The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I didn’t join up to get on, Judy. I joined up because it’s my duty to fight for my country. And for those I love. Which includes you.’

  ‘And my father said we’d have to wait?’

  ‘He seems to think it wouldn’t be fair me marrying you just when war’s about to break out. You might be a widow within minutes. You can see his point. So many war widows after the last dust-up. Well. You can see his point – although I must say I did not want to.’

  ‘I had really rather be married to you than not. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘Of course. Of course I know what you mean. Me too. But you’re still only nineteen, Judy. I mean, you can see his point.’

  ‘I shall be twenty in a few weeks.’

  ‘You still haven’t reached your majority. You’re not yet twenty-one. Still a minor, in the eyes of the law, Judy.’

  ‘I suppose I won’t mind waiting,’ Judy sighed, knowing that she would mind terribly. Because they were well out of sight of the house she leaned against Walter, allowing him to put his arms round her waist. ‘At least the old man didn’t forbid you. I mean at least he didn’t refuse his permission, as Mummy hinted that he might be going to.’

  ‘And what else was your mother busy hinting? No, don’t tell me – that the Tates aren’t out of a high enough drawer for the Meltons.’

  ‘That’s just her way. The Melton way, not that she was a Melton, but she has been one for so long now I don’t think anyone can tell the difference.’

  ‘What matters is what your father thinks, and he thinks we’re to wait until the war – when it comes – which it will – we’re to wait till the war is over.’

  Judy turned and stared up at Walter. ‘But suppose it went on as long as the last one? We could be a hundred and ninety by the time it’s over.’

  Walter shook his head and detached himself from her, taking her hand and leading her further away from the house.

  ‘If you were twenty-one, sweetie, it would be different, but the fact is you are not.’

  ‘We could – we could elope! Couldn’t we? We could run away and get married, Walter. We could! We could elope!’

  ‘We could – except I have to return to base tomorrow, Judy. And I don’t know when my next leave will be. So, much as I’d love to run away with you, I don’t see it as all that practical. Not really.’

  ‘So what are we going to do, Walter? If we’re going to have to wait—’

  Walter turned and took her back in his arms.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to have to do, Judy,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to make darned sure the war, when it comes, lasts no longer than Christmas.’

  That evening Walter ended up drinking with his brother John in the Three Tuns overlooking the harbour. The pub was not at all crowded, with just one knot of regulars grouped in one corner of the bar discussing the subject that was occupying everyone’s minds, and another foursome forgetting their troubles with a darts match on the other side of the bar. John and Walter sat themselves in the bow window that looked out directly on the jetty and then beyond to the estuary itself.

  ‘If I were you, old lad,’ John said, tapping a Senior Service on his silver cigarette case, ‘I’d do as she suggested, and run off with her right now.’

  ‘Well, you’re not me, and you don’t have to report back on board tomorrow a.m.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a spanner in the works.’

  ‘A spanner? It’s a bloody sight more than a spanner, John, it’s a bloomin’ great pickaxe, that is what it is.’

  ‘Judy’s so pretty.’

  Walter eyed his brother’s dreamy expression, while quickly stealing one of his smokes. ‘You keep off the grass, old man. Anyone straying on that grass will be prosecuted.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Walt. I’ll be in uniform myself before too long. In fact I’m thinking of volunteering – like you. Thought I might join the Guards.’

  ‘When last discussed you were talking about the Navy. So what’s changed your mind?’

  ‘Not putting all our eggs in one basket, that’s what. As a family. Spreading it about a bit. You in the Navy, me in the Army, and young Dauncy – when he leaves school – he wants to go flying. Seems only sensible.’

  ‘Sensible.’ Walter stared into his drink. ‘I don’t know where sense as far as war is concerned comes into it, really, do you? Going out and killing other people’s sons just because some twerp with his parting on the wrong side of his head is saying and doing things we don’t agree with. Might have been a bit more to the point if someone had organised an assassination, I should have thought. Not that difficult, really. A great deal less difficult than full-scale war, but then that is the fault of the appeasers. Appeasers! Ditherers more like.’

  ‘Come on, Walt, drink up. We’ve got a good bit of drinking to do – before we ship you and your opinions off back to sea.’ John stood up and waited for his brother to empty his glass. ‘And don’t you worry about that old bag Lady Melton. There’s not a lot she can do, you know. And even if you did have to wait for a year – so what?’

  ‘So what?’ Walter looked up at him, handing him his glass. ‘A year is three hundred and sixty-five days, John – in case you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘And in case you’ve forgotten, Walt – in the last one the old man got through four and a half of them – at sea as well. Same again? No, as I say, don’t worry about old Ma Melton. If you decide to wait, wait you will, and win you will. You will win through, and there’s really very little she can do.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there is.’

  ‘What are you doing, Mummy?’ Judy protested, watching as her mother started packing her suitcase with her belongings.

  ‘I’m taking you somewhere where you’ll be a lot safer,’ her mother replied, picking up another armful of Judy’s clothes. ‘You and I are going to Scotland to stay with my cousin, out of the way of the bombs.’

  ‘But why? Why do we have to go to Scotland all of a sudden? We’re perfectly safe here. Daddy says nothing’s going to happen for weeks – if not months. If it does at all.’

  ‘You don’t know what you are talking about, Judy. Now just do as you are told and finish packing up what you will need. Whether you like it or not, you and I are going to Scotland.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘For as long as it is necessary. And please don’t argue any further – this was your father’s idea, not mine.’

  ‘How long for? How long are we going for?’

  ‘For as long as it takes to defeat Hitler.’

  ‘But I don’t want to go to Scotland! I want to stay here!’

  ‘You are going to Scotland, and that is an end to the matter.’

  ‘I want to stay here and do something useful!’

  ‘Like seeing that wretched Tate boy.’

  ‘Like doing something to help if there’s a war. And I can hardly see Walter if there’s a war, can I? He’ll be away at sea.’

  ‘You are coming with me to Scotland, and that is all there is to it.’

  ‘Please? Please, Mummy—’

  ‘You would rather be made a ward of court?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘A ward of court? What for? Because I want to marry Walter? You’d make me a ward of court?’

  ‘You’d better hurry up, Judy. We are catching the early train in the morning to London, and then the sleeper to Edinburgh. So I expect you to be packed and ready to leave by half past seven. Goodnight.’

  ‘Mummy? Mummy—’

  But Lady Melton had gone.

  While Judy was preparing to escape from her bedroom, once she was certain her mother was asleep, in the study directly below, her father was standing with a glass of brandy in hand in front of her mother’s portrait. It was a charming oil painted of his wife when she was hardly older than Judy, seated on a stone bench under the old apple tree in what was now her favourite part of the garden. She had been such a beautiful young woman,
slender, graceful and above all so good-humoured. He had fallen in love with her the moment he had met her on the tennis court at the local club. In fact so smitten by the young Elizabeth Watkins had he been that his distraction caused him and his older sister to lose an important match that they had been expected to win with ease, much to his sister’s intense displeasure.

  Sir Arthur shook his head and took another draught of his cognac, remembering the absurd despair into which his love for this tall, brown-haired, athletic young woman had plunged his family, and how he had invited her round one Sunday to meet his parents in the hope that they too might be won over by the character and originality of the girl he had fallen for so passionately. The day turned out to be a disaster. His mother had politely ignored his future wife, while his father had asked her the most embarrassingly direction questions about her family background, and his sister had directly snubbed her. Somehow they had weathered the storm, although for the life of him he could hardly remember how, since they had finally to wait two years before being able to marry and then another five years before his parents actually spoke to either of them again.

  And now history was about to repeat itself, as it had a habit of doing. Elizabeth and he were trying to erect exactly the same obstacles his own parents had put in the way of Elizabeth, and with about as little reason. The more cognac he drank the more shame he felt, so that by the time he put the stopper back on the decanter he was determined to go and tell his wife that whatever opposition she might have to the prospective union of Melton and Tate, he himself could not go through with it. If they wanted to marry, marry they must.

  With his inner self well fortified with his finest vintage cognac Admiral Sir Arthur Melton dropped his cigar in the fire, brushed the ash from his velvet smoking jacket and made his way slowly upstairs, determined on discussing the matter in order to clear the air. The last thing he wanted for his daughter was to have her prospective happiness jeopardised for no good reason, particularly at that moment, when they were on the brink of war.

  He was just contemplating the idea of putting his head round Judy’s door to wish her goodnight and chin up and all that when he noticed that there was no sign of light from under it, so, not wanting to wake her, he thought better of it and headed instead for his wife’s bedroom. Much to his astonishment he found her door too to be locked and no sign of light shining from within her room either.

  ‘Elizabeth. It’s only me.’

  ‘I’m a little under the weather.’

  ‘But your door’s locked. I wanted to speak to you.’

  ‘Not tonight, Arthur. I’ll explain in the morning.’

  ‘Elizabeth—’

  ‘Tomorrow, Arthur. When you’re sober.’

  Duly chastened, Admiral Sir Arthur Melton put aside his good intentions, considering that all told his wife was right and those matters of importance that he wished to discuss could wait quite happily until morning, when not only he but all three of them would be in a better state of mind.

  Except by then it would prove more than a little too late.

  Walter had just fallen into an alcohol-induced sleep when the first pebble rattled against his window. Due to the amount of whisky he and his brother had drunk that evening it was going to take more than a few small stones to rouse him. Getting no immediate response from her first cluster of pebbles, Judy chose a larger stone, aimed it carefully at her target and achieved a perfect bull’s-eye. A moment later she saw a light go on.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Walter called from his now open window. ‘Is there someone there?’

  ‘Ssshhh! It’s only me! Judy!’

  ‘Judy!’

  ‘Ssshhhh! You’ll wake everyone up!’

  ‘Throwing stones at someone’s window is not the quietest of occupations.’

  ‘I need to talk to you!’

  Grabbing his dressing gown Walter hurried quietly downstairs and out of the house.

  Judy was waiting for him behind the large beech tree that stood on the corner of the front lawns. She was wearing a headscarf, a light raincoat, and a frightened expression. Walter took her hand and led her away from the house in the direction of the gazebo that was hidden from view to the right behind a shrubbery of azaleas and rhododendrons.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Walter whispered after she had told him of her mother’s threats. ‘At least I can. After the warning off I got from your father.’

  ‘I know. I – I really thought Daddy would take to you – you being in the Navy and all that.’

  ‘It’s your mother who is most against it, I think. Or rather, my mother thinks.’

  ‘They used to be so much in love themselves – my parents.’

  ‘My parents think you’re entirely splendid. If it was up to them we could get married tomorrow.’

  ‘If only you weren’t going back to Portsmouth tomorrow, Walter.’

  ‘What? If only I wasn’t going back to Portsmouth what, Judy?’

  ‘I’d run away with you.’

  ‘You really would run away with me?’

  He took her in his arms and kissed her. Judy responded passionately, holding him as close to her as she could, her arms tight round his waist, her body pressed closely against his. They had never kissed in that way before, and the more they kissed the more it seemed to both of them that it really could be for the last time.

  Walter put a hand to either side of Judy’s head and studied her expression, trying desperately to remember every detail of that moment.

  ‘I love you. More than my own life. Far more.’

  ‘I love you too, Walter. If I could come with you.’

  ‘I know. I know. But we must be patient. We must wait. It might not be as bad as everyone says. War might not be that imminent. There might be a respite – I might get home for another leave – there are all sorts and possibilities of might.’

  ‘Too many, many mights. But not I might be going to Scotland, Walter, I am going to Scotland. No might about it.’

  There was only one way to treat this immovable fact, and they both knew it.

  Chapter Five

  The following day Meggie found herself once more at sea, indecisive, on edge, unable to decide anything.

  It was hardly surprising, such was the tension gripping London. Every newspaper hoarding, every news bulletin, was bringing the outbreak of war nearer and nearer to that particular second when it would be not about to be declared, but upon them. And in that second, as they all knew, their fates, everyone’s fates, would be finally, and perhaps fatally, sealed.

  Being alone she had spent most of the morning of the previous day, Sunday, in bed, as if afraid to face the outside world. Finally, summoned to lunch at short notice by a midday telephone call from her grandmother and unable to get a taxi, she had found she had awoken to a world teetering on the verge of chaos.

  The pavements outside her flat had been thronged with both men and women in uniform: newly called up soldiers heading slowly but determinedly for railway stations and trains which could carry them to their barracks; auxiliary firemen, now no longer volunteers but full-time professionals, hurrying to hastily summoned drills; air raid wardens securing observation posts; sailors sea bound and young airmen looking no older than schoolboys making for craft that they had as yet no notion how to fly.

  The roads had also been busy, jammed with traffic leaving the city, piled high with family possessions, luggage and pets, a sensible and for the time being orderly self-evacuation of people determined to be housed safely in the country when the bombs began to drop, as everyone sensed that all too soon they would.

  Caught in a sea of dismay, Meggie had found herself being swept along in the opposite direction to that in which she was headed. Her sense of futile hopelessness was increased by her inadvertently interrupting the unloading of a couple of hundred wooden coffins. By the time she had finally reached her grandmother’s house in Brook Street, on foot, war had become such a reality that, looking up at the skies above her while s
he waited for Richards to open the door, she had quite expected to see it already thronged with enemy aeroplanes.

  After a predictably subdued lunch served by a still politely drunk Richards, Meggie had asked Elinor what she thought she should do now that the country was headed inevitably for war?

  ‘What would you do? If you were me – my age now. What would you do? Because whatever you would have done, I shall do.’

  ‘Something exciting, I expect. Can’t just stand by.’

  Elinor Gore-Stewart was always happier to generalise rather than give an opinion, refusing, as the old and the wise do, to give advice which they might later regret.

  ‘Knowing you, you would have volunteered probably for the WRNS.’

  ‘Possibly. They do have quite a smart uniform, darlin’, except the officer’s hat, which is hideous. Don’t want to wear that, not for anything. Actually, if they’d teach me how to fly, as a matter of fact, I’d still quite like to join the RAF. Always did fancy flying. More and more women will be soon, you know. One of these days people will think nothing of it.’ She paused, staring into some kind of future which only she could see.

  ‘I have no sense of direction, which might make it a bit difficult. No, I think I shall join up, but not the RAF. Bit too much map reading, which is not my strong point to say the least. No, I think I shall volunteer and join the Wrens. Purely for the uniform, of course. But not, if what you say is true, the officer’s hat.’

  Elinor smiled at Meggie’s lightheartedness, but only because it was better than weeping. It was all just as it had been before, and hardly twenty-one years later. Young people volunteering, dashing off to war, ready to do their bit, all courage and ignorance. For how else can the young face war if not in a state of ignorance?

  During the silence that followed, Richards appeared with a dusty bottle of vintage cognac from which he generously filled three glasses.

  ‘Good luck, and God speed to us all.’ Elinor raised her glass to her butler and her granddaughter.