face, living an inner misery behind a frail smile. It’s simply not going to work anymore.”

  We sat in silence for a minute or two, him rubbing my shoulder, and me looking into nowhere, enjoying a last feeling of warmth and comfort from him before he leaves.

  “Why don’t you come with me, then?” he said in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, as if he were suggesting a picnic or a day at the beach.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I muttered.

  “I don’t see why not. I mean, they’ve found me a nice flat in London, and there’ll be plenty of room. There’s a need for nurses everywhere at the moment, so you’ll find a job up there. It’ll be like a new start. An adventure. We’ll have to get married, of course, but that’ll be easy.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Look at me, Margaret.” He’d never used my name before, and it made me feel strange, like he was talking to the real me, the one inside, not the one who rushes around cheering people up and making things better. “I mean it. I’d love it if you’d marry me. We’ve been living together these past months blissfully, so why leave it there? I love you.”

  I was suddenly finding it hard to breathe, so I decided it was about time to tidy up the cupboard under the sink. Making a loud scraping sound as I pushed back the chair, I strode to the sink, got down on my hands and knees, and started to drag everything out.

  “Don’t you love me, too?” he demanded, crouching down beside me and helping me take out a rather grubby old metal bucket with several holes.

  “Of course I do,” I replied, carefully bringing out an old pot with candles poking out the top. “But we can’t just get married. What about David? He’ll come home and find I’ve gone.”

  “He’s a man now, although he’ll always be your boy. He can always come and stay. You can’t just sit here waiting for him to come home.”

  “And what about your girls?”

  “They’ll adore you. Everyone does.”

  I got up to find an old cloth to wipe the shelves inside the cupboard, then knelt back down, proceeding to give it a severely hearty scrubbing down.

  “And what about me? My independence? My home, my village? Ivy House?”

  “We can come home after the war, if you want.” He took my hands in his, prizing out the old scrubbing cloth and throwing it on the floor. “I don’t want to take over your life. I just want to be part of it. Living together, just like we have been. Two people together, happy.” He took a deep breath, his fingers lacing between mine. “There’s a war on, and everything seems to be getting a lot worse out there. You never know what’s going to happen to any of us. We need to grab any happiness we can while there’s still time.”

  I sat gazing at him for a long moment.

  “I need time to think it over. I’m not one of those people who can jump into something new straightaway.” I leaned into him, tucking my hand behind his neck and bringing him close. “And yet,” I began, pausing for a moment with the truth of it. “I’m not sure I can just let you leave.”

  We sat there for some while, on the kitchen floor, holding hands and kissing, talking about it all—the war, David, his girls—until the sirens went off at around two, and we headed downstairs to the cellar.

  Friday, 6th September, 1940

  An Unexpected Wedding

  What an extraordinary week this has been! With astounding decisiveness, Mrs. Tilling married the Colonel yesterday in our little church before they vanished off to London. I know whirlwind weddings are the thing at the moment, since we don’t know if we’ll all be here from one week to the next, but I was impressed with Mrs. Tilling making such a forthright move. She stepped forward to conduct the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir one final time during the ceremony, choosing “All Creatures of Our God and King,” a magnificent smile across her face as we sang the words:

  Thou burning sun with golden beam,

  Thou silver moon with softer gleam.
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br />   Mama threw a party of sorts for them afterward, a few cucumber sandwiches and cardboard cake, as usual. Yet there was a joviality about the place, as if our choir felt somehow responsible for giving Mrs. Tilling a new lease on life.

  “It’s what we have to do these days, Kitty,” she said as she kissed me good-bye. “You need to find where you fit in this world, where you are happiest, where you can make a difference. And don’t be afraid of change.”

  “But you can make a difference here in Chilbury,” I told her. “You don’t need to go to London.”

  “I’ve done what I can here, and now it’s time to go and help out elsewhere.” She smiled in a way I don’t think I’d ever seen—not like her usual caring smile, or her polite smile, but a whole deeper level of smile, as if radiating a force of sunlight breaking through a stormy sky.

  “We’ll miss you—you will write to me, won’t you?”

  “I will. And you keep the choir going. I know you will, though, but somehow it seems a lot to be asking a thirteen-year-old.”

  “I’m almost fourteen,” I snapped. “And I’m planning on taking the choir to bigger and better things. Just you wait.”

  The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir

  With Mrs. Tilling leaving, the choir voted for me to take over concert planning, which is an extraordinary honor. To her utter relief, Mrs. B. was finally voted to take over the conducting, so she and I have become quite a team, visiting bombed towns to offer our services. Can you believe that the Mayor of Dover has asked us to perform there? They’ve had more than their fair share of bombs and hundreds of people are now homeless. Mrs. Quail and I have started collecting blankets for them.

  I’m sure there’ll be other places in need of our blankets and singing concerts soon, as there seems to be a never-ending stream of Nazi planes flying over to bomb us, our Spitfires fighting fiercely back. They’re saying that the more we shoot them down, the less likely they are to invade, so we’re putting our all into it.

  Our New Additions

  Now that we have two babies in Chilbury Manor, Mama and Nanny Godwin are busy all the time. Mama is overjoyed, of course. They’re like twins as they were born on the same day, except they couldn’t be more different—Rose all cheerful and angelic and Lawrence small and perplexing. Silvie has been helping to look after them, saying it reminds her of looking after her baby brother. She still has that wistful look but has been talking more, and has attached herself to Mama quite fiercely. Silvie and I have been busy planning our expedition across Europe after the war to find her parents and her brother. She said she’ll show me around her old house and neighborhood, and has begun to tell me more about her life. How lovely it was before this horrid war began.

  News from the Shop

  The village shop was bustling again with news this morning. Ralph Gibbs has bought the old mansion across the square, Tudor Grange. It must have cost a lot, and no one knows where he got the money, as surely the black market isn’t doing all that well. Quite the village lord he is now, with Mrs. Gibbs saying she’s to sell the shop. Elsie is glued to him, the attraction now more obvious. I can’t help wondering if it has something to do with the money that we found with Tom.

  Tom’s Departure

  Sadly, Tom is returning to London as his school is starting up again (as is ours in Litchfield). He promised to write to me, and if he doesn’t I’ll be incredibly cross as Silvie and I have both become quite fond of him. He says he’ll miss us, too, and he’ll be back next year, if not before for a visit.

  The Newcomer

  We have another newcomer to our village, and quite a character she is, too, with her shoulder-length wavy hair brushed back like she’s spent too long on a very windy cliff or has undergone a tremendous shock. She’s older than Venetia, maybe even thirty, and taller, too, wearing a tweed skirt and striding around looking at everything with determined interest like an unruly horse.

  “I’m a journalist,” she told us in a nasal upper-class voice. “Endeavoring to root out the real stories behind the war. The stories of us women, left alone in these little places to fend for ourselves and deal with the devastation. How we all pull together to help the war effort.”

  Obviously I introduced myself to her promptly. “Let me be the one to show you around,” I announced, taking her arm and marching her off to see the remains of Church Row. “You see, we’ve had quite a summer with it all!”

  “Is that where the bombs hit?” she asked, putting on her black-rimmed glasses and taking a notebook out of a large leather handbag.

  “Yes, two women were killed, and one badly injured. One of the dead was the magnificent new choirmistress, the other our wonderful schoolteacher. Luckily her baby was rescued.”

  Her face snapped around to me. “How fascinating!” She glanced around and pulled me to the little wooden bench by the duck pond, the September sun sending a glowing golden hue over the gently yellowing leaves.

  “Tell me about it. What time did it happen?” she asked.

  “About half past eleven.”

  “And a clear night?”

  “A crescent moon, I think.”

  She sat transfixed for a moment, murmuring to herself. “Clear black skies with a shimmering moon, the stars flickering like a thousand innocent bystanders.”

  “That sounds beautiful,” I sighed. “It must be marvelous to write like that.”

  “I can teach you if you have time,” she said, and I found myself transfixed as she rose from her seat and began pacing around the pond twiddling her pen. “But first I want you to tell me all about how the women are coping with war.”

  “Well, I don’t think we were doing very well at all, until one spring day the new choirmistress arrived and got us singing again. She resurrected the choir, making it a women’s-only choir—the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir. It seemed such an unthinkable idea at first, but then we won a competition and realized how much better we were, and how we could transform ourselves into a charity singing show, or anything we liked. Well, after that we all began looking around and realizing we could do a lot of things better by ourselves, or with the help of each other, and together we became stronger, better. A force to be reckoned with.”

  The woman watched me, and then gazed over at the crumbling church.

  “The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir. It has a ring about it.”

  “Yes.” I nodded, smiling. “The most inspiring group of women you’ll ever meet.”

  My jovial grandmother, Mrs. Eileen Beckley, always regaled hilarious stories from the war, most of them funny or racy, some of them touching on the horrific and sad realities. But through it all, her tales showed how the women came together, working hard and keeping cheerful, to form the solid Home Front that played such a crucial role in the war. My warmest gratitude goes to her and the women who fought on through the bombs and the heartache. This book is dedicated to them.

  At the beginning of the war, an organization known as Mass Observation began, encouraging ordinary individuals to keep diaries and journals and send them into the headquarters, where some would be published in a newsletter. These diaries filled in many gaps in my understanding of the war years, notably one by Nella Last, and my thanks goes to her and her fellow writers for allowing us to look not only into their lives, but also into their minds and hearts. Letters, biographies, and memoirs have also provided details of the era, and my thanks go to their authors, as well as to those who spoke to me personally about the war. A wealth of books about women in the war has provided background, as well as books and articles written during the era. Henrietta’s War, by Joyce Dennys, includes wonderfully witty stories written by a journalist of the era, and was invaluable for gauging the voice and spirit of the time.

  After this book became a work in progress, a multitude of people helped to see it through. Wholehearted gratitude goes to my beloved critique group, Barb Boehm, Emmy Nicklin, and Julia Rocchi, for providing excellent critiques and plenty of wine and warmth to help the process along. Thanks go to m
y teachers at Johns Hopkins, especially to Mark Farrington, whose intuition for plot, character, and narrative is legendary, and also to David Everett, Ed Perlman, and Michelle Brafman. Other people who added information, personal stories, or helped along the way, include Irene Mussett, Jerry Cooper, David Beckley, Chris Beckley, Louise and Charlie Hamilton Stubber, Cheryl Harnden, Colin Berry, Breda Corrish, Annie Cobbe, Elaine Cobbe, Lorraine Quigley, Seth Weir, Douglas Rogers, and Grace Cutler.

  From the very first time I spoke to my phenomenal editor at Crown, Hilary Rubin Teeman, I was taken aback by her intuitive understanding of the book. Her vision and exceptional editorial skills have made Chilbury into the book it is today. Thank you so much for all your work and expertise. My thanks go to the publisher, Molly Stern, and all at Crown, including Annsley Rosner, Rachel Meier, Maya Mavjee, David Drake, Kevin Callahan, Rachel Rokicki, Amy J. Schneider, Patricia Shaw, Heather Williamson, Sally Franklin, Anna Thompson, and a special mention to Rose Fox for all her help. Thanks also go to Mick Wiggins for the stunning jacket illustration.

  Cassie Browne, my excellent editor at Borough Press, has blown me away with her ability to bring a book to its true potential. Thank you for your invaluable perception and insight. Big thanks also go to Kate Elton and Suzie Dooré, and the wonderfully welcoming and enthusiastic team at HarperCollins: Sarah Benton, Katie Moss, and the excellent Charlotte Cray. And for the ingenious cover, my gratitude goes to renowned illustrator Neil Gower.

  My magnificent agent, Alexandra Machinist at ICM, combines editorial wisdom, publishing instinct, and immense charm in a truly spellbinding way. Thank you for your razor-sharp guidance and expertise. Thanks also to the invaluable Hillary Jacobson.