The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  Neither did anyone care to try to get hold of Jessica and Blossom, since they seemed to change their lodgings every few days – bomb dodging. All anyone knew was that they were still slaving away at the aircraft factory.

  Despite the mind-bending, back-breaking, agonising days spent painting aircraft, or slotting metal, the pause in the German assault that had come from the skies had given renewed energy to the girls and women in the factories. It was as if someone from above was patting them on their heads and saying, ‘Without all that you are doing, and have done, we would be Hitler’s lackeys.’

  In fact Jessica had taken up lodging in an old inn some miles from the factory. It was said to be haunted, but no spirit had, as she now often joked, ‘a ghost of a chance of waking me up after my shift’.

  If she was on dawn shift, which she often was, she was able to throw herself into the pub bar, and enjoy a drink, always providing there were any to order.

  Too often there would be a sign saying, ‘NO BEER. WAITING DELIVERY’, or another saying, ‘SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. UNEXPLODED BOMB IN THE ROAD’.

  The quiet while a bomb was being dealt with outside in the road was, indeed, the silence of the grave. Happily, the second time it happened, there was beer to be had, and she and the other regulars were able to toast Phil and his friends from bomb disposal, who had brought about a happy outcome.

  Phil was older than the rest of his team, but nevertheless he had that same bright-eyed look that a friend had told Jessica the young officers of the Great War had possessed, before they went over the top. This particular night, after a successful lift of an unexploded bomb in the neighbouring town, the little bar was filled with young men, eager to drink away the reality of what might have happened.

  ‘Your hands had a bad time of it, in that place?’

  Phil nodded at Jessica’s hands, which were now so marked that she had to wear gloves.

  ‘I am afraid so. Still able to hold a glass though—’

  Phil watched Jessica put the glass down, and handed her a cigarette.

  ‘And a cigarette?’

  Jessica nodded.

  ‘That, too,’ she agreed, laughing suddenly.

  They started to talk, and as they did so, Jessica realised that although Phil might be ten or perhaps even as much as twelve years younger than she was, and not from the same background, nevertheless they might as well have been born in the same year. They talked, as everyone did nowadays, about everything except the war. They talked about the films they had seen and the books they had read, about travelling abroad – carefully leaving out the words ‘before the war’ – and by the end of two rounds of drinks, and even more cigarettes, Jessica was quite sure that whatever else happened, she had to make love to him.

  As with Esmond, there would probably only be time for it to happen once – and as with Esmond, it would be something that would remain with her always. As also with Esmond, she did not care what people thought, or that the publican winked at her as she passed him to go upstairs, Phil following her, after a statutory few minutes.

  What did it matter? There was a war on, and she knew what war did: it took people for ever. So when they were with you, you made sure that you made them happy, and when they were not with you, you knew that you had at least brought them some last-minute love.

  Afterwards – when break of day had dawned and nudged them both into leaving each other’s arms, and going back to the war – instead of Jessica’s thoughts reaching out to Twistleton Court and darling old Branscombe, to Freddie and the dogs, instead of drawing comfort, as she usually did, from her memory of the old place with its soft stone, its benevolent aspect, and its delicate air of having always been there, she found that she was only remembering the last few hours of the night. The factory work might be cruel in every way, but as her badly gashed and bruised hands reached out to push open the dark door that led to the factory floor, as she faced the start of yet another smoke-filled twelve hours, of yet another truly back-breaking day, another day of community singing to the sound of Workers’ Playtime, she found she was remembering only the passion and tenderness of the night.

  Chapter Nine

  While the sun showed still weakly on the horizon, the first rumble of army tanks was heard in the village below the Hall, the ominous noise rising above the sound of the distant sea and the gathering wind and rain, above the sound of people pushing anything from hand carts to wheelbarrows up to the Hall, their only place of refuge against the coming invaders.

  Maude had been up for some few hours, busily making up beds with poor grieving Susan Huggett. Bedroom after bedroom, and in an awkward silence punctuated only by small instructions from Maude, they carefully observed the usual routine, moving from room to room, making hospital corners at the side of each top sheet, and equally carefully straightening all the blackout blinds at the windows, not to mention dusting all the mahogany furniture.

  ‘That is the last bed we need to make up in the house, I think, Mrs Huggett. Branscombe has been busy in the basement, so that area will not need us. He has found any amount of furniture from the outhouses in the stables, and is dragging them in for the Lindsay boys, while Dan Short and Mr and Mrs Budgeon and the rest are taking up the stable flats.’

  Susan Huggett nodded dully, and then made a sighing sound.

  ‘Why those Lindsay brothers have not been sent packing back to the East End, I simply do not know. You could use that basement flat for other, better purposes, Miss Beresford, better purposes than for the benefit of those slummy boys.’ Susan turned away, her face a picture of misery above her black blouse, and her black suit . . . ‘There is all too little thought being given to us, the village proper. All too little, really there is. Our homes have been taken from us by this wretched army. And what a thing for us to know that we have been occupied not by the Nazis, but by our own army!’

  ‘You are having a very bad time of it, Mrs Huggett,’ Maude said quietly. ‘But we will all help you as much as we can. In my experience—’ She paused before repeating, ‘As much as we can help, we will.’ Just for a second she felt more than unusually helpless.

  How could she help a woman who had just lost her son?

  But Susan turned away. What experience could a woman like Maude Beresford have had of loss? She had never had a child! She could not know what it was to truly grieve.

  ‘In my experience . . .’ Maude carried on with dignity. ‘In my experience,’ she said again, still to Susan’s back, ‘work and more work is the only answer to grief, as Doctor Johnson once said.’

  ‘Doctor Johnson.’

  Susan repeated the name in such a contemptuous manner, as if the famous literary figure was a family doctor with a bad reputation, that this time it was Maude who turned away. She left Susan listening to the news ‘read by Alvar Lidell’ – thinking, as she did so, how very strange it was to hear announcers giving out their names.

  She went in search of Branscombe and found him arguing with Dan Short . . .

  ‘They will be perfectly happy in the stables, Mr Dan—’

  ‘They will be no such thing.’

  Maude took Branscombe aside.

  ‘Look here, Branscombe, if Dan wants the Tumps with him in the house or whatever, let’s see to it. Anything for peace when in the midst of war . . .’

  ‘No, no, nothing to do with the Tumps, they’ve gone to their nan in Isleworth only this morning, no, this is his hens. He wants the hens in with him, in the flat, don’t trust them not to be rustled by the troops.’

  ‘Well, he does have a point, Branscombe. The troops will take one look at his hens and think only of bread sauce and sausagemeat.’

  ‘It’s not hygienic, Miss Maude,’ Branscombe said, lowering his voice. ‘You know how much hens do, and then it’s not as if they don’t walk it about, and that’s before Dan starts doing the same.’

  Despite the steady downpour the atmosphere in the large, square stable yard, with its old stone sets and its arched entrance, wa
s thick with resentment. Maude could see at once that the housing of the hens had become a matter of The Cottages versus the Hall, and that would never do.

  Dan continued putting up a steady defence of his hens.

  ‘I’m not putting my girls in there, Mr Branscombe,’ he stated, nodding at the stables. ‘Not no how, Mr Branscombe, not no how, not never . . . They’ll be targets for every wassailing soldier, not to mention every fox in the county, what with no huntin’ and no nothin’. I might as well wring their necks and eat ’em myself. Foxes can jump stable doors, as Miss Beresford here’s old hunter used to do, I’m a mind to remembering, as I am sure she does.’

  Branscombe shrugged his shoulders, his one good eye shooting a desperate look at the mistress of the Hall as he did so.

  ‘Mr Short can’t seem to understand that living with hens is not going to be what is wanted here, Miss Maude. What about the others? That is what I think we should be thinking of, the others what are going to be living here too, in the other flats and cottages. They’ll be kept awake by the cock crowing at dawn, any old how, I am thinking.’

  Maude knew Dan of old. He had always been immovable, entrenched in the old ways.

  ‘I don’t see why Dan can’t have chickens in with him if he so wishes. The hall of the flat is quite large enough, isn’t it, Branscombe? After all, if he puts a coop in there, he can at least go to bed at night knowing they can come to no harm, and then he can let them out into the yard during the day. No harm done, I shouldn’t have thought.’

  Branscombe shrugged his shoulders, yet again, and sighed, and then found he really did not care if Dan put the hens in his bed with him, he just hoped that he wouldn’t have to clear up the feathers and the rest of the mess when, at the end of the war, Dan went back to The Cottages.

  ‘With Christmas all too soon, by 1941 there’ll be half the countryside coming after my girls, mark my words,’ Dan went on, glowering at both Branscombe and Maude as if he suspected they might be about to put a chicken in the Hall oven.

  ‘We may well not even be here at Christmas, Dan,’ Maude murmured, turning away. ‘Let us go to church and pray that we will be, but we cannot and should not take that particular idea for granted, as I am sure you will agree?’

  Still as busy as ever on ops, Daisy had found that as far as the second Christmas of the war was concerned she had drawn a pink ticket, and was able to snatch a bit of precious leave before returning to her duties.

  As she drove into London to try to do some shopping, and to meet up with Freddie, Aurelia and Laura at the basement flat Gervaise had lent her, it occurred to her that wartime London did not look very different from the countryside now – what with sheep grazing in Green Park and vegetables flourishing not only in the parks, but in every front garden. So when she galloped down the basement steps Daisy was unsurprised to find Laura proudly showing off a cabbage plucked from her own front garden. She was also busy in the tiny cupboard that passed as a kitchen, already wielding a saucepan and starting to make what seemed to Daisy to be a particularly sad-looking soup.

  ‘I am not touching that, Laura ducky,’ Daisy told her, putting her arm round her. ‘Not with a bargepole, let alone a spoon.’

  Laura looked at Daisy calmly.

  ‘It does look filthy. Even so, I think you will find that it will fill a corner tonight.’ She glanced down at her watch. ‘The other two are bound to be late, they’re queueing for presents. Freddie’s mad keen on getting the Lindsay boys things like Meccano that they very likely won’t even know what to do with – bless her.’

  A scrabbling at the door announced the latecomers, Freddie with arms full of Meccano that she had indeed been queueing for since dawn, and Aurelia with some soap and talcum powder for Hotty, now under house arrest and being deprived of all the little luxuries that she had always taken for granted.

  ‘So now everyone’s going to have luncheon on me,’ Daisy announced. ‘I have enough coupons saved to feed the entire population of Twistleton, let alone the members of that oh-so-exclusive club, ye Daisy Club, so fall in behind, it’s off to scoff we go!’

  ‘Don’t you mean everyone at Twistleton Hall, Daisy?’

  Daisy took the stub out of her cigarette holder and carefully put the tiny bit that remained of it in the ashtray.

  ‘I certainly do not mean everyone at the Hall, since I am persona absolutely non grata at the Hall. Why would I mean everyone at the Hall?’

  The other three looked at each other, and then at Daisy.

  ‘Didn’t you get my letter, Daisy?’ Freddie asked. ‘I wrote to everyone care of their lodgings, about Twistleton. I sent yours here.’

  Daisy finished powdering her small delicately made retroussé nose, before snapping the compact shut.

  ‘No, I did not hear from anyone until Laura rang my lodgings last night. Why? Is there something that I should know? Has Aunt Maude run off with Branscombe, or taken to driving tanks?’ She said this flippantly, looking from one face to the other – but not at Laura’s.

  It was almost impossible for Daisy to look at Laura. She did not know whether David had even told Laura of their meeting, let alone anything else; because of this she glanced with determined nonchalance from Aurelia to Freddie, and back again, only realising as she did so that the expressions on their two faces were fluctuating between gravity and embarrassment, before changing to uncharacteristic bitterness and fury.

  ‘You mean you don’t know what’s happened to Twistleton?’

  ‘Well, I know that most of the evacuees have returned back to their mums because like Johnny Town Mouse they found the country too quiet. Mmm. Now what else? Well, I know that Freddie here has been a Trojan helping in the hospital – not to mention acting as an ambulance service when that bomb dropped on the Wychford canning factory after the East End raid, and—’

  ‘Shut up, Daisy, you’re being de trop, truly you are,’ Laura snapped suddenly, which immediately gave Daisy the feeling that Laura did know about her and David Moreton.

  ‘Twistleton,’ Freddie said, her expression serious, ‘has been requisitioned by the army, and Miss Beresford and everyone else think that it will not be long – what with regular mortar practice and tanks on exercise, and having to practise urban fighting, oh, you know, all those things that it seems the army have to practise – before the whole place has been razed to the ground.’

  Daisy stared at the three faces that were now staring back at her.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t believe you, you must have got it wrong,’ she said slowly. ‘I flew over Twisters only a few days ago, on my way to “somewhere secret”, and it was very much still there, I know it was.’

  ‘It may have been, but not for long, it won’t be, if any of the other requisitioned villages are anything to go by. As a matter of fact, none of us know why Twistleton wasn’t cordoned off years before, but it seems it was too small and tucked away to matter, with too little access from the sea. The beach is so narrow. Somehow it got overlooked – until now, that is . . .’

  Daisy shut the front door again, took out a cigarette, placed it in her holder, and lit it.

  ‘Tell me all, fellow members of the Daisy Club, concealing absolutely nothing,’ she said, looking embarrassed as she realised how flippant she must sound. ‘Come on, let me have it,’ she said slowly through the holder firmly wedged between her teeth, a recent habit, because, somehow, when her teeth were clenched on the holder, she felt, for no good reason, a little more able to cope.

  ‘It happened overnight,’ Freddie said quietly, while they were all still standing in a strange little queue by the front door, as if they half-expected it to be opened and a parcel to be handed out to them by a beaming butcher or fishmonger.

  ‘Oh well, let’s go and have luncheon anyway, before we all proceed to Twistleton,’ Daisy commanded. ‘After all, when all is said and done, it is Christmas.’

  This time it was the turn of the other three to look embarrassed, waiting for the penny to drop that the Hall was
open to all of them, but not to Daisy.

  ‘I suppose you might be able to spend Christmas in the country with your godfather?’ Freddie offered, as they walked round to the restaurant.

  At last Freddie could see that the penny had indeed dropped and Daisy had realised that they were all going to be huggermugger at the Hall, but without her, because she had been banished.

  Daisy, teeth still clenched on her cigarette holder, walked a little faster.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she agreed. ‘Of course there is Gervaise, but I heard on the grapevine that there’s a new girl in town, his driver, and they are having a bit of a time of it, between whatever else is happening, or not happening – and I daresay she might not want a goddaughter hanging around the Christmas tree. But I can always ask him. He’s such a brick, I’m sure he’ll extend the godfatherly hand to me.’

  She smiled gaily at Freddie.

  ‘Come on, let’s scoff!’

  Freddie and Branscombe had been put in charge of the lower regions of the Hall, and so it was up to them to invite everyone downstairs for Christmas luncheon, which they did, all, that is, except for Maude, who they imagined would still eat her festive luncheon upstairs amidst the portraits of her ancestors, the old glass, the silver wine-coolers, and the mahogany furniture.

  ‘As you know, Miss Maude is one of the old school,’ Branscombe explained tactfully to Freddie, but Freddie was not impressed.

  ‘She is hardly older than Aunt Jessica, Branscombe, and you know it.’

  ‘Miss Jessica is expected back for Christmas?’

  ‘No, Branscombe, neither she nor Blossom think that they should come back. I wrote to her again about the army taking over Twistleton and the Court being used as headquarters for one thing and another; and this time she did get the letter, and she wrote back.’