The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  Jean shrugged her shoulders. Who knew?

  Freddie left Jean at The Cottages, walking back to the Court, her torchlight catching the newly planted vegetables of all kinds that had taken the place of flowers in all the Twistleton cottage gardens. Making compost to feed these vegetables was the new hobby of everyone in the village – they used everything from manure and old bits of horsehair mattress to sodden newspapers.

  The Dig for Victory campaign had started the previous September, and had caught fire. There was not a park, an allotment, a council flower bed or a station yard that did not now sprout everything from leeks to shallots, from potatoes to cabbages.

  Even by torchlight it was all too evident that it had changed the look of the village, but on the other hand, no one could say that the sight of the vegetables did not give cause for optimism. The rows of fronded tops and rounded shapes, interspersed with marigolds to protect them from disease, were defiantly pretty – perhaps as pretty as any flower border, once everyone grew used to not expecting flowers.

  The following morning Freddie dressed as usual and, after breakfasting the Lindsay brothers, drove up to the Hall, the back of her car filled with all the usual necessities, only to find Maude standing on the steps outside.

  Maude, as always nowadays, in her Great War nurse’s uniform, was as neat as a pin, but today she was wearing not just her starched apron and headdress, but an expression on her face as shut as the car door that Freddie was now closing.

  ‘Everyone is to be moved on,’ she told Freddie in a flat voice. ‘No one is to stay. Orders have come this morning, via Sister on the telephone. She does not agree with them, but apparently every case is to be assessed and then appropriate measures taken to place each patient in a specialist unit. Some of them will even have to go to London for repair work. London!’

  Maude raised her eyebrows at Freddie, her look giving Freddie to understand that she thought this the maddest idea of all, since everyone knew that once the bombing and the gassing started, London would be sure to be the worst hit.

  ‘Do they not think we are coping?’

  ‘Nothing to do with how we are doing, Freddie dear, all to do with the top brass wanting everything in neat little packages, and please tell me when do they not? Everything done on a map, everyone a number, no thought to what it does to the patients’ morale to be moved on just as they are feeling better. No thought to the harm it could do our patients physically, to be bumped about in the back of a converted lorry, or some decrepit ambulance. Oh yes, and it seems that a great deal of our work is too old-fashioned, and we are using too many VADs by dividing up work into sections as we have – that, too, is old-fashioned, it seems. Well, I mean to say, Freddie dear, it seems to me to be the Great War all over again! Nincompoops everywhere!’

  Freddie stared at Maude. She had never ever called Freddie ‘dear’ before, but not only that, she had never talked to her at any length, least of all voiced an opinion.

  ‘It has always been my experience that people in authority are put there because nothing else can be found for them to do. When we nursed at the Front, we who were good at the nursing did the work without complaint, but there was always someone who was hopelessly incompetent who had to be found a job. So they put them in a position of authority. Someone would be brought in who would make life more unpleasant, both for the patients, and for the nurses. Of course class came into it, too. The worst jobs for the aristocracy was the rule of the day, probably still is. Corpses to be laid out, bed-pan duties – gracious, and who is this coming up the drive?’

  They both turned and stared as a dilapidated car slowly made its way to the front steps of the Hall.

  The young girl who climbed out was carefully, if poorly, dressed. The glove on the hand she extended to Maude and Freddie was much mended, but meticulously clean. She wore a felt hat, and she had a light tweed coat, which was a little too short for her dress, so that it showed an inch or two beneath. Her shoes were sturdy, and her stockings carefully darned.

  ‘I have come for Corporal Bastable,’ she stated, looking from Maude to Freddie, and back again.

  ‘Corporal Bastable? Yes, of course. You must be Clare?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  Freddie couldn’t say because she had written to her on his behalf, so she only smiled.

  ‘Corporal Bastable is not ready to come home yet, Miss.’

  ‘Oh, I think he is. See, he wrote to me that he wants to come home, and that he misses me so much.’

  Freddie’s mouth went a little dry. Oh, dear heavens! The truth was that she had written a few more things at the bottom of Corporal Bastable’s letter, more than the good man had perhaps meant her to put. She had said that he was missing Clare, and because he had touched on their woodland walks together, Freddie had put that he missed those walks with her so much. Oh, and she had put a little something about moonlight, and about love, and about how often he thought of her when he saw the stars, and how happy they could be together once the war was over, or perhaps even before? Crikey!

  ‘I’ll take you to see him,’ Freddie said, ignoring the warning look that Maude had given her. ‘They’ll all be breakfasted now, and up and about, shaved, too. I shaved him yesterday, but someone else will have done early duty today.’

  The reunion between the good corporal and his girlfriend was muted. To say that the young man looked amazed was, Freddie thought afterwards, like saying that Hitler was rather horrid. The poor one-handed young man’s face almost fell apart, emotions tearing through him – joy that Clare was there mixed with fear that she would hate seeing his lack of a hand and all the rest of his injuries, and then incredulity that she had made the journey from so far away, and that she had driven herself.

  ‘You’re coming home, Benjamin Bastable,’ she told him. ‘Coming back to Murphy and me.’

  Only trouble was Maude was far from pleased by the notion.

  ‘Can’t just let him go AWOL, Freddie dear,’ Maude told her. ‘It won’t do.’

  ‘Surely we can manage something?’

  Freddie looked at her pleadingly.

  ‘I daresay you have a plan?’ Maude was now looking, for Maude, almost amused.

  ‘I have to admit to feeling a plan coming on,’ Freddie admitted. ‘Well, Miss Beresford, since they are all going to be turfed out, surely, one way or another, Corporal Bastable can just be found to have been turfed out a little earlier than the others? See, here we have the lists of patients. My point being that we have them, and we can hold them, distract Sister, and then, whoosh, suddenly Corporal Bastable will be gone with all the others, a big tick by his name, but somehow he gets lost the other end, but with a war on, albeit so far only the Phoney War, one wonders who will bother about him.’

  Maude surveyed Freddie’s guileless if freckled face with equanimity, while Freddie looked up at her, wide-eyed.

  Maude sighed, lightly.

  ‘With you on our side, Freddie dear, victory will surely be ours within months. I certainly can’t see the little corporal from Germany defeating you.’

  So Corporal Bastable and Clare drove off together, and that night Freddie finally left the Hall to bicycle home without lights, hoping that she would arrive back to some sort of supper left out for her by Branscombe or Jessica, which happily she did.

  ‘Still up, Aunt Jessica?’

  Freddie looked from the delicious tray of food laid out by, she guessed, Branscombe, to Jessica who was sitting knitting at the kitchen table.

  ‘Yes, Freddie dearest.’ Jessica nodded briskly at the tray. ‘Tuck in, duckie, you must be starved, on your feet all day as you are. Eat and then sleep, sleep and then eat, it’s the only way to keep going.’

  Freddie took off her cap, and undid the pin that had secured her hair, quickly re-braiding her hair and throwing the plait back over her shoulder in her characteristic way.

  ‘Everyone is to be sent on. The Hall is finished as a nursing home. Don’t know why, and nor does Miss Beresford. I sha
ll have to go back to Bramsfield and take orders from there.’

  Jessica paused, momentarily, in her work, the sock she was knitting swaying a little between the three needles.

  ‘I heard from Aurelia that Longbridge has been cleared of everything, that it is to be requisitioned by the army. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before the Hall is, too?’

  She shook her head and resumed her work, the sock seeming to quickly lengthen to a man’s size foot even as Freddie ate.

  ‘Longbridge Farm with the army installed is not a pretty thought,’ she murmured.

  ‘No,’ Jessica agreed. ‘Life is about to change immeasurably, yet again, thanks to Dunkirk.’ She stopped knitting and thrust all three needles through the ball of wool in a short savage gesture. ‘Hitler thinks we’ve had it, Freddie, and perhaps we may have, but we just must not go down without a fight. Doesn’t matter what happens, we must fight to the last. What we need above all . . .’ She stood up. ‘What we need is aeroplanes. I heard from Blossom yesterday, they’re short-handed. So. I’m going to join her lot. Aeroplanes, aeroplanes, aeroplanes, that is what we need, Freddie, and I want to be part of building those fighters. And do you know what? I shall kiss each piece I contribute, and murmur to it: “Go to it, and kill”. What a thing for a God-fearing person to say they hope to be doing, but I shall, believe me – I shall be leaving at crack of dawn tomorrow. If we don’t cross paths, God bless you, darling.’

  She leaned forward and kissed Freddie briefly.

  Freddie watched Jessica leave the kitchen, and stared down at her empty plate. With Aunt Jessica gone, and all her friends, that just left Branscombe and the dogs.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ she murmured, and then felt ashamed that she felt desolate, that the house was too large, and she for some reason too small for it.

  She stood up. Time to get going again. She had to drive through the dark to the hospital. They were desperately short-handed, everyone needed, patients coming in from all directions, the flow from Dunkirk still being constant, not to mention the pregnant mothers that had been evacuated from Wychford to make room for the wounded.

  For the first time in her life Daisy was beginning to find out what it was to be really tired, and it was a salutary experience. She had known that ferrying aeroplanes from factory to airstrip, again and again, and yet again, would be quite a task, but had sadly underestimated the battle fatigue. No time to ask questions, just get in and get on with it. They had to get the planes to the men – young men, most of whom had barely finished their training, some of whom had not even finished it – waiting, playing cricket, smoking, wondering whether their number would be up, or whether they would return. France had seen the loss of three hundred fighter pilots. To make up the numbers the Fleet Air Arm had to be called in, the Royal Canadian Air Force, too, and squadrons now desperate for men were manned by escaped Czechoslovakian and Polish pilots.

  The rumour was that over a hundred squadrons were needed, and yet even with all the additions, they still only had sixty.

  ‘There are no ground forces at all, unless you count the Home Guard, who are armed with everything from old muskets to broomsticks and frying pans, and no anti-aircraft guns to speak of, so how we will defend ourselves on the ground I don’t know . . .’

  Guy shook his head. He lunched and dined at the top tables, heard everything, and could do nothing; peeling away every few hours from some new stiff-upper-lip gathering, only to have to attend another, experiences which were far from uplifting.

  He and Clive were now based in London. It was rumoured that the theatres would soon reopen, although when, exactly, no one quite knew. However, Guy had other plans besides presenting his clever little comedies.

  ‘I hope to be fielding a troupe of players, taking them out to the provinces, going to sing to the workers in the factories, because that, after all, is what I am famous for, is it not, dear Miss Jones?’

  Now that Aurelia was in London all the time, her role of looking after Guy had both increased and decreased. He did not need her in connection with his particular work, but he did, it seemed, need her for other duties.

  ‘It will be your task, Miss Jones, to go around and about, to be seen everywhere, the Savoy, the Dorchester, all the while, of course, keeping your pretty little ears open in order to bring me back relevant information.’ He paused, pulling on his cigarette holder. ‘We want to know everything that is being said, and even everything that is not being said. There are still British-born Nazi spies and agents all over town, and we want to know about them. Not everyone has a file on them, you know, not everyone in society is open about their political affiliations. We need to know more about these society Fascists, a great deal more, and you after all have the entrée to society. You know these people because you have grown up with them, Miss Jones.’

  Aurelia flinched at that. Her last visit to her mother had revealed that Hotty had a quite serious chest infection, and her father had already lost over a stone in weight, which succeeded in making him look both younger and more lined. However, thanks to Clive Montfort’s behind-the-scenes influence they had both been moved to less harsh surroundings, sharing their quarters so that they could look after each other, which was a great relief to Aurelia, although a source of open disgust to Guy.

  ‘Why the special treatment?’ he asked Clive, disapproval written all over his face as he lit a cigarette.

  ‘Not special, old boy, just different.’

  ‘Appeasers! Fellow-travellers! Fascists! Why?’

  Clive looked across at Guy. He did not share either his confidence, or his black-and-white vision of the world, which was probably why Guy was a successful playwright, and he no more than his secretary.

  ‘Thoroughbreds and carthorses, old boy. Different treatment. Some live out, some live in, some have thinner skin, some have thicker. Can’t treat even the naughty ones all the same. Mercy in war is as much a victory over the enemy as defeat, as some great man once observed.’

  But Guy had walked away. Nothing that should have been done to prevent the war had been done, and everything that was happening now was just a confounded waste of beautiful lives. If he had had a heart he was sure that by now it would have broken, and yet the proper war had hardly begun. Everyone was going around calling now the Phoney War.

  The Bros at Operation Z had told him that someone truly bright had suggested bombing the Krupps arms factory, which would after all have put paid to a lot of, if not all, their present difficulties; but needless to say the idea had been firmly vetoed in cabinet, because, it seemed, it would offend the French! Well, with the Nazis crawling all over France at that very moment, the French were well and truly offended now, and if that was not the truth, nothing was.

  Jessica knew that both Branscombe and Freddie would look after the dogs and the house. She also knew she was expendable at the Court now that the Lindsay brothers were being put to work in the fields and garden, not to mention the house, for even little Johnny had stopped crying, and had learned to trot after Branscombe chattering his head off, while Branscombe contented himself with the idea that had he ever been able to attract a wife, which with his wounds from the Great War would never have been possible, little Johnny could have been his grandson.

  The girls who had been occupying the cottage in the stables were now dispersed, while Alec, the eldest of the Lindsay brothers, had gone to work for Jean alongside her army of land girls. She sometimes heard him getting up in the morning at the same time as she had just done, tiptoeing downstairs as the light came up, that perfect light that was pale pink and grey, and blue, and somehow purer than at any other time of day.

  She had to walk to Twistleton Meads Station, leaving the car behind for Branscombe’s use. Even at a brisk pace the walk between the Court and the station took some time, and when she did arrive she knew she would be forced to sit in the ladies’ waiting room with her knitting, waiting for hours to get on a train that might take as much as a day to travel to the factory where Blos
som was working.

  As she sat knitting, the silence around her seemed ominous, as if even the countryside was waiting, even the awakening birds, the wild rabbits, the squirrels, the foxes, the badgers, the sheep and the cows. As if they were all waiting for the sound of that siren that would signal, not the arrival of the train, but the arrival of the enemy. She wished that she could knit faster, and faster, just to stop thinking, because thinking brought back memories of that other war, of that time of such despair, that time which was upon them again, except the war was to be here, above them. Not in France, not in some foreign field, but here in their own fields.

  Her fingers ached, her arms ached, and yet the blasted sock did not seem to be getting any bigger. She pushed her needles out in front of her, examining the neat work in which she was pretending to be engrossed, remembering now that she had been told that all those socks they had knitted for the troops in the last war had been used to clean guns! What a futile occupation, to be knitting something which would probably end up cleaning a gun! But it was something to do, better than nothing. Nowadays she couldn’t read, couldn’t write, had no one to whom she wanted to write, just had to do something repetitive.

  At last the train arrived, at last the peace was thankfully shattered by that reassuring sound of brakes applied, steam and noise welding into one effect, people staggering with their luggage, doors opening and closing – thank God for noise, for people.

  Except, perhaps not!

  As she walked into the factory where Blossom had been working for some time now, it was Jessica’s turn to be shattered. She had never imagined in all her wildest nightmares that such noise could exist, never imagined that a place could be in such ferment, the air filled with such a fog of cigarette smoke that it would be difficult to see anything beyond your own work. She had hardly been there a minute before the effect on her eyes and her breathing was noticeable. In a matter of seconds, when she saw the hideous conditions under which everyone was expected to work, Jessica found herself envying anyone who was not in the factory that day; and then she remembered exactly why she was there, and felt ashamed.