The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘It’ll all come right soon, just you wait and see, Johnny, and you’ll go back home to Mum and be as happy as a bird in a tree.’

  Just then a frozen bird fell out of the tree they were passing, dead as a nail. Jessica looked away, and to distract Johnny she quickly pointed out an aeroplane passing overhead.

  Hotty was looking as Aurelia had never seen her look before. Still beautiful – the bone structure had always been remarkable, and that of course was still in place – but her wonderful skin, always so carefully guarded, was now pale and sallow. Her nails, usually long and red, were now short, and there were white flecks in them – from lack of some vitamin, Aurelia supposed. And of course the worst thing of all was that she was still Hotty, absolutely determined to make a party out of her situation, to kick on, as the riding master used to shout at Aurelia, to do her best to make her situation a bit of a giggle.

  ‘Of course, there are some very strange people in here,’ she finally admitted. ‘I mean, some of the women simply hate the way I talk, which is killingly funny, but I got round that one, darling, by asking them to teach me to talk like they do! They actually think I am coming on a treat, would you believe? I now know not just how to ask for the lavatory, not the aunt, but also a little bit of cockney rhyming slang, and even a little bit of Scottish; although Welsh is not my strongest point en ce moment . . .’

  ‘Well done, Mummy.’

  ‘You are a sweetie to come.’ Hotty smiled. ‘I don’t know why they want to put me behind bars, Relia darling, but if it makes the powers-that-be happier, then this is where I have to stay, isn’t it, sweetie? I will probably be able to give lectures on prison conditions when I get out of here, finally, to all those poor dear women who read the Daily Telegraph and pontificate at all times of the day and night, but don’t know what it’s like. But I must say, I would never be able to be like those suffragette people and allow myself to be force-fed, because that would be just too de trop.’

  Hotty smiled the kind of smile, eyebrows slightly lifted, pretty mouth parted just a little, that she would have given an attractive young man at a cocktail party when she was in her salad days. ‘I mean, I shall be able to tell all those ladies who might need to know such things just how to make use of the prison walls. For instance, you can rub your hand across whitewash and then quickly pass it over your shiny nose. Do you know, Relia darling, the other women have been absolute bricks about showing me how to wash my hair, and in return I have given them a cabaret.’ In answer to Aurelia’s surprised look she said, ‘Yes, I know, I know you would never think I could, but I manage really quite well. I sing some of Guy Athlone’s amusing songs to them, you know the sort of thing? I sing “A House Is Not A Home”, and “Relax, Relax, Relax” which always gets a good laugh, and also “Some Way”, and all those others. They like the gentle romantic ones . . . You would never think that they would enjoy Guy Athlone’s songs, but they love them, and of course they tease me terribly because they know I love to be teased. So all in all, I’m really very lucky.’ She leaned forward. ‘Do you know some women are in here simply because they had a baby out of wedlock, and their husbands thought they had betrayed them, things like that; but even they consider themselves lucky not to be in a mental home, which is the lot of so many who slip up, poor little things.’

  And so it went on, Hotty being even more Hotty, despite her prison clothing and her white, white face, which made her eyes look even larger and more beautiful. And of course her voice, so cultured, so well-articulated, so musical, seemed even more so in that place where she had been condemned to be, Aurelia knew, by none other than her only child.

  Aurelia walked back to the car park, and seated herself in her car. It would take her hours and hours and hours to get back to Longbridge Farm, hours when the tears would be allowed to flow freely, and the guilt would start; perhaps, like the war, never to end.

  When the thaw did come, it was an anticlimax, everything dripping and bursting, and the well in the yard, from which they still drew their water, too full for comfort. Only Daisy was exultant, beginning her training proper, feeling really chipper about the fact that she had been chosen to be what was already being called an Air Transport Auxiliary, or ATA girl. Exultant, and not a little proud, until she saw who else had been rounded up to fly aircraft from factory to aerodrome.

  ‘Talk about a motley lot!’ she moaned to Jessica. ‘You should see them. There are only about three other girls like myself. The others all look like chuck-outs!’

  Jessica laughed as Daisy went on to describe the odd bodies, ‘including myself, of course’, who had logged up enough hours to be trusted to fly planes from the factories to their take-off points. Middle-aged men, too old to be taken up by the RAF, bottle-nosed, hearty, and all too often hellish. Bitter young men whose eyesight was just not good enough for flying fighter aircraft in combat. Ladies like Twistleton’s Miss Manningham, who would go anywhere, do anything daring, to prove that they were really the boys for which their benighted mothers had so longed. All these and more began their training with Daisy, and all of them would, one way or another, become her friends. Because, being thrown together as they were, rejects from the other services, or just madcaps like Daisy, they had begun to realise that they were complete misfits. Worse than that, they knew they were considered to be what Aunt Maude called ‘people of no consequence’ – in other words, expendable.

  ‘And what is harder,’ Daisy joked, ‘is that the girls are not even allowed to wear trousers. You try wearing a safety harness, with a strap fastening up the middle of your skirt! You can’t imagine how uncomfortable that is. And – and what happens if you bail out? But our head of everything, the brilliant Gerard d’Erlanger, will not hear of anything else. We wear skirts, and that’s it, no argument, and since he’s been in our corner, and has been for years . . .’

  Jessica stared at Daisy.

  ‘But that’s terrible,’ she said, placing a bowl of home-made vegetable soup in front of Daisy, while the dogs yapped around her feet, and Branscombe quaffed a pint of cider he had found as treasure trove in the cellar.

  ‘No, it’s not terrible, it’s beastly!’ Daisy attacked the soup and the side helping of home-made bread at the same time. ‘Can you imagine what will happen if I decide to bail out and have to land with my suspenders and stockings on show, and my skirt around my ears? I will opt to fly to Berlin rather than that, I promise you!’

  They both laughed, but Jessica turned away even as she did. Knowing what she knew, she could hardly bear to hear Daisy joking, see that bright look in her eyes, remember other laughter, other bright looks, shining from what suddenly seemed to be the very same eyes. So much to forget, so much that now must be forgotten.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Seven

  Guy Athlone put his cigarette in the end of his holder and lit it, before walking over to the window and staring out. He had just handed Clive a cutting from the New York Times – May 1940. If he had allowed himself to be affected by it, Guy knew he would have given way, but as it was he simply refused to let the side down.

  So long as the English tongue survives, the word Dunkirk will be spoken with reverence. In that harbour – such a hell as never blazed on earth before – at the end of a lost battle, the rags and blemishes that had hidden the soul of democracy fell away. There, beaten but unconquered, she faced the enemy . . .

  Clive finished reading it, and then slipped it into a folder on his desk.

  ‘I daresay you could do with a snifter?’ he asked after a few seconds, because they had both stopped counting just how many of their friends were still in France.

  The happily vast hall of the Hall, now devoid of its inlaid marble table, was crowded with people on crutches, with nurses and stretchers, not to mention men from the village who had been roped in to act as orderlies. Trains that were bringing the wounded back from Dunkirk stopped at Twistleton Meads Station, and Jessica, who was in charge of so much in their area, had telephoned to Maude to te
ll her what to expect. At first just the lighter cases came off the trains bearing the wounded – those that did not need operations, those that were not badly burned, or had already had amputations – but the fact was that some of the worst-affected had to come to the Hall, because no one could face leaving them to continue on without relieving their pain in some way.

  Jessica and Maude hadn’t spoken since the Great War, since the telegram had arrived telling his family that Esmond had been killed at the Battle of the Somme, and now that they were speaking again neither of them felt any warmer towards each other. In fact they both realised, with a kind of dull surprise, that neither of them felt anything at all after all these years, except a strange acceptance. There was nothing left to feel, they just had to get on with the job in hand, do their duty, and use their organisational and nursing skills to keep up morale and to mend the boys back from France. But what they both did know, what was unspoken, was that whatever happened, whatever the outcome, even if the German Army were outside the doors of the Hall, their boots ringing out on the stone steps, both Maude and Jessica would stand shoulder to shoulder, they would be there armed with croquet mallets, broom-handles, medieval pikes taken from the walls of the Hall, anything rather than surrender.

  ‘Whoever thought it was a good idea to go to France in the first place – army half-wits, I suppose?’ Guy demanded before climbing out of his car, followed by Clive, both of them hurrying into Twistleton Meads Station and up to the train carriages from which many of the wounded were being handed.

  ‘Careful, Guy, you know it’s against the law to lower morale by seditious talk.’

  ‘While the people at the top make decisions that would make you weep,’ Guy carried on, regardless as always. ‘Oh well, we will win the war despite the politicians and the mad generals. Despite everyone and everything, we, the people, will win this war.’

  The first casualty to be brought off the train that morning had been in a quite appalling state, but for some reason that Clive could never understand, Guy was able to cope with the poor fellow as well as any trained nurse. More than that, his hail-fellow-well-met manner meant that he could joke with the men, offering them cigarettes, taking their minds off the ghastly pain that so many of them were experiencing.

  But all that was as nothing compared to the way he coped with Maude Beresford.

  ‘My dear Miss Beresford, what a privilege!’ he called out as he helped yet another stretcher-case into the Hall. ‘You’re looking even younger than when I last saw you!’

  Maude, starched and white in her Great War nursing uniform, tried to pretend that she had not heard Guy. She had never seen any of Guy Athlone’s amusing comedies, but she had met him once or twice when they were younger, on the few occasions when he had been brought to the Hall to play and sing before an invited audience in aid of the village memorial, and other such causes.

  She had formed the impression then that, theatrical though he might be, Guy Athlone was very much on the gold standard, and so he proved over the next days. In between such work as took him to London, he was always in and out of the Hall, not just anxious to help, but better than that, easy to have around.

  The Hall was a strange place to be, with men of all ranks placed in beds that had been moved out of everything from maids’ bedrooms to nurseries, so that at any one moment a tousled bandaged head could be seen propped up against a carefully painted picture of a pink fairy, or a mahogany four-poster could be found housing two Frenchmen busily smoking and playing cards.

  ‘We’ve brought as many Frogs back from Dunkirk as ourselves, I sometimes think,’ Corporal Bastable commented to Maude, when he was up and about, albeit supported on his good arm by a crutch.

  Maude, who to her relief had found that her nursing skills from the Great War had not deserted her, smiled. She had been personally responsible for setting young Bastable’s leg, not in plaster, which when she nursed at the Front had not been the practice, but in splints and bandages. This meant that the bones could be checked at reasonable intervals, and there was no possible risk of malformation, as had happened so often since the practice of using hard plaster had come in, with the result that people were often left with limps and bad backs, with arms that were useless – all sorts of unnecessary handicaps arising simply from careless setting that could not be checked before the bones knitted.

  Maude had hoped that the sister in charge of the intake along the line from Twistleton Meads Station would be an old friend of hers, but to her disappointment she was replaced at the last minute by a new woman. A tremendous organiser, the new sister had brought with her from various local points a clutch of nurses, all of whom had immediately been reorganised into groups. There were experienced, trained nurses who attended the operations, nurses who were good at organisation, and those that waited on the patients, doing what the sister called ‘personal nursing’.

  ‘No point in operating successfully on someone if you then leave him to die of thirst,’ was her motto.

  Much to her relief, Freddie was co-opted into the last category, personal nursing, and so found herself doing anything and everything for men of all ranks, including writing letters home.

  ‘Dear Clare.’

  There was a long pause while Corporal Bastable, who had not only had his leg badly injured, but his right hand blown off, thought through what he could say to Clare.

  ‘Dear Clare,’ he began again. ‘I hope you are well.’

  Freddie dutifully wrote this.

  ‘I hope you are well . . .’

  There was another long pause as he stared past Freddie.

  ‘Can I see that?’

  Freddie held up the writing pad so that he could read what he had dictated, which Bastable did, nodding with solemn approval, and then he looked at Freddie, and looked away, and then back at her again.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell her about my hand,’ he confessed. ‘That’s what I’m trying to work out, how to tell her. I think she’ll want to chuck me if she knows. On the other hand, I can’t wait till I get home, can I? I mean to say, give her a worse shock, I should have thought.’

  Freddie could see his point, and it was a sticky one.

  ‘How about if you put it just like that?’ she asked. ‘Say what you have just said to me, but perhaps like this. “The thing is, I don’t want you to chuck me, but I understand if you do. I have sustained serious injury to my right arm and leg, as a result of which I now only have a left hand.”’

  ‘I think you’re right, Nurse. I think that would be all right, to put it like that.’

  Freddie dutifully wrote as she had suggested, and showed it to Corporal Bastable.

  ‘That’s good,’ he said approvingly. ‘And then I could make a joke of it after that. Say “As you know I never did like my right hand much, the left always being my favourite.”’

  Freddie wrote that, too.

  ‘How is Murphy? I hope he is not missing me too much?’

  Freddie paused, guessing at once who Murphy was.

  ‘He’s my mongrel sheepdog,’ Corporal Bastable told her proudly. ‘Very good dog, happily for me, considering everything that’s happened. He responds to the whistle, don’t need a lead!’

  Freddie smiled, suddenly, for no reason she could think of, wondering about Blossom and how she was getting on. And then wondering about the Hall and how long it would be used for mending young soldiers like Corporal Bastable. Somehow the Court, despite all its colourful characters, seemed to be fading from her, and she couldn’t have said why. It was as if they were all in a painting that was about to be bought by someone else – which was ridiculous because everyone knew that the Valentynes had been at the Court since for ever, and no one could move them on, but no one.

  At The Cottages, now that summer was on its way, Jean might have been forgiven for feeling smug, since her new potatoes and cabbages, and other vegetables, were all doing so well. But what might have been a cause for celebration was cancelled out by the misery of the Mugglet
on children put into her care, their homesickness, and their inability to adjust to country life. On top of that the Hall, serving as a temporary hospital for the wounded British Army returning from Dunkirk, was a vivid reminder that the lull that had fallen after the outbreak of war was now formally over, and the gloves were well and truly off.

  ‘I don’t know what to say or do to cheer my lot up,’ Jean confided to Freddie, when she dropped in for a late-night cup of tea.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, the Lindsay brothers are the same, they hate everything, but everything. The food, the village, all of it. They constantly complain that there is nothing to do, and we have to pretend that our carrots have come out of a tin. They thought eggs came out of a shop, and when I showed them that hens laid them, and where they came from, they were so disgusted they refused to touch one ever again. Not that you can blame them, when you come to think of it!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘I haven’t heard from Joe at all, not since he went back,’ Jean suddenly confided.

  Freddie, who had found out about Joe from the usual village gossip, looked sympathetic, although she couldn’t imagine taking the time to fall in love just as a war broke out, or anything else, really – she just couldn’t. She wanted to mend people, not marry them.

  ‘I expect he’s training so hard he doesn’t have time to pick up a pen.’

  ‘Oh, I know, and I have nothing at all to do, and yet I find time to write, in between throwing myself into the fields at five in the morning, and looking after that lot upstairs.’ She jerked her head up towards the ceiling, indicating her clutch of evacuees. ‘Mind you, I have had a bit of a vee for victory with Miss Maude Beresford. I did not ask, but she has offered to put up some land girls to help with the farm work. Really very decent of her considering how much she has disapproved of my growing potatoes and cabbages in her fields.’

  ‘What kind of land girls are they going to be?’