The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  But supervising herself doing the dusting, telling herself that the house was running on really rather straight lines, making sure that the maid and the under-maids – all about the same age as herself – were doing what they should do, was finally much too dull. Jean had no wish to upset Miss Beresford, but she knew that if she was not to go mad she had to give in her notice and strike out in a different direction. This new direction, however, was somewhat of a surprise to both Miss Maude, and Jean.

  ‘You want to do what?’

  ‘I want to farm.’

  ‘Why? If you don’t mind my enquiring, Shaw?’

  Jean hesitated. She could read, and she could read fast, no putting her finger under the words or any of that nonsense. One of the perks of working for Miss Maude at the Hall was that they took all the newspapers, every day. No one who worked there had ever quite dared to ask why, and no one did, although Jean had always assumed that it had been the habit of the large, bustling, pre-Great-War household to take newspapers for everyone at the house, and that meant literally everyone, even the servants. So every morning, willy-nilly, to the house came the Daily This and the Daily That, and unlike the rest of the girls who could not wait to put them on either the fire, or the floor after washing it – as was the custom – Jean read all the newspapers, and what she read, alone by candlelight at her cottage, made her uneasy, and at the same time savvy. There was not enough food being grown at that moment in England. A great deal of it was being imported, so if there was a war and imports stopped, there would not be enough for everyone to eat. It did not make sense. Someone had to start growing more food, and quick, in however small quantities, because every last crumb was going to be needed.

  ‘Land is what you need, my girl. Land will never let you down,’ Granny Shaw used to say to her. ‘If you have land you will never starve, believe me.’ She used to point out of the cottage window to her own couple of acres. ‘I can grow my own food, and that way I need answer to no one.’

  Answering to no one became Jean’s ideal. She did not want to answer to anyone, probably because she never had. She had been unfortunate in her mother, but fortunate in her grandmother, so her ill luck had been her good luck, and thinking that way had become a habit, as she was now telling Joe.

  ‘Good comes out of bad, I am sure of it,’ she stated as they finished lunch.

  ‘No good can come of war, Jean. Look at the Great War, no good came of that. No, war is not good, Jean, no one can say that,’ Joe told her in a vaguely patronising voice, sounding as if he was speaking to someone a great deal younger.

  Jean considered this, and then began again, reluctant to let go.

  ‘Some people say that had there not been the Great War we would have had a revolution in England, because of all the rich folk having too much, and all the poor folk having too little, and that there would have been a bloodbath like in France at the end of the eighteenth century. That is what some people say.’

  Joe stared at her. Jean was such a pretty girl, with her thick dark curly hair and green eyes and pale skin, such a pretty girl, and with such a heart-turning smile, why would she want to talk like that? Like some sort of politician, or suffragette, or something?

  ‘I hope you’re not going to turn out to be intelligent as well as beautiful, are you, Jean?’ he asked, all innocence.

  Jean put one elbow on the table, and laid her other arm across so that her hand held the crook of the first arm, and then placed her head a little lower and widened her eyes, making it her turn to look falsely innocent.

  ‘Why, Joe Huggett, you are such a tease, truly you are. Do I look intelligent? I ask you, I mean, do I? God forbid that I should. Surely it is against the laws of nature for a woman to be beautiful and intelligent?’

  Jean widened her eyes mockingly as Joe stared at her holding her ridiculous pose, and then he started to laugh.

  ‘Where did you learn that little party trick, Miss Jean Shaw?’

  ‘I didn’t never learn it, Mr Huggett, what I did was observe it, when I worked in my holidays at grand houses. Before I left school and went to help Miss Beresford at the Hall, I observed that whenever the men were around, the ladies of quality always pretended to be half-daft. Never could understand the need for it, to tell you the truth, not never, no how – why would someone want someone else to be stupid?’

  Joe frowned, realising all of a sudden that he couldn’t understand it, either. It was a silly way of carrying on, and at the same time he realised, too, that the reason he was attracted to Jean was that she was not like that. She was, and always had been, her own person, ever since she had kicked around the playground with him and his brothers, she one of only two girls at the otherwise all-boys village school.

  ‘I don’t want a girl to pretend to be anything, I just want a girl to be a girl, not a boy, but with a mind of her own nonetheless,’ Joe stated.

  ‘Well, that is good to hear, Mr Huggett,’ Jean went on, but her voice was still vaguely mocking.

  Joe put his napkin down in a gesture of finality, as if he was preparing to leave.

  ‘I don’t really understand where all this is getting us, Jean. I didn’t bring you to lunch here for you to make fun of me. There is a war coming, sure as your eggs are your eggs, and your chickens are your chickens,’ he went on, referring to Jean’s newer acquisitions. ‘And all that land you have been renting from Miss Beresford for tuppence three farthings is going to be commandeered, and you are going to have to change your ways. There will be no time for mockery soon, Jean Shaw, and I have a uniform, and only one day left of my leave. We may soon all be dead, and, believe me, we will be regretting every minute that we have wasted.’

  Jean stared at Joe. He was tall, and he was handsome in a pleasant even-featured way, and, which was pretty rare in Twistleton men – whose dentistry consisted only in ‘having ’em all out’ – he had great teeth.

  ‘What are you trying to say, Joe Huggett?’

  ‘Marry me, Jean. Before I go to war, marry me, and make me happy for a few days, or hours. Soon our whole world may be gone, every last bit of it, my mum’s house, your cottage, the Hall, everything covered in Nazi flags. Hitler youth striding through the streets, Hitler standing on the balcony at Buckingham Palace waving to the crowds below—’

  ‘Stop it, Joe. Stop it. You’re exaggerating!’

  ‘Am I?’ Joe reached down and picked up her gas-mask case and placed it on the table. ‘Is this an exaggeration?’

  Jean stared at him, seeing the bleak landscape ahead of them both – the bus had already passed children playing in gas masks in the playgrounds – seeing everything as he, perhaps, was seeing it. Perhaps Joe was right? Perhaps she should marry him before everything disappeared?

  ‘Whoosh!’ Maude was sitting beside Daisy in the new motor car, holding on to her hat, despite the fact that she had secured it firmly with motoring veils. ‘Whoosh!’ she shouted again, her cheeks pink from the breeze. ‘This is just how it used to be.’

  Naturally Daisy was thrilled with herself, not just because she was driving so well, and so fast, and after only a few lessons with Mr Russell, but because she had actually managed to persuade Aunt Maude to leave the Hall. It was a big decision for Maude, and they both knew it.

  She had probably stayed at the Hall, Daisy thought, ever since Daisy had arrived, Nanny in tow; or was it Nanny arriving with Daisy in tow? It did not seem to matter much now. What had mattered was that one day Nanny had left, and with her had gone Daisy’s childhood belief in the idea that everything was going to be all right.

  A maid, Patty Bywater, had taken Nanny’s place, for no reason that anyone ever explained, but she had proved endlessly cruel; not just painting Daisy’s fingers with bitter aloes at Aunt Maude’s request, but making fun of her because she was ‘grand’. Every evening Patty would switch off Daisy’s light, leaving her in the pitch black of countryside darkness, and make her own way down the corridor by the light of a torch. And just before, instead of reading to Daisy
, she would dress up in frightening clothes, and, pretending to be a grotesque of some weird kind, would dance up and down in front of her charge, her shoulders hunched as if there was a string at the back of her, and she was a puppet. Too proud to admit, even to herself, that she was not frightened – but actually terrified – Daisy would sit bolt upright in bed staring at her, pretending to laugh at her antics, hating her all the time.

  One day, as is natural to all bullies, the wretched creature went too far, and while in the act of pretending to suffocate Daisy with a pillow, caused her to black out, upon which Patty immediately panicked, and ran screaming from the nursery. The sound alerted another of the servants, who, upon finding Daisy, brought her back to consciousness.

  Aunt Maude, not a minute too soon, in her own words, ‘dismissed the ghastly creature’, and her replacement, Nippy – so nicknamed because rumour had it that she had once been a waitress – took her place.

  Nippy was a cockney, and proud of it. On marrying a local boy, as a result of a country holiday sponsored by the vicar of her church, she had taken a daily job at the Hall. She liked Miss Maude, ‘one of the old-fashioned sort’ was how she described Maude to her farm-labourer husband, but she would have none of the old-fashioned sort’s Victorian methods. The bottle of bitter aloes was ceremoniously emptied down Mr Thomas Crapper’s brilliant Victorian invention, the water closet, and a night light installed beside Daisy’s bed.

  ‘Don’t give that Patty Bywater another thought,’ Nippy would say, when once or twice Daisy confided in her. ‘She was just out to get yer, ’cos of you being ’ere, and she not being ’ere, and all that. My Bert, he says she was always a tyrant on account of her father spoiling her. Myself, I hope she falls down in a ditch and no one finds her, until it’s far too late. She turned the back of your hair white, I’m sure of it, but no matter, no one will notice once yer grown up, it’ll just tie in with the rest of the blonde, yer know?’

  How Nippy had known that Daisy’s light mouse-coloured hair would eventually turn blonde, without any help from a bottle, neither of them would ever know.

  ‘Just me intuition, love, that’s all. Me intuition, always has been one of me main attractions for Bert, you know? Ever since I come on holiday here, and I told him he would marry a girl from another place with red hair . . .’

  This was a great joke, as it might well be, since Nippy herself was indeed from another place, and had the brightest red hair imaginable. Of course she had retired now, and Daisy still missed her, but only occasionally, because she knew Nippy was happy with her Bert.

  Aunt Maude climbed out of the motor car, a suddenly decorous figure, standing on the pavement outside Mrs Bradshaw’s confectionery, newsagent, post office, and general grocery store, the potatoes and cabbages spilling from boxes outside the long, low sprawling shop seeming to make her look even more elegant, already a figure from another, calmer era.

  ‘It is such a good idea, this motor car,’ she said, sighing happily, and looking around and about her, as if she had just arrived from a different planet. ‘We can take shopping home in it, Daisy dear. And we can come to the village more often.’

  ‘Not if there is petrol-rationing, Aunt Maude,’ Daisy murmured. ‘If there is petrol-rationing I shall have to put the pony at the front and get him to pull it into the village!’

  Aunt Maude looked away, suddenly deaf, as she was wont to become at any hint of another war to come. Daisy knew that her beloved aunt had set her heart against the idea, that she simply would not believe it, she simply could not believe it, and moreover she did not have to believe it, because, despite every possible newspaper being delivered, the truth was that Aunt Maude never paid the slightest attention to any of them, never even so much as glancing at a headline.

  Nor would she countenance a wireless. It would have been ridiculous to even suggest that she should buy one, or, worse, listen to it. Daisy herself had secretly asked her godfather for one and installed it in the butler’s pantry, where she sneaked off to listen to plays, and the news, and even comedy and variety shows of an evening, while Maude sat in front of the great fire with her photograph albums.

  Maude stooped down and started to replace one or two of the potatoes that had strayed from their box, her gloved hand becoming marked by the dry clods of mud clinging to them, and as she did so the name on the side of the box caught her eye.

  ‘This says these are Jean Shaw’s potatoes,’ she said, in a surprised voice. She turned to Daisy. ‘You know I have leased some fields to her, on the advice of Mr Chittlethorpe, my farm manager? Does this mean she is growing a potato crop, do you think, Daisy?’

  At that moment a cloud moved across the sun, blocking out the warmth from the day, just as a frown came to Aunt Maude’s face, and Daisy realised with a sinking heart that the warmth had gone out of her expression.

  ‘Come, Daisy, we must drive back to the Hall, and inspect the lower fields that run down towards the sea, those that I have leased to Jean Shaw through Chittlethorpe.’

  Oh, dear poor Geoff Chittlethorpe! He had suddenly lost his right to being a ‘Mr’. It was as if a knighthood had been withdrawn from him.

  ‘I daresay we could do that after luncheon, couldn’t we, Aunt Maude? I mean, whatever Jean is growing on the fields will wait until we have finished our drive, surely?’

  ‘Very well, continue on, Daisy, but after luncheon, willy-nilly, we will be driving across the estate to those leased fields. I was always a little nervous of Chittlethorpe’s modernising ideas, and I only hope I am wrong.’

  Of course she knew very well that she couldn’t be, and that the potatoes must have come from somewhere, and that that somewhere must be her own fields. And of course, after luncheon, despite Daisy trying to deflect her attention from such a tedious matter, she insisted that Daisy drive her to the relevant fields, which were indeed planted, many acres of them, with potatoes. Daisy dropped her back at the Hall, and then shot off to the Court, only thankful that she had promised to give Laura and Aurelia driving lessons.

  The next day Geoff Chittlethorpe was summoned to the Hall.

  ‘Miss Shaw has ploughed up my ancient pastures to plant her wretched potatoes!’

  Daisy, who was listening at the drawing-room door, straightened up. There was no need to put her ear to it any more, Aunt Maude had raised her voice. It was unheard-of for Aunt Maude to raise her voice, let alone shout, and what Daisy had just heard was really quite near to a shout.

  ‘Well, Miss Maude.’ Daisy heard the panic in Geoff Chittlethorpe’s voice as he sought to justify himself. ‘I know it must seem strange to you . . .’

  ‘Strange! It is hideous. Potato crops! Cabbages! In fields that have been pastures since Oliver Cromwell! You should be shot at dawn, Chittlethorpe. If you knew of this, I shall personally court marshall you.’

  Daisy wasn’t sure that Geoff Chittlethorpe would believe even Aunt Maude had the authority to bring about her threat. Even so, she was very frightening, as people who believe absolutely in their own authority so often are.

  ‘Miss Maude, may I explain?’ Geoff Chittlethorpe had obviously taken a deep breath while pausing to think, because his voice had become a great deal firmer. ‘There is a war coming, Miss Maude. We are going to need to eat – and not just meat. Potatoes and suchlike must be grown in place of so much pasture for sheep and cattle. We will need to eat cheaply, Miss Maude. Cabbages and potatoes will become our national diet.’

  ‘From whom did you gather this?’

  ‘From the wireless, Miss Maude, and from the newspapers. We all know there is a war coming.’

  Another long silence, and then finally Aunt Maude spoke.

  ‘I am severely disappointed in you, Chittlethorpe. However, what is done is done, and cannot now be undone. I imagine we have leased the fields to Jean Shaw for some interminable time?’

  ‘For five years, I believe, Miss Maude, and she has never yet been late with the rent, Miss Maude. Never. Brings it herself, in cash.’


  Cash or no cash, Aunt Maude was obviously not in a mood to be reasonable.

  ‘Well, well, well, that it should come to this, Chittlethorpe. But, and I must in duty say this to you, if you are to make something of yourself, which I somehow now doubt, but if you are, you should take the advice I am now giving you. Avoid reading newspapers, avoid listening to that contraption called the wireless, read your Bible, go to church, listen to the sermons preached by the reverend – although not his locum who has some very peculiar ideas about almost everything including the creation – and above all, remember to say your prayers at night, together with your wife and children.’

  Daisy knew that poor Geoff Chittlethorpe had no wife or children, so this last advice could surely and most happily be ignored? Before the wretched man could back out of the room in the manner of some crushed debutante at a royal occasion, Daisy shot down to the kitchens. When, oh when, would Aunt Maude start believing that there was going to be a war? Perhaps only when one of Hitler’s cohorts was forcing her to have dinner with him?

  Freddie had been counting gas masks for some time before it actually came home to her that they were real. Gas masks up to that moment had just been, well – just gas masks. Now, all of a sudden she remembered the Sargent painting of the gassed soldiers in the Great War moving slowly forward with blindfolded eyes, each with a hand on another’s shoulders. Oh dear, that was how they could all be in a few months’ time, she with a hand on Daisy’s shoulder, Daisy with a hand on Relia’s shoulder, Relia with a hand on . . . She stopped, and clicked her fingers sharply beside her head. No point in thinking like that, no point at all. The truth was that in a very short space of time their whole world would be turned upside down. She imagined, as she always had as a child, making a camp in the cellars below the house, Aunt Jessica, and herself, Blossom, and Branscombe and all the dogs, all of them quietened, listening, all waiting for the inevitable sound of people overhead going through the house, going through their things, searching, searching, not just for possessions, but for human beings, for anyone or anything.