The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Perhaps she needs iron. Quite a lot of people do at the moment. I have a good contact, I can get her iron tablets, if you think that would help?’

  ‘Could you, would you?’

  Hugh looked almost pathetically grateful as Judy got up to take her leave. Judy was not sure whether his gratitude was based on the idea that iron tablets might give Loopy back not just her zest for life but her personality, or whether it was because, despite Judy’s being a member of his family now, he really rather preferred to be alone with John and Dauncy, the all male household, able to talk about male things, not having to be distracted by a woman.

  She herself felt relieved, despite the blackout, to be able to walk home to Owl Cottage quite alone. As usual she went the back way, via the church, and then up to the right, following the ancient pathway that led to the row of cottages whose very aspect somehow, no matter what had happened during the previous days and nights, always gave her hope. The ancient thatched roofs, the crazy paving paths that ran round the front gardens that grew both vegetables and flowers, the sound of the old brook that ran on the other side of the tiny country road – it was all so reassuring. She pushed open her front gate, and taking out her key and flashing her small torch she went quickly and expectantly up to the front door. Sometimes when she put her key in the latch she imagined that she heard Walter’s voice from inside calling to her, which was ridiculous, because he had never called to her from indoors, not once. Why should he, since they had only ever had twelve hours at Owl Cottage together? At other times she thought she could hear him laughing and talking, and she hurried through, hoping, always hoping that as she closed the door behind her she would see Walter in front of her, perhaps reading a book, or just ‘slouching’ as he loved to call sitting and thinking. Tonight, before pulling down the blackout blinds, she shone her torch on the table in front of the blue-covered sofa. There was a note on the table. She picked it up.

  Mrs Tate, you were out, but a telegram come, so I took it for you. Next door when you want it. Dora Niven.

  No one in the war was ignorant of what a telegram meant, most especially not a young newly married woman. It meant that in all probability she was now a widow.

  Of a sudden the tables were turned and Judy knew what it was to be given bad news, rather than to give it. And the following morning, having slept not at all, as she went next door to Mrs Niven, and long before she opened the telegram with its carefully phrased message Regret to inform you Walter Hugh Edward Tate RNVR missing believed killed, she also knew that Walter’s mother must have known, long before the War Office, long before the Navy, just what that telegram would say.

  Loopy had taken to her bed in premature grief, because, as happens with mothers, she had already known. She had realised that Walter was ‘missing believed killed’ long before anyone else, even before Judy, who now found that she almost felt resentful of Loopy’s precognition, believing passionately as she did that she had loved Walter enough to have known the same, to have had the same feelings.

  Walking up to Shelborne later that morning, her uniform carefully straightened, her face properly prepared, telegram in her gloved hand, Judy tried to imagine that she was just any member of the WVS preparing to tell a member of the public that their son might not be returning from the war.

  But as the ever faithful Gwen, now also in the grey-green uniform and plum-coloured jumper of the WVS uniform, opened the door to Judy and dropped her eyes to the buff envelope, and Judy’s large, brown eyes gazed steadfastly ahead, not all her WVS training, nothing, could stand her in the sort of stead for which she might have wished. The fact was that she did not have to say anything, and in some ways, as she walked past the silenced Gwen, Judy knew that it would be the same when she walked into the drawing room, the room in which they had all been so happy that weekend just before the war, when the piano had been played so joyfully, and Hugh and Walter had sung a duet of Walter’s boyhood favourite from HMS Pinafore: ‘We sail the ocean blue, and our saucy ship’s a beauty . . .’ The room where she had danced with John, and Walter had teased his elder brother that he had a crush on her. That had all happened, and, like Walter, all of it was now missing – believed dead.

  Now the piano would remain silent, perhaps for ever. Now Walter would no longer be seen, so dashing and handsome in his naval uniform, waving to Judy from the garden. Nor would there be enough gaiety to fill a thimble, let alone the room in which she now stood listening to Hugh sobbing, as upstairs Loopy lay silent, inert, a graven image unmoving in her awful grief.

  No telegram had arrived for Virginia’s mother, the former fast Gloria Bishop, scourge of the tennis club in nineteen twenties Bexham, nor indeed for Rusty’s mother and father. While other parents and relatives who lived much nearer to the dance hall had searched in vain for their children and loved ones, while boyfriends who had turned away for what had seemed to them only a minute or so to go outside for a cigarette, or a breath of fresh air, now faced the horrors of the morgue, and the sometimes worse horror of everlasting guilt, neither the Todds nor the Bishops knew anything of Rusty and Virginia’s escape.

  Nor would they ever know, Rusty thought to herself as, together with Virginia, she returned to the site to try to help the ambulance and fire services. The Todds, churchgoing and God-fearing as they were, would never understand Rusty’s leaving her digs to go dancing dressed up like a fancy woman, as her father would have said. And, if anything, the Bishops would understand even less, although for a completely different reason.

  If Virginia admitted going to a dance hall and thereby narrowly escaping being bombed, her mother would have said in her husky voice, ‘Well, dear, if you do something as common as working in a factory you really must not expect to live!’

  So while Rusty and Virginia, together with the two American soldiers in whose company they had left the dance hall only fifteen minutes before, worked alongside everyone else to try to clear the rubble, they both knew, without saying anything to each other, that they would never ever mention how close they had come to death that night, not to anyone, least of all their families.

  Once back at the factory, and despite the noise and the din and the seemingly endless days that they worked, Rusty would run the whole catastrophe through her mind and wonder, over and over, what it was, who it was, that had ordained that she should be spared when so many others had died. It did not seem fair, to say the least, that she and Virginia had left the dance hall to go to the common with their jitterbugging partners and thereby ended up alive, when so many, perhaps far more virtuous, less forward girls, more innocent girls, and their partners, were now dead.

  Of course Virginia liked to make a joke of it, saying many times to Rusty afterwards, ‘You have to face it, Rusty ducks, our escape from death was the reward for sin!’ but it simply did not do for Rusty.

  Rusty knew in her heart of hearts that, fortified by too much drink and excitement, she had been quite prepared to ‘earn her nylons’ on the common that night, and that knowledge frightened her almost more than the idea that she had only just escaped being laid out in the morgue by the seemingly stoic rescue teams.

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.

  For some reason that she could not name – she could not have even said which play it came from – that famous line from Shakespeare, which she had heard only recently on the radio, kept running through Rusty’s mind as she worked her twelve-hour shift.

  Soon she would have another two days off, after her five days on, and she knew exactly how she would spend it. She would not be going dancing with Virginia, or anyone else; she would be going home to Bexham. She would be going to see young Mickey’s chestnut tree that he had grown in a pot, and so lovingly tended, before he ran away to join up at too young an age, before he broke what was left of their mother’s heart. The tree that Richards had written to tell her he had planted on behalf of them all by the green.

  ‘The tree of life we call it now.’

 
That was what Richards had named it. The tree of life, a symbol for all of them that no matter what, come what may, things still grew, and what was more and what was indisputable was that, despite everything, things were still worth growing.

  WINTER 1942

  Chapter Fourteen

  Of course the beautiful dress that Lionel had obtained, with such difficulty, for Mattie for her birthday had not fitted her, any more than the idea that his beloved only daughter was pregnant and unmarried had fitted into what he might, before the war, have considered to be his scheme of things for her.

  But war changes everything, and Lionel, to his own amazement, as Mattie grew more and more obviously pregnant, instead of being embarrassed by her condition, had become fascinated by the idea of this new life about to burst upon the scene, this new person who would, he imagined, take up all their time, all their interest, and had already done much to take his own mind off his guilt about Maude.

  ‘There, there, never mind, eh?’ was all he had been able to say to Mattie as she had tearfully confided the news of her pregnancy. ‘There, there, worse things have happened at sea, I am sure.’

  What Mattie would never, could never, tell her poor father was that she had become pregnant quite deliberately. For Mattie to have made a mistake would be, in time of war especially, understandable. After all, the whole of Bexham was rife with rumours of how so-and-so had succumbed to what was known, euphemistically, as ‘the prevailing disease’ by being given a ‘fright’ in an Anderson shelter. Or of how such-and-such had been led, quite falsely, to believe that some GI would marry her, but had, to her amazement, instead been left holding the baby with no wedding ring in sight. No one but no one, it seemed to Mattie, had of late become pregnant on purpose – except Mattie.

  Mattie had not just wanted Michael’s baby, she had longed to have his baby, and that night at the old inn she had prayed that she would become pregnant by him. But now – it was so different. Now that she was actually having it, now that she was nine months into her pregnancy, she was, she had to admit, dreading the birth. The idea of having a baby was one thing, the actuality of it was quite another.

  However, vast though she might now be, she still felt the need to what her father always called ‘titivate’. She picked up her bath towel, and letting herself out of the house she proceeded to walk, albeit slowly, towards the main part of Bexham, passing the harbour and the inlet. The familiar sights of the village were still much the same, the flint-encrusted buildings, the sign of the Three Tuns swinging in the wind, and in her present state of dread they were pleasantly reassuring. Even the new sights, the barricades and the coils of barbed wire, were not without comfort, compared to the anticipated ordeal of the birth.

  Since she was going to the hairdresser’s, she was taking some knitting with her as well as her own towel and some liquid soap, soap that she had managed to obtain through a friend of her father’s, someone in the Home Guard who had some kind of private access to the precious commodity.

  As she walked along in her pregnancy coat, made from an old blanket once belonging to her mother cut out into an A shape complete with a fur collar and fur trimmed cuffs, Mattie noticed Rusty Todd, also carrying a towel, and walking smartly towards Virginia Morrison’s new hairdressing salon. Ever since the bombing of the dance hall, not only Rusty but Mattie’s old friend Virginia had shown a marked reluctance to return to the all important manufacturing of barrage balloons. And although no one else knew how close they had both come to death, it was not just the Todds and Virginia’s mother who were glad to see them return to Bexham – the girls themselves were more than relieved to go back to other wartime occupations. Virginia, having returned with more nylon stockings than anyone in Bexham had ever seen gathered in one place, had needed no urging when several friends had begged her to open a much needed hair salon, because no one could now be certain of driving to Churchester and back without the kind of undue incident which might make a perm or a Marcel wave seem just a little too costly.

  ‘Go on then, if you want new for old, send your wife to Churchester to have a perm!’ was the joke that passed as being only fairly humorous in the Three Tuns, particularly since one of the buses to and from the town had been hit, with a resulting complete loss of life.

  So now, meeting up with Rusty, Mattie paused before going on her stately way.

  ‘Going the same way as me? We can shout our gossip over the sound of the hairdriers, and shock the village,’ she joked. They both turned as they saw Judy Tate approaching Virginia’s from the other side of the green.

  Judy smiled, her eyes avoiding Mattie’s very pregnant state and concentrating on her face, for many reasons, the main one being that each time she saw Mattie looking both beautiful and blooming in her present condition, she felt a terrible stab of jealousy.

  ‘It must be something in the air. We all want our hair done today, and it’s not even Friday,’ Mattie went on gaily, because of a sudden it seemed to her that there was no war on, and she was not going to have a baby any minute. It was just a fine winter day in Bexham, and they were all going to the hairdresser’s. With only a little bit of effort she could imagine, with no sirens going, and a wintry sun above them, everything was just normal. Only the fact that they were all taking their own towels to the hairdressers, and their own soap if they could find any, made it seem any different from a day in peacetime. That and the fact that Rusty Todd had abandoned the boyish look and was now wearing a hairstyle that was bang up to the minute for wartime, nylon roll and all.

  Whatever their private opinions, they all knew that there were currently two prevailing attitudes to women beautifying themselves despite all the shortages. The first was that it was vain and insensitive to think of such things as your hair or make-up during a war, and the second was that it was cheerful and necessary for the war effort for all girls and women to look as glamorous as was perfectly possible.

  As far as Mattie was aware not only Judy and herself, and obviously now Rusty, but most Bexham women had decided to opt for the Our Women Must Look Glorious argument being urged by the majority of the newspapers and women’s magazines, all of which were anxious to point out that to look dreary meant that the war was getting you down, and therefore Hitler and Goering were winning the propaganda campaign.

  Look Marvellous For Our Boys was the message that seemed to be winning.

  Rusty was aware of all these mixed feelings, but, much as she admired Virginia, and grateful to her as she was for helping her to discover that she was actually a young woman, and not a tomboy, she was quite sure that she could no longer aspire to be the kind of girl that Virginia, before the incident at the dance hall, had thought she might be quite happy to be. Rusty was not willing, or even able, to set about earning herself nylons by ‘going out’ with American servicemen. It was just not her way. Not that she intended to slide back into being the old boyish Rusty again; that particular Rusty had, thank God, gone for ever.

  And just as Mother had now started to go out to work on the buses as a clippie, Rusty started to make secret plans to save every scrap of money that she had earned at the factory, with the intention of building up her father’s boatyard again. With Tom gone, and Mickey no one knew where, Rusty set her heart on making new plans for the boatyard, plans that might bring Todd Senior back to life. Her mother might have given up on her husband, and no one could blame her for that, but Rusty now dreamed of bringing her father back to how he had been before the war and guilt over Tom’s untimely death had set in. His emotions, felt but not expressed, seemed to have eaten away at him, numbing his ability to do anything constructive except visit the Three Tuns, or fall asleep in front of the fire, waiting for Mother to come back and cook him something hot.

  Rusty, freed from her new job in the Food Office for a precious lunch hour, now pushed open the door of Virginia’s small, cramped hairdressing salon, and held it open for Mattie. While Judy felt a stab of jealousy every time she saw her burgeoning shape, Rusty only pitied he
r. To be pregnant in war was just so awful. However, it had its compensations. It was not unusual to see the queue to the shops crammed with pregnant women, all happily clutching the green ration books that allowed them privileged access to certain foods during their nine months. Mattie could not count the times that she had been hauled to the front of the food queues on account of her green ration book. It had become a joke at home, with Lionel quite able to tease her that she had become pregnant simply to get her hands on the precious green ration book.

  Virginia, looking more glamorous than anyone could have thought possible and wearing, of all things, a boiler suit, greeted her three customers with pecks on the cheek, and open delight when she saw that they had all brought not just towels and soap, but also hairpins, and even that most precious commodity, Kirby grips.

  ‘You are my favourite customers,’ she declared.

  Rusty looked at her new friend, and found herself feeling vaguely amazed at the way in which Virginia could look so immaculate. There were no real beauty aids to be had anywhere in Sussex, and yet Virginia’s make-up and hair could have done justice to any movie star.

  Unfortunately, they had hardly pushed through the door into the little salon when the siren sounded.

  ‘Oh, thing and blast.’ Virginia pursed immaculately red and enviably shiny lips, and glanced at her watch. ‘I say, what if we just carry on?’

  Rusty knew that it might be all right for the rest of them to take the risk of carrying on, but it could not be so for Mattie. As soon as she heard the siren she pushed her pregnant friend ahead of her and out the back towards the Anderson shelter. Shortly afterwards everyone else duly followed, including the lady whom Virginia had been brushing out the perm. A village woman, she sat down calmly beside Judy, looking as resigned as any housewife waiting for a bus, her hair still in Virginia’s home-made curlers.