The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Can you find me something, then?’

  The woman nodded, her eyes already searching for the necessary paperwork.

  ‘Find you something, Mrs Eastcott, and you the owner of a motor car? If the WVS has anything to do with it, your feet will not touch the ground, that I can promise you!’

  Gwen, the Tates’ housemaid, had been a member of not the WVS but the WI for over five years before war was finally declared. It had seemed a nice, busy thing to do, and, since she was a Quaker, perfectly in line with her beliefs. The WI had actually been started to help food production during the Great War. It was not, as rumour always suggested, absolutely not an organisation just to do with jam making and singing Jerusalem. It was a practical institute, as practical as anything that had ever been organised by some stupid government, as Gwen was always telling her husband whenever he took time out to mock it.

  Now it had been brought home to Gwen most forcibly, most especially by the non-Quaker members, that the WI might be going to be once again about vital food production, and more than ever before, more even perhaps than during the Great War. Jam making would of course be part of it, for if there was no butter to be had, at least if there was jam to put on their bread the children of the nation would obtain some vital vitamins from the home-grown fruit.

  Perhaps because she was what Hugh Tate always called ‘a bright little thing’ Gwen, among others, was sent up to London to learn how to organise a ‘Jobs Mending School’, for not only did every housewife now have to learn how to mend a fuse and many another job they would have normally looked to their men to do, but they had also to learn how to grow vegetables from seed, plant currant bushes, and make more and more jam to a new and firmer consistency, so that it could be transported all over the country to WI centres without any chance of spillage. The last part of the short training was in what Gwen called ‘the silly games half hour’. Central to the work that members of the WI contributed to the war effort was the recognition that with all that had to be borne, with all the strains under which the women fighting on the home front were being put, letting down their hair for half an hour was not just a good idea, it was vital. Matchboxes on the nose, musical chairs, charades, going round the room without touching the floor – whatever could be done to make the women laugh and forget their troubles must be done.

  Yet some troubles could not be alleviated by light-hearted treatment, and Elizabeth Melton’s netting circle was one of them. While quite as vital to the war work as her neighbour and acquaintance Elinor Gore-Stewart’s, it seemed that Lady Melton’s was not the netting circle in Bexham that anyone wished to join.

  No matter what the hour, or how tired they were from their other occupations, everyone in Bexham flocked to help with the netting at Cucklington House. Such was definitely not the case at the Melton house. In fact only two ladies regularly attended Lady Melton’s netting circle. One was an old lady who lived in the former groom’s cottage, and the other was Mrs Molly Woodhouse, a woman remarkable only for her bridge-playing prowess and her narrow view of life, but whose bad-tempered ways had to be borne because, after all, when all was said and done, there was a war on.

  Even Judy Melton never called in to net with her mother at the family home in Old Bexham, a fact which was actually so hurtful that Elizabeth Melton could hardly bring herself to think about it. Very well, Judy did lodge now with the Gore-Stewarts, on account of Meggie and Judy’s both having joined the WVS, but even so, a visit once or twice a week from a daughter to her mother would not go amiss.

  Tonight, however, not only was Judy not present, which was hardly unusual, but neither was old Mrs Crescent, nor even the ill-tempered Mrs Woodhouse, so that, unsurprisingly, as Elizabeth Melton surveyed how little work the three of them had accomplished, her heart sank to the bottom of her prim, dark brown, side-buttoned shoes.

  Even so, she pulled on her mask and with a look of resignation and a sinking heart approached the ghastly task of knotting quite alone, which it had to be said was a first, even for her.

  ‘It seems to me, old girl, that at this rate the biggest net you’re going to produce for our army is a hair net!’

  Sir Arthur would keep making that joke. And he was making it again now, as he put his head round the door and stared into the ground floor room set aside for this vital work, before going off fire watching.

  Tonight Lady Melton sensed she was not just alone, she was alone and quite ridiculous. Yet to give in and not continue to work on the netting for the army would be unpatriotic, and worse than that it would give more than a little ammunition to that lot, as she thought of the rival Bexham netting circle at Cucklington House.

  She had been hard at work for some few, and considering there was a war on, strangely peaceful, hours, and it was now after midnight, so Elizabeth was expecting no one when she thought she heard someone knocking at the front door. Grabbing her husband’s ridiculous old family musket from beside the fireplace, she went into the hall and tiptoed quietly towards the sound. The blackout made it impossible to make anyone out, and at the other side of the heavy front door she could hear only heavy breathing.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she called out, trying, pathetically, to deepen her voice in such a way that anyone on the other side might perhaps become doubtful of her actual sex.

  ‘It’s me, Lady Melton, Gardiner.’

  Elizabeth Melton unbolted the door, and held it open a few inches, shining a torch in her visitor’s face.

  ‘Gardiner!’ Lady Melton stared at her former maid, long ago married and gone to live in the village. It was years since she had seen her, but naturally she pretended it was not, for some reason that she herself could not have said. ‘Gracious, you’re very late, Gardiner. But better late than never, I do agree. I myself, as it happens, am working through the night.’

  ‘Thank you, Lady Melton.’

  Gardiner slid through the narrow gap allowed to her, and followed Elizabeth into what had been the old sewing room.

  ‘Good, now we have a chance of going a bit faster, Gardiner. With your hands at the ready we will do better.’

  Lady Melton handed Gardiner a mask to cover her nose and mouth, and looked on approvingly as she did so, as if Gardiner was trying on an Ascot hat which had once belonged to her ladyship, and they were both now finding that it suited her really rather well.

  ‘Anything the matter, Gardiner?’ she asked as Gardiner took the mask off again, almost at once, as if of a sudden she could not breathe.

  Gardiner looked away and then back again, concentrating her gaze entirely on the pearl buttons on her former employer’s blouse, before she could at last bring herself to speak.

  ‘Just a little bit, Lady Melton, yes. That’s why I came along up to the house really. Got to do something to take my mind off everything, because – my son – you know, fire fighting in London? Well, I just heard, he’s been killed, and I gotta, I just gotta do something to take my mind off it.’

  Elizabeth Melton stared at Gardiner. It had been a year since they had all first expected the bombing of London, but now it had started in earnest, and the very worst thing that can happen to a mother had just happened to her former maid. Forgetting that she was Lady Melton, wife of Admiral Sir Arthur Melton, a woman who had grown stern with the years, for no reason that she could now quite remember, Elizabeth held out her arms to this woman called ‘Gardiner’ whose Christian name, incomprehensibly as it now seemed, she had never even asked of her, and drew her into a warm embrace.

  ‘You’re looking pale as a coming-out frock, Madame Gran.’

  Richards stared into the face of his employer with some concern.

  ‘Stop being such an old woman, Richards. That’s my role in life, to be an old woman, and not yours; yours is to be perfect, which of course you are.’

  ‘I am your ladyship’s devoted man of all seasons.’

  ‘Well, think of yourself as you will, Richards, but I prefer to think of you as my guardian angel, come down to earth and made fles
h, the wings upon which I fly, you are really, Richards,’ Elinor told him, suddenly. ‘Now I am going to bed. For as usual you are right. I am very tired. Feeling my age. Better in the morning.’

  Richards stared after her. He had never known Madame Gran admit to tiredness, not even when she crawled in from the Dorchester at five o’clock of a summer morning singing ‘The Nightingales Sang in Berkeley Square’. Even then she always had time for a nightcap, usually even demanding of Richards that he put a record on the gramophone for a bit of a dance.

  He glanced at the old grandfather clock in the hall and saw that by the light of his torch the old man in the moon on the gold face of the clock was telling that it was only one in the morning. The netting circle was still as busy as ever, and consequently Richards was as busy as ever, torn between the netting and the tea making, knowing all the time that the chances of victory were as slender as a single hair.

  Of course Miss Meggie being Miss Meggie, now she had joined the WVS, would be in the centre of it, busy taking someone’s children back to the East End where their mothers were eagerly waiting for them. For some reason that no one could understand, least of all the WVS, the insane idea that it was safer and better for them to be in London with their mums rather than in the Sussex countryside with some caring family had, of a sudden, become popular once again.

  ‘Where’s Miss Meggie tonight, Richards, by the way?’

  Elinor shone her torch up her staircase, illuminating the straight-nosed, delicate-eyed faces of a few of her ancestors as she did so.

  ‘Miss Meggie is due to come back here by – er – two or so,’ Richards lied, quickly and adroitly. ‘I believe she’s meant to be busy at one of the WVS rest centres, that is what I believe, Madame Gran.’

  ‘You were never very good at lying, you know, Richards. Where is she – struggling through London in the Blitz, rescuing people from burning buildings? Anything as long as it is dangerous, knowing Miss Meggie.’

  ‘Whatever she’s doing, she’s very busy, Madame Gran,’ Richards went on, ignoring her. ‘These days sleep is just not something she is in touch with. And when she is she tells me she goes out like a light, which is strange because as a little girl, if you remember, Madame Gran, she never really slept, did she? Miss Meggie never really slept.’

  ‘No, I think you’re right, now I recall, Richards. She never was one for sleeping, was Miss Meggie. Very well. When she joins you,’ Elinor turned towards her bedroom, ‘tell her – tell her I send her my dearest love, won’t you, Richards? And keep an eye on her? Well, I know you will, you always do.’

  Richards was too busy forging ahead to Madame Gran’s bedroom to make everything ready for her to pay much attention to this last remark.

  Madame Gran missed her personal maid these days, as you would when there was a war on, but most of all she missed the order in which everything had once been kept for her. Never had been used to doing everything for herself at home. Neatening up, straightening up, clearing up, pulling and twitching, was not Madame Gran’s style. It was Richards’s style, but not that of Madame Gran.

  Richards stopped. He stared around him as he heard his mistress walking slowly off towards the bathroom for her late night ablutions. Madame Gran’s bedroom was like a new pin. Everything was in its place, but to such a degree that it had probably never looked so neat in all its life. He opened one of the cupboards. The line of Madame Gran’s frocks had never been so straight; indeed so straight were they, they might have been Guardsmen on parade. The coats, too, were all hung in perfect lengths, and their protective covers pulled over them. Madame Gran’s fur tippets and fur muffs were all neat and tidy, the hats normally in total disorder were now in total order, her shoes in perfect lines, her handbags and reticules all the same.

  Richards knew that he should feel pleased, but as he made a mental note to check that she was safely asleep before he himself finally called it a day as dawn was about to break, he did not know why, but his heart turned over a little. It was as if someone else was now occupying the lovely bedroom on the first floor with its pale and tasteful furnishings, not his Madame Gran; as if – but he turned away from the thought. He had always told Madame Gran she would outlive them all, but only a little later, when he knocked on her door on some lame pretext, Richards found that he was wrong. The unthinkable had happened. His Madame Gran, as so many of the gravestones in the churchyard at Bexham read had, fallen asleep in God, leaving Richards not just bereft, but, it seemed to him, for the first time in his life, utterly alone.

  EARLY 1942

  Chapter Ten

  Walter was singing at the top of his voice as he drove at top speed towards Bexham. He was on forty-eight hour leave, enough time to get married to Judy and have a twelve-hour honeymoon. After all that he had been through it seemed to him that he was in heaven already. Against all the odds, he was going home to be married. Of a sudden his steering wheel started to play up, and he stopped singing as the three passengers to whom he was giving a lift, yelled, ‘Flat tyre!’

  Turning into the nearest farm entrance he drew to a stop outside a cow shed, the owner of which, a red-faced farmer more used to counting sheep on the Sussex Downs than searching for pilots shot down over England, volunteered to help him.

  ‘I found a machine gun pellet in my milking pail yesterday,’ he told Walter cheerfully, peering at him from under his steel protective helmet, ‘and two enemy parachutists landed in the middle of my ewes last week. But my son and I held them hostage with our pitch forks until the Home Guard arrived, not that they were much better armed than myself – broomsticks and fire pokers is what they arrived with!’

  He chuckled as he handed Walter the necessary trappings for his now mended tyre, and then, nodding affably from Walter to his two companions – hitchhikers in army uniform Walter had picked up on the road – he sighed with envy.

  ‘Darned shame, I told my wife, but I was passed unfit this time around, otherwise I would be fighting alongside you young fellows, believe you me.’

  Walter smiled, and handed him a tip, which he refused at first, reddening as he did so, before finally pocketing it quite gratefully.

  ‘I should think he got blind drunk with gratitude when he was passed unfit,’ Walter observed to his passengers, and they laughed, knowing that the idea that everyone who lived in Britain was simply dying to join up and fight for their country was ludicrous. ‘Where can I drop you fellows off?’

  Seeing the time, Walter put his foot down. He had forty-eight hours’ leave. Forty-eight hours in which to get married to his darling Judy. He had hardly been able to believe the news when he was told that Lady Melton had, of a sudden, given in to the idea of Judy’s becoming Mrs Walter Tate. He started to sing ‘A Maiden Fair to See’ in a creditable baritone. For two whole days he was going to put the war behind him, no matter what went on elsewhere.

  Some weeks before Walter was given his forty-eight hours’ leave to get married, Lady Melton had gone to see Loopy and Hugh, or rather she had gone to see Hugh and Loopy, because Elizabeth Melton, Loopy realised, was one of those women who, when faced with a man and a woman, completely ignored the woman. It was as if Loopy was not even in the room.

  ‘Mr Tate, as we are all now quite aware, my daughter has fallen in love with your son, Walter, and they wish to get married. The admiral has never been against it, as you may or may not be aware, but I, as Judy’s mother, have always been against it. Now, however, I am not against it. Let the marriage take place, with all our blessings. Let them be married as soon as the young man can obtain some leave, although forty-eight hours is the most they can expect at the moment, I am afraid, and even that is difficult. We will hold the reception at our house. Not too much fuss, since there is a war on, you will agree.’

  ‘Of course, not too much fuss.’

  Loopy had put in her pennyworth, in a vain effort, she realised afterwards, to attract Elizabeth Melton’s attention. But it was truly vain, for Lady Melton continued to stare at Hugh, her exp
ression not unlike that of a bedraggled bird which has arrived at her destination after a long and stormy flight.

  ‘I wonder what made her change her mind so suddenly?’ said Hugh a few minutes after she had gone, leaving Hugh and Loopy to discuss the incredible volte face with which she had presented them, not to mention the prospect of arranging a wedding in a very short space of time.

  ‘The war, Hugh darling. Even women like Lady Melton are not impervious to what is happening outside their front doors.’

  ‘But, Loopy, don’t you realise, this is such wonderful news. We must get in touch with Walter, somehow, we just must.’ Hugh gave a sudden and brilliant smile, thinking of Walter. ‘Like Tom Kitten, he will burst his buttons—’

  ‘Oh, but you are so right, Hugh, he will burst his buttons.’

  ‘He will be so happy,’ his father agreed, and then turned to his piano and played a rousing rendition of yet another Gilbert and Sullivan song, one that both he and Loopy knew young Walter had always loved since he was a little boy in short trousers. ‘We sail the ocean blue . . .’ Hugh and Walter had always sung it together at the piano before the little fellow hopped up to bed of a summer evening at Shelborne.

  Following her mother’s almost historic visit to the Tates at Shelborne, Judy veered between treading emotional water, because it looked as if everything was going to be all right after all, and becoming dizzy with the sheer dread of how much she had to accomplish before her wedding day. To begin with, it was still winter, so the all important question of what she should wear posed itself.

  ‘My old wedding dress, Judy dear!’

  Judy could hardly bring herself to look into her mother’s excited face, or down at the simply beautiful silk dress she was cradling in her arms.

  ‘Mother—’

  ‘I can’t tell you how many yards of silk this took.’

  ‘Mother—’