The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  As the siren continued its long drawn out threnody it occurred to Judy that women would do anything to make themselves feel better, no matter what. Come bombs, come battle, women would improve on their natural assets, which was probably why they were such survivors. They would not go under. They would endure. She had heard that women in prison wiped whitewash off the walls to powder their noses and keep them from shining.

  In the event, Virginia, with her usual panache, made sure that none of her customers wasted their time in her Anderson shelter. As she finished brushing out her first customer’s perm, she passed on her own beauty tips to her fascinated audience.

  ‘See my lips? They look good, don’t they? Well, that’s not lipstick, it’s beetroot, finished off with Vaseline, which gives a nice shiny effect, don’t you think? Eyelashes?’ They all leaned forward, deeply impressed, as she lowered her face to them, and shut her eyes and opened them again to demonstrate their immaculate appearance. ‘That’s burnt cork; eyebrow pencil – same. You can use boot polish, but if you’re involved in what we will call a close-up with a member of the armed forces, or your Mr Regular, it can prove a bit smelly, at least that’s what I’ve found.’

  She gave her usual devil-may-care laugh, and proceeded over the next half hour not just to wash and style Judy’s long, shining hair, but to advise on the best way to make face cream out of the most unlikely ingredients, and put perfume into melted down soap to add more glamour to a shampoo.

  ‘There you are, my dear,’ she finally told her seemingly expertly permed first customer. ‘You’re finished; and what’s more the all-clear has just sounded. And no thanks to the Nazis I’m only three hours behind in my day, which is a bit of a miracle.’

  Back again in the salon, Virginia watched the woman walking happily out of the door with a mixed expression on her face.

  ‘Poor soul, she does so love a perm, she had to have one, nothing else would do,’ she said, as she stared after the lady in question who was now sashaying proudly down the street. ‘I only hope she makes it home because the poor dear’s been here since early dawn and just won’t admit she’s popping.’

  She turned on the wireless and started humming along to ‘Some Sunny Day’, while Judy waited patiently for Mattie to be washed and set.

  ‘Come back to my house this evening. Come and have Green Ration Book supper, on me.’ Mattie was looking and feeling better than she had been for days, and as the other three looked doubtfully at each other she clinched it by saying, ‘Daddy’s out, so please, all come, will you? We can be quite private, if Daddy’s out.’

  ‘We’d love to, Mattie ducky,’ Virginia told her briskly. ‘Course we’ll come.’

  Returning to her dull but vital job in the Food Office after having her hair washed and set, Rusty, like the other three, not only felt glamorous, but found herself looking forward to a girls’ evening in. It would be most enjoyable to spend an evening somewhere other than her parents’ house, or the Three Tuns. At the end of a long day dealing with nothing but filing cards, which were about to be moved to Bexham Library for safety, she duly returned home and changed into the lovely dress that Mattie Eastcott had given her.

  Turning round again and again in front of the mirror, she realised that a beautiful dress really did turn you into a beauty, by its cut, by its allure. Mattie’s dress made Rusty look slim and glamorous, and set off her Titian hair. It was pale blue with pretty sleeves; the design a little old-fashioned because it was from before the war. Apparently Mattie’s father had given it to her for her birthday, but Mattie had not been able to get near it, due to her pregnancy. Rusty shook out her hair proudly. She loved the new look that Virginia had given her, managing somehow by dint of her strange potions to straighten Rusty’s curls into a shining bob.

  At Mattie’s house, Virginia opened the door to her, wearing slacks.

  ‘I say, Mattie, do look – the war’s turned Rusty into a girl, and Judy and me into boys!’ Virginia looked thoughtful for a second. ‘Just think,’ she said to Rusty, ‘before the war if any of us had walked down the street in slacks there would have been cat calls and goodness knows what else. Shocking stuff, a woman in slacks of all things. And now look, no one turns a hair.’

  ‘The vicar is still shocked by slacks,’ Judy said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Won’t have them in his church.’

  They all laughed. Mattie too, but unlike the others she also gasped. Naturally, because they were all too busy pouring drinks and lighting cigarettes, no one heard Mattie gasp. She hardly heard herself, although a minute later, when she laughed again at something outrageous that Virginia had just said, she found that she had cause to gasp once more. This time everyone in the room heard, even Mattie. They turned first to her, and then to each other.

  ‘My God, Mattie, you’re starting, don’t tell me you’re starting. My God, you are, you’re starting. You can’t start yet,’ Virginia told her. ‘We haven’t even mixed the second gin and It.’

  ‘Where does the midwife live, Mattie?’ Judy asked, gently, as she saw what was happening, and Virginia ran for towels.

  ‘The other side of Bexham, you know, you go up Badger Lane on up towards Peak Farm, past there, and on – oh, you know—’ Mattie gasped again. ‘You know! Mrs Ripley – Chick Mill – that’s her house, except it’s not a mill any more.’

  At that moment the awful wail of the siren started, its very tone seeming to be conveying only doom.

  ‘Mattie, you can’t have a baby here, not without the midwife.’

  ‘I must be early! I can’t be. I must be. Blimey, I wasn’t due for another fortnight.’

  Mattie stared up at them all, calmly. She was the only person who was calm, although not the only person staring. Judy, Rusty and Virginia all now stared at each other.

  ‘We’ll have to go down to the basement, duck,’ Virginia told Mattie, suddenly practical. ‘We will, really. And then one of us will have to go for Mrs Chick at Ripley Mill.’

  ‘No, Virginia – Mrs Ripley at Chick Mill, except it’s not a mill any more—’

  ‘Oh, do shut up about the mill, Mattie,’ Judy exploded suddenly, ‘and let’s get some more towels, because you really are in need of some!’

  Virginia, knowing the house from before the war, quickly organised towels and bedding in the basement, and then volunteered to go for Mrs Ripley.

  ‘See you,’ she called cheerfully from the top of the steps, turning round and smiling as she did so.

  Rusty looked up at her new friend for a second and smiled. Virginia looked so chic, changed from her boiler suit to slacks and a zip-up jacket, homemade, but elegant. She was now twisting up her hair underneath a scarf and knotting the scarf on top of her head. She kissed the tips of her fingers to Judy and Rusty, and seconds later she was gone.

  ‘I don’t know why you didn’t book yourself into the nursing home in Churchester like everyone else in the village is doing. It’s only cheap, you know – everyone else has had their babies there, and it’s everything you could want, apparently,’ Judy said suddenly to Mattie. ‘The nursing for mums during the war is meant to be better than it has ever been.’

  ‘I didn’t want to go to Churchester.’

  Mattie could not say why, but having Michael’s baby in Churchester was just not something she wanted to do. It was as if, having his baby at home, she could make believe that somehow she and he had been in touch all the time, and any moment now he would come through the door, tall, handsome, American, in his impeccably cut uniform, his smile as wide as the marriage bonds that would always separate them from each other.

  Because a part of her, although only a very small part of her, hoped against hope that, knowing she lived in Bexham, one day Michael would come and search her out there, and by-mistake-on-purpose find the baby too.

  Later, once the all clear had sounded, they managed to shift Mattie from the basement to her own bedroom where they made more proper preparations for the arrival, all the time hoping that the baby would make his or
her entrance into the world in a nice slow fashion, giving the midwife time to arrive.

  ‘I hear there are no anaesthetics to spare now, not for civilians, so there would be nothing to give her to relieve the pain, anyway, even if she was in a nursing home.’

  Rusty tried to look philosophical. She and Judy had left Mattie to try to have some sleep in between the pains, which were still only coming every twenty minutes, and were now attempting to make themselves a hot drink in Lionel’s over-tidy kitchen.

  ‘Oh, look, orange juice, how jolly. Let’s boil some water and make hot orange.’

  As they did so, Rusty asked after the Tates, knowing that in doing so she was really asking after Judy too.

  It seemed that Loopy had done her very best to keep some sort of spark burning, initially in the hope that everyone was wrong and one sunny spring day she would look up and see Walter strolling up the garden with dog at heel, cigarette as always in one corner of his mouth, perhaps a bunch of wild daffodils for her in one hand.

  But when she could no longer fool herself that ‘missing believed killed’ did not actually mean lost for ever, she tried to keep the spark alive with other things, at first with prayer. Then, when she thought that God had failed her, she stopped bothering with God, which was understandable, because no one could know what the loss of a son felt like to a mother. This savage tearing of the heart, this seeming irreparable damage to mind and soul. Not God, not Judy, not Hugh – perhaps least of all Hugh who had high-tailed it back to London and the War Office as soon as he could.

  She knew it was wrong to love Walter and miss him as much as she did, because, unlike so many other women, she had two other sons. So she thought she wouldn’t leave yet. She would wait for Walter’s birthday. And she would wait to see Judy again, brave little Judy who was holding the fort at Owl Cottage, still not really able to believe that Walter would not be coming home to her.

  As they had embraced, under Loopy’s silks and fine wools Judy had felt her frailty, the inner thinness of this valiant, elegant woman. And when she stepped back to look at her better it seemed to Judy that her mother-in-law might have already left for another world, that while her thin, taut body might be present at Shelborne, Loopy herself had, in fact, gone, caught the train.

  But now, facing Rusty across the table, Judy merely said, ‘Oh, you know, she’s going along as best she might. She has her bad days and she has her good days, but all in all, well, that’s the best I can say, that she’s doing her best. John comes home, Hugh’s in London, Dauncy’s home quite a lot actually because the east wing of his school received a direct hit. Sometimes when I have a little time off Loopy comes to visit me at Owl Cottage. I think that’s a comfort, because of Walter’s things being there. But it’s difficult. And, you know . . . anyway, how is everything at your place?’

  There was no time to find out from Rusty just how things were at her place, how they never heard from Mickey, how Tom’s memory seemed to fill the house all the more because he remained unburied at the bottom of the sea, how her father’s mind now seemed to be actually wandering, and sometimes when she went in to see him of an evening he appeared to think that she was her mother, and at other times that it was before the war. How he spoke to her in different voices – sometimes in the deep seafarer’s tones of the former strong, confident man with his own boatyard, sometimes in the pathetic voice of an old man, and how confusing it all was, and how she longed to make it all different. There was no time for all this because from upstairs there was a sudden loud cry. Mattie was, it seemed, not only awake but this time bearing down, her baby about to make its appearance, and not a sign of Mrs Ripley of Chick Mill, or any other place.

  Before leaving, Virginia had carefully laid out scissors and cotton, and written instructions, but faced with the reality of a birth both Judy and Rusty wished that Virginia herself, who always seemed so unflappable, so redoubtable, was there, rather than just her instructions on a piece of paper.

  ‘It says here we must boil the scissors – I’ll go and do that.’

  Rusty rushed out of the door, not just because she realised, as Mattie gasped and swore, that cutting the umbilical cord might be imminent, but because she could not wait to get out of the room anyway. Childbirth did not frighten her, it terrified her.

  ‘And bring some more towels!’

  Rusty flew down the stairs as fast as she could. God, having babies was almost as bad as Dunkirk, perhaps worse, since there was no Mr Kinnersley there to reassure her in his deep voice, no man there as it were to conduct proceedings from the helm.

  However, no sooner had Mattie yelled out once again to her Maker for a new and terrible strength to cope with the pain she was enduring than Lionel, coming off his fire watching, sea watching, all seeing duties with the Home Guard, fitted his key into the door of the house, only to be greeted as he opened the door by the worst scream that Mattie had yet let loose.

  Lionel knew nothing of childbirth except that there always seemed to be a great need for boiling water, so on hearing his daughter’s quite terrifying scream he thought he knew at once not only what was happening, but what was wanted, and went straight to the kitchen and started to boil water. He knew from the lack of ordered sound upstairs, the constant drumming of female feet as they rushed to and fro, that there was no midwife, as yet, present, and that being so there would be nothing to relieve poor Mattie of the awful pain. Even though all the major anaesthetics had to go to relieve the war wounded – and whatever pregnant women were, or were not, they were not that – most Sussex midwives, although not equipped with anything sophisticated, travelled about with their own pills and potions.

  As he watched the kettle coming to the boil, more slowly than it seemed it had ever done, he realised that he was in a state of mind that was somehow frozen. It was exactly as if it was not really him standing watching the kettle, and as if the kettle was not really going to boil. While this sense of unreality floated through his body, a much darker sense of reality marched through his head, and it seemed to him that all he could hear was his own voice, when he returned from the Three Tuns, just after Mathilda was born, saying complacently to the nurse, ‘Well, that wasn’t too bad, was it, Nurse Miller?’ and wondering why, in return, Nurse Miller had given him such a very cold, very pitying, and very old-fashioned look.

  Ever tried having a baby, Mr Eastcott?

  But now it was not Nurse Miller speaking, but a really very lovely-looking Rusty Todd standing in front of Lionel waiting for him to hand her the kettle, before she shot back upstairs with it.

  ‘No, Rusty, as a matter of fact I haven’t. I believe it’s too painful for men to have babies. Besides, as I now know, men are far too cowardly. As my wife used to say, if it were up to us to have the babies, the world would have stopped years ago. Left to us males the whole human race would stop, just couldn’t take it, that’s what I think anyway, since you ask.’

  Rusty Todd seemed somehow mollified by the humble tone of this anti-male speech, but nevertheless her whole demeanour, like that of Judy Tate, seemed very close to despite when it came to poor Lionel. It was as if, by standing in the kitchen helplessly boiling water, he represented the very worst in the whole male species. Or as if he had made Mattie have this unwanted child, his grandchild, as if he had made her come home and have a baby, when it was truly the last thing that he would have wanted – until he saw him.

  It was not something that Lionel was prepared for, not something to which he had ever even given a thought, the idea that he would have a grandson, that someone would hand him a bundle of laundry which contained a small, perfectly formed face crowned by a halo of dark hair. The overwhelming feeling that came to Lionel as he gazed down at the little chap was that his life had, after all, somehow been worthwhile, that for all the bitterness and boredom that had lain between himself and Maude, for all the constraints and strain, he was now being given a second chance.

  He put his finger out and felt the power of life in the small grasp
. He kissed the top of the baby’s forehead, and after all the horrors of the war, after all the dead bodies, after Maude’s heroic death, despite everything that was happening, and even what was to come, he felt able and whole once more. He felt a purpose coming back into his being. Here was someone he could take sailing on the calm summer waters, here was someone he could teach to hold a cricket bat, someone he could guide and understand. His grandson.

  It was a cold, cold early morning into which Judy and Rusty finally found themselves, leaving Mattie and the baby with Lionel.

  ‘No midwife, no Virginia. Strange, that. They must have been stranded up there in them there hills, cowboy,’ Judy joked to Rusty as she shivered in the cold of the day that was creeping towards them, the feeble light of her silly little torch hardly making an impression on the ground more than a yard ahead of them.

  They groped their way along the narrow path that led back to the main part of the village in silence. Of a sudden Rusty found that she was really looking forward to telling her mother that she had helped to deliver a baby. Judy was looking forward to telling John Tate the same thing, when he next came home on leave. She thought it might interest him in a way that nothing else she said did. She was also, as always, looking forward to going back to Owl Cottage, hoping, praying that she would somehow, against all the odds, find Walter there waiting for her. It was a ridiculous fantasy of hers, and one that she re-enacted every day. Perhaps because there were no funerals for those who were missing believed dead, Judy could not get over the idea that Walter would come back to them, that he would prove the authorities wrong, that he was not missing and dead, but missing and alive.

  Only Loopy Tate’s despair in the middle of this awful war defeated Judy’s optimism. Seeing her mother-in-law nowadays was not something to which Judy could look forward. It was not something to which anyone could look forward, and when she parted from Rusty, finally and thankfully arriving outside the front door of Owl Cottage, she was so tired, so fagged out, that she could have sunk down and fallen asleep on the doorstep. Instead she found a note from Dauncy tucked into the old brass letterbox.