The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Judy’s friend Meggie’s coming over to help us, later this evening, if she can, but you know she’s running about for the WVS while also helping with the netting circle at Cucklington, and goodness knows what else.’

  ‘How is the netting circle at Cucklington?’

  ‘Anything with Elinor Gore-Stewart at the centre of it is bound to be invigorating.’

  ‘And Judy’s mother, how is she?’ Hugh’s face assumed a mock serious expression, as it always did when Walter’s perhaps-may-be-could-be in-laws were mentioned.

  ‘Well, you know Lady Melton, she is never not Lady Melton, except when Mrs Gore-Stewart is around, when she becomes a little less Lady Melton, but not much less.’

  Hugh laughed. He always loved Loopy’s line on things. God, she was so refreshing. He looked across at her trying not to imagine the unimaginable. Life without Loopy. He loved her, with all his heart and with all his soul. She was the opposite of him. Together they made one whole, because they were so different. Loopy so New World, so stylish, such fun, so zesty, while he was so Old World, so Gilbert and Sullivan, so Bexham, so British.

  ‘I don’t know how you put up with me,’ he told his wife suddenly.

  Loopy smiled. It was her pas devant smile, because of Dauncy’s being there. But it was also the smile that a woman gives a man she loves with all her heart.

  Although the Tates could not know it, even Lady Melton had been forced to forget all about the niceties of life when faced with her new task, namely the urgent setting up of net-making frames in her house, for the sole purpose of producing camouflage nets to protect our army.

  Elinor Gore-Stewart too had set up a netting circle, and, as she soon discovered, it was the filthiest job imaginable. Even after long hours spent darning socks, most of the women volunteers would have willingly run back to darn the worst holes in the least attractive socks rather than continue with netting, but net they must, and they all knew it. Netting was more important than darned socks, or salvaged saucepans, or clothing of any kind. It was the most important job you could help with, on top of whatever else you had taken on, and it could only be done by hand.

  ‘I say, I suddenly realised, Richards, that no good will come of our netting groups unless we can also get hold of some tea urns,’ Elinor told her devoted butler. ‘It’s the dust and the fluff from the scrim – it chokes you fit to bust. I suppose all those old school teapots and so on have gone to make aeroplanes?’

  Somehow Richards managed to scrounge, if not tea urns, then some of the largest teapots around – the kind that are normally only found in institutions – and since the weather was so fine, and despite the dog fights going on overhead, the sound of the machine gun fire, and rumours of an impending invasion, despite the comparative success of the Battle of Britain, despite the young men lost who would never come back, despite the fact that some households were already in mourning for some young life lost – and in between everything else they had to do – the women of Bexham lined up to volunteer to start knotting the scrim on to the nets.

  Crawling about with bruised knees and aching backs, there was not a woman in Bexham who did not volunteer at some point of their week to help out with this dire but urgent task. When they were not darning socks or knitting, helping out at the cottage hospital, or making armbands for the LDV, not to mention clearing glass from the bombed streets of neighbouring towns, or in Judy’s case ferrying WVS members and officials to and from Bexham in Chummy, they dropped in to help out with the netting. Mrs Todd, with her arthritic fingers, was no exception, arriving with an appropriately knotted headscarf covering her hair, and sidling quietly into the room.

  ‘How is your husband, Mrs Todd? How is Mr Todd?’

  Elinor Gore-Stewart broke the awkward silence that Mrs Todd’s entrance had engendered, no one quite knowing how to broach the subject of the bereavement that the black armband on her coat proclaimed.

  ‘Mr Todd has now quite recovered consciousness, thank you, Mrs Gore-Stewart.’ Mrs Todd nodded.

  ‘We were very sorry to hear about your son, Mrs Todd.’

  ‘Thank you, but, as his dad and I see it, our Tom’s only been taken a little earlier than we expected, since he was due to be trained in bomb disposal. To our eyes he would not have been with us that much longer, if you understand me. He was just taken early.’

  The group fell silent once again, none of them quite knowing how to take this practical, courageous but somehow almost shocking statement.

  ‘And I’m very sorry, we all are, all the village, about Mr Kinnersley, Mrs Gore-Stewart,’ Mrs Todd continued. ‘He was a brave man. Mr Todd always said, if David Kinnersley could have taken out his heart and put it on a plate for you, he would have done.’

  ‘That is very true, Mrs Todd.’ Elinor turned away. Whatever happened there would never, surely, be a better or more fitting tribute to poor young David. Even now she could hardly believe that he had gone, despite the fact that he had seemed to be risking his life so many, many times over the past years. Always so funny, and rueful, self-deprecating, delightful, warm-hearted – the fitting adjectives for beautiful young David seemed to gallop through Elinor’s mind in the small hours of the morning, the few small hours when Richards insisted that she pretend to sleep.

  ‘Very well, now, I am going to make tea for the netters – outside.’

  Elinor cleared her throat, breaking yet another awkward silence, at the same time nodding to Richards who had just abandoned his darning circle to bring in a fresh supply of sandwiches to the netters. As she watched him with gratitude – always so practical – Elinor thanked God, yet again, for her butler. He had been the mainstay of the house since Meggie’s heart had been broken by David’s not coming back, right down to galvanising Meggie into realising that she had to get up and get going, get on with her life.

  Richards’s motto was, ‘It’s always better to do something rather than nothing.’ In his book anything else was unthinkable.

  Although she was ostensibly only going to make tea for her outside group, Elinor still changed out of her netting clothes, pulling out her white hair from under its scarf, and climbing out of her faded dungarees. For, old as she was, she still insisted on joining in the netting. Still determined to choke on the dust and the fluff with the best of them, seeing this, as she did, as almost the most urgent part of their war effort. For, as they all now appreciated, one extra hour spent netting meant that many more feet of precious cover for their army. When they were netting it was as if they were making a shield not just for their own, but for everyone’s loved ones. Besides, it was one of the few things they could actually do that they knew might really make all the difference to their boys, the difference between life and death. Between their boys coming home to them, or their boys not returning to them.

  Masks were another necessity for this filthy work, but neither masks nor headscarves nor dungarees – nothing could stop the netting staining the skin and hands dark with its rich dye. Yet the netting at Cucklington regularly continued until just before midnight, when many of the regulars would crawl off to take over a fire watch, or to make hot meals for incoming pilots at the local aerodrome, or to relieve some other volunteer at one or other of the rest rooms in nearby towns, leaving Cuckers, finally, to Madame Gran and Richards, and to an exhausted Meggie, if she was home. Then daylight struck once more, and the whole routine started again. It was the same night in night out, day after day, Judy, fresh from ferrying some of the wounded from the cottage hospital to a larger hospital near Churchester, also made a practice of dropping in on Mrs Gore-Stewart’s group at around midnight before retiring to bed for a few hours.

  On this particular evening, she saw at once that Mrs Gore-Stewart was overdoing it. Watching her excessive zeal, Judy knew that she was exaggerating her devotion to the task in hand, because of her feelings of loss over David Kinnersley and Tom Todd, the first of the Bexham young to be sacrificed to the Nazis, but only, they all realised, the first. Soon there would be m
any, many more.

  Her arrival fresh on the scene meant that Judy was perhaps more observant than many of the others, exhausted as they were by their own discomfort from both the work and the long hours. Judy could hear that Madame Gran’s breathing was becoming affected by the dust and the fluff, not to mention the agonising struggle her poor old arthritic hands were being subjected to by the work itself.

  Within a few minutes of her arrival Judy made sure to kneel down to talk to her.

  ‘Tea. Please have some tea, Mrs Gore-Stewart. Please, stop and take some tea, won’t you? You’ve been at it night and day now, and for far too long. Please? For my sake, please?’

  Richards, himself now masked and choking from the dust, looked up at that, and nodded smartly at Judy as if to say, Yes, for goodness’ sake get some tea down her.

  Elinor drank her tea, quickly, and in the event most ungratefully, since her eyes were quite evidently still fixed on the work yet to be done. Judy, feeling guilty at such a display of energy from someone so much older than herself, immediately set to herself to help with the work, and tired though she was, as she knotted, and choked, knotted and choked some more, she could not help thinking of all the young men who might be going to be saved by the work they were doing – young men like Walter.

  The previous day she had taken a few hours off to visit Walter’s family, but not at Shelborne. The invitation had come out of the blue.

  Meet us all at this address, if you possibly can, at one o’clock.

  Loopy thought she would always remember the expression on Judy’s face when she handed her the key to the cottage and said, ‘Happy birthday, Judy. Hugh and I want you to have Owl Cottage – it is for you and Walter.’

  ‘But we’re not even properly engaged—’

  ‘Yet – not even properly engaged yet. Of course you will be married, but until then this is yours – both of yours – until the great day dawns.’

  Loopy looked evenly at Judy, who immediately blushed, suddenly realising that the Tates must know about – well, about everything that had happened between Walter and herself. Not that Walter would have told them; she knew that Walter would never be indiscreet, but mothers knew these things about their sons, so perhaps they knew all about girls who were in love with their sons too?

  ‘This is everything that we would have chosen.’ Judy stared around the low-ceilinged rooms, their white walls now immaculate. ‘It’s as if you had done it up for us, but exactly – it is as if we had done it up ourselves! How did you manage to guess—’

  Loopy shook her head, interrupting her before she could go on.

  ‘I must stop you there, Judy.’ She smiled. ‘I mean, really, dear. You don’t think Walter would go to sea without telling us everything about you, including that you had told him that when you were able to have your first home together you would like corn-flower blue covers and pink cushions, and that you wanted a pale yellow bathroom? I mean to say, Judy, what kind of a family do you Meltons think the Tates really are? We would hardly have taken it on had we not known exactly what you both liked.’

  Loopy laughed delightedly, ignoring Judy’s look of embarrassment at her light-hearted reference to the Meltons’ intransigent attitude to the Tates. They had all worked their legs off, in between everything else that was required of them, to get Owl Cottage ready for Walter and Judy, and selfish though she knew it was, and not even remotely patriotic, seeing Judy’s delighted face as she wandered about touching everything, unable to believe that this was really going to be her first home, that Owl Cottage was a gift to Walter and herself, Loopy could not find it in herself to feel sorry for what they had done.

  Owl Cottage was all about willing Walter home, about Lady Melton’s allowing Judy and Walter to get married, about everything they were meant to be fighting for, which was why it was so terribly important.

  ‘Your mother still on the outs with you about Walter, is she, Judy dear?’ Loopy asked later, at a discreet moment, when Hugh and Dauncy were busy in the back garden trying to fix the bucket in the top of the little well.

  ‘I am afraid so, Mrs Tate.’ Judy looked away, embarrassed to be the child of such a mother.

  ‘It’s because you’re an only child, isn’t it? You are her ewe lamb, and that makes it very difficult. I mean let’s face it, Judy, as far as your mother is concerned, the only person who is suitable for you is someone who has not yet been invented!’

  Loopy laughed to take the sting out of her remark, and, happily, so did Judy.

  ‘Don’t worry, she’ll come round. Parents usually do. I say usually. Some never do. My English mother-in-law always thought my American cooking would kill Hugh, never mind what it would do to her grandsons, and she was probably right, so just as well I’ve never cooked for him much, until now, but look – by God’s grace, Hugh is still alive. At least, I think he is!’

  Loopy stopped, suddenly remembering that even if Hugh was alive, Walter might not be, but Judy was hardly listening, only looking round, realising, more and more, the love and care that had gone into Owl Cottage.

  ‘You did all this for me and Walter to bring Walter back, didn’t you, Mrs Tate? It’s like lighting a candle and leaving it in the window, isn’t it? This is Walter’s candle, lit for him.’

  Loopy nodded, and immediately lit another cigarette.

  ‘Of course. If you love your children you would do anything to bring them back to you, safe and happy.’

  Lionel stared at Mattie. ‘What the devil do you think you look like?’

  ‘A bit better than you in your uniform, if we can call it such,’ Maude chimed in.

  ‘You’ve joined up?’

  ‘No, Daddy, actually.’ Mattie gave a hearty sigh. ‘No, actually, I am going off to a fancy dress party! Of course I’ve joined up. Goodness gracious, what do you think the driving lessons were all about?’

  ‘He thought they were all about your driving instructor,’ Maude put in, and Mattie laughed.

  ‘Oh, old hot hands Blundell. Mmm, well, he did help me to concentrate. And believe me, if you can learn to drive while all around you are trying to grab your knees, you can drive anyone through anything.’

  ‘So, this is it. It has really come to this. You, my only daughter, have joined up, joined the army of all things.’ Lionel sat down suddenly in his armchair, before turning on Maude. ‘This is all your fault, all your fault. You and your driving lessons, encouraging her to be a man. I don’t know what you are all about, really I don’t. Except I do. Bungling, that is what you are all about, as usual. Bungling, Maude.’

  Mattie went and stood in front of her father’s chair, her uniform giving her a sudden authority. She was determined to defend Maude.

  ‘No, Daddy, it is not Mummy’s fault, believe me, it is not Mummy’s fault, and it is not my fault, it is the fault of Hitler. I have to join up, simply because I am your only daughter. Don’t you see? I have to prove myself the same as if I was – well – either sex. Just because I am a girl doesn’t mean to say I don’t have the same feelings as a boy. Not that I want to be your son, nothing like that. I like being a girl; I like being your daughter, but just because I am doesn’t mean that I don’t have the same call to do my duty as everyone else. I had to join up, I simply could not sit at home darning socks, or making tea, or joining the WVS and minding the rest room, I’m too young for all that, really I am. Besides, I am a very good driver. I have just passed all my army tests, first class, A1. And I can pack a mean punch, believe me, just ask my dear driving instructor.’

  ‘You could have told me,’ Lionel said, still staring at Maude. ‘You might have told me.’

  Maude turned away, her husband’s eyes telling her, if anything happens to Mattie it will be your fault, all your fault and no one else’s, and I will never forgive you.

  What Maude was not telling Lionel was that, at Mattie’s instigation, she herself had just bought Peter Sykes’s car from him – since, having joined up, he was going to have no use for it for the duration
– and she had bought it with the sole intention of joining the WVS car pool. Maude was quite determined that Mattie was not going to be the only one of the family in uniform.

  Frankly Maude could not wait to put on the grey-green uniform with its ruby red jumper and felt hat, which was deliberately designed so that it could be shaped in any way the wearer desired. Up off the face, more flattering for the older woman, was how Maude was going to wear hers, she told herself.

  Presenting herself for recruitment was a different matter, though. After all – she could not help wondering with sudden awareness – after all her long, tedious years of marriage, seeing only to Lionel and Mattie’s needs, what had she to offer the Women’s Voluntary Service, except a mild ability to play bridge, and a new ability to drive a motor car?

  She confessed as much at her interview.

  ‘I am pretty useless, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ the woman behind the desk told her, and since she was probably about the same age as Maude, Maude was prepared to believe her. ‘That is the whole point of the Women’s Voluntary Service. We turn no one away, because we know that there is always something that a woman is good at. Always something useful she can do. To give you an example, there’s an old lady near here, near Bexham, who walks six miles three times a week – in her seventies she is too – just to come here and clean the offices. She makes them look like a new pin, and do you know something? She’s twice the person since she started doing her bit, and why? Because she knows she is doing her bit, pulling her weight. That’s what it’s all about, the women doing their bit, pulling their weight, not sitting at home just knitting and listening to the wireless.’ She paused before leaning forward and confiding to Maude, ‘Do you know that I admire her cleaning as much as I admire Churchill’s speeches? And why? Because both of them are doing what they’re good at. That’s what it’s all about, believe me,’ she repeated.