The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘As a matter of fact, I’m not. No. Listen, old thing, who I am is – I didn’t like to say, didn’t want to put the foot down too hard, but I’m really Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course, I would have recognised you anywhere. Come this way, Sir Hugh. I have laid out the best glasses, the best whisky, and the best meat pie you will ever have tasted in your life, but first I must light a candle or two.’

  They stared at each other through the candlelight, and somehow, even though the journey had been as long as hell, even though he had to get back on ops sooner than he cared to think, Daisy looked so beautiful that David knew at once that every minute with her was going to be golden. He knew that whatever happened to him, in his last moments – if they came sooner rather than later – he would always think of her as she was at that minute, slightly sleepy-eyed, slightly tousled, wearing a now rather crumpled Christmas party dress with sequins around the top. He had never seen her in a dress before, only in her ATA uniform. The cut of the silk followed the contours of her body, showed the outline of her small rounded breasts.

  ‘God, you are so beautiful, Daisy, you make me feel as if this war had never started. Stay as you are, don’t move. Let me always remember you like this!’

  He raised his glass to her, and as he did so there was the sound of a siren, and they knew they should get under the table, or go to the coal cellar, but they didn’t, they went to her bedroom, and David undressed her, and they made love so beautifully that even the picnic in the sitting room was forgotten in favour of lying together until the dawn of Christmas, when they were woken by the telephone ringing. Daisy was wanted back by the ATA, as soon as possible. She shrugged her shoulders as David moaned, ‘But it’s Christmas! Surely we can have a few more hours?’

  But apparently not. Christmas during the Great War might have meant a ceasefire, but now it meant only a few hours before the bombing and the destruction began again, and Spitfires were wanted, Hurricanes were wanted, everything was wanted, and sooner rather than later, when it might be far too late.

  ‘One of the aircraft factories has been hit, so it’s all hands to the pump, old thing!’ Daisy said, determined to be lighthearted.

  David looked mournful.

  ‘A few more hours?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘We’ve gone through our emotional coupons for the moment, and you know it.’

  He turned away from her. They both knew, had always known, they were only sitting in an oasis for a few hours, and then it was back to the harsh reality, of death lurking behind every burnt-out building, behind every telegram regretting to inform the recipient that someone was ‘missing’. Such was the sorrow of the times that only love relieved the pain, and youthful energy fuelled the duties ahead. That and the will to win, or rather, not to be defeated.

  Daisy pinned up her blonde hair and pulled down her uniform jacket. Time to go.

  ‘I won’t look back, and don’t you wave,’ she called to David as she sprang up the area steps into the dawn light. ‘Whatever happens, don’t wave.’

  David turned, and it was only when he reached the front door of the basement flat that he noticed the sign reading: ‘THE DAISY CLUB – MEMBERS ONLY! NO NAZIS!’

  Once inside he saw the visitors’ book, with all the girls’ names signed in. Taking up the pen that lay beside it, he cheekily wrote his own name under theirs, and then went back to bed for a few hours.

  Christmas luncheon at the Hall, in the basement kitchens, prepared by Branscombe, was as sumptuous as he could make it, helped and sometimes abetted as he had been by his many helpers. There was not just one turkey, but two to carve, and many side-dishes of extravagant pre-war delight, three sets of Miss Jean’s potatoes, once so despised by Miss Maude, and plenty of cabbage, also once the cause of Miss Maude’s disdain.

  No one asked where most of the food had come from, although Dan did bolt back to his flat to make sure that, ‘No one’s gone and stealed my girls’, in exchange for the turkeys, or done some other piece of nifty barter at their expense.

  Of course they all knew that it would have spoilt everything to have known the exact origins of the turkeys, let alone which of the pigs had gone to make the sausages – which were out of this world. Since there were so many of them, Branscombe and Freddie had designed the meal so they all started by eating a piece of Yorkshire pudding. Branscombe had suggested this to Freddie, knowing that by starting with a piece of pudding, as in the old way, the guests’ appetites would be kept at bay, just a little.

  Of course Freddie had always been aware, since she was quite little, that Branscombe had a pretty special hold on the rest of the countryside around Twistleton. His contacts were second to none. Also, since his father and grandfather, on his mother’s side, had been in the Connaught Rangers, ‘foraging’ was second nature to him. Or as Aunt Jessie had always said, ‘it was in the blood’. So nothing was said about the enormity of the spread at Christmas luncheon, food that they had spent several days preparing, although, inevitably, eyes came out on stalks at how crowded their plates were allowed to be.

  ‘Won’t always be like this,’ Branscombe murmured, as he heaped up yet another plate, and another contented guest reeled off towards the kitchen table staring down at their helping with disbelieving eyes.

  For the first time ever, Miss Maude had changed her mind about where she would spend her Christmas luncheon, and now that she had, she was very glad about it, although it had taken some effort on her behalf to break with her time-old tradition of Christmas in the dining room. But when the time came, after they had all been to church, she was quite relieved to find herself not upstairs, pretending that everything was still the same as it had always been. The truth was that she and Daisy, all alone with only one of the luckless and understandably resentful maids serving them, had been really playing a game of pretend. They had been pretending, or rather Maude had, that everything had not changed since the Great War. All quite absurd, now that she came to think of it.

  ‘Pull the wishbone with me, Miss Maude?’ Branscombe asked.

  Maude nodded. She had always hoped to be the one chosen to pull the wishbone by their father, if only so she could offer it to young Roderick, who always closed his eyes and said his wish out aloud, inevitably spoiling the whole effect.

  ‘Look at that, you’ve only gone and won it!’ Branscombe nodded approvingly at the wishbone that Miss Maude was holding. ‘Now, I wonder what you will wish for, Miss Maude?’

  Maude closed her eyes. She knew just what she would wish.

  She wished, how she wished, for her darling Daisy to come home to the Hall.

  She had known now for some time that she should never have behaved the way she had towards Daisy. Her only excuse was that she had found it unbearable seeing her going off like that, seeing the look in her eyes, the replica of that in her poor dead mother’s, Maude’s sister-in-law, who had been piloting a plane to Deauville just after the war, when it had crashed, leaving Maude to bring up Daisy. Maude just hadn’t been able to face even the idea of losing Daisy, so had disinherited her, cut her off rather than have to wait around in that unbearable way, waiting, always waiting, to hear that she had been lost.

  She knew now she had reacted in a way she should never have done. She must make it right after Christmas, make everything right again.

  Mentally she raised her eyes to heaven. Sorry, God! Awful war, awful war, it did it for one finally, one reacted in a foolish fashion, and then regretted it.

  Branscombe stared at her as she opened her eyes.

  Maude stared back at him, waving the wishbone.

  ‘I was just wishing that Miss Daisy would come home!’

  Branscombe smiled, but at the same time he shook his head.

  ‘Never reveal your wish, Miss Maude, didn’t your nanny tell you that?’

  They both laughed, and then Maude turned away. Well, never mind that, she had told her wish, and nothing could be done about it now. Th
e truth was that just the sight of Daisy would be the best Christmas present she could have had. Just the sight of her swinging through the double doors into the Hall, eyes sparkling, bubbling over with excitement, bursting to tell her old Aunt Maude a story.

  The worst of it was just how much she despised herself for being so scared of loss that she had banished the one person she truly loved from her life. The truth was that the burden of her grief, untold for so many years after the Great War, had somehow swelled up inside her, and she had been unable to contain her dread of losing Daisy. She had banished her instead, when she should have known that nothing could protect a loved one, nothing but prayer, and hope.

  Chapter Ten

  The calendar said February 1941, but as far as Jean was concerned it was really saying ‘only three weeks to go’.

  ‘You should be careful about that baby of yours,’ Freddie had spent the last few months warning her. ‘It will be born running, and much sooner than it should, if you go on as you do.’

  Jean shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘If it was going to be born sooner, Freddie, it would have happened in the trap by now. Bounce, bounce, bounce!’

  Freddie, half-asleep after her night-work, gently pushed Jean back down into the old kitchen chair, and for a few seconds she sank gratefully back against the old Liberty flower-printed cushions that lined it.

  ‘Sit you down, Mrs Huggett duckie, and let me make you a nice cup of warming tea.’

  Jean struggled to get up.

  ‘I can’t stay for a cup of tea, Freddie. I have to get on, truly I do.’

  ‘Those girls of yours, what are they for, Jean? Leave it to them, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘Those girls of mine, as you call them, are all down with influenza. High temperatures, the lot. Doctor Blackie called last evening when you had gone off to the hospital. Came across on his horse, and he says that half the troops in the village have got the same bug. I could see he was hoping that it wasn’t Spanish flu.’

  Both young women looked at each other. They had grown up with people talking in low tones about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1917, which had taken off millions of people. When it did not kill, it had often left people unconscious to the world, graven images locked into hospital beds, unaware of their condition, their loved ones left grieving for people who were dead, and yet not dead.

  ‘What a winter! Enough to get us down, it is, really,’ Freddie murmured, putting a kettle on the old kitchen range. It would take so long to heat up, she knew that they would be lucky to have a cup of tea before dinner was on the table.

  ‘Trust the troops to bring a bug into Twistleton. Doctor Blackie said that we haven’t had anything like this for years and years.’

  ‘The trouble is most of the men, well, they’re not from these parts, so they have no respect for anything or anybody. If they were the North Wessex or the South or North Wiltshires it might be different, but no, they’re from all over, and care nothing about Twistleton and us.’

  ‘I gather most of the village street has been shelled since General what’s-his-name graced Twistleton with his presence.’

  Jean stared at Freddie, realising at once from what she had just said that she could hardly have left the Hall for weeks.

  ‘Are you no longer going to the hospital, Freddie?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ Freddie asserted stoutly, throwing back her plait of brown hair. ‘I’m on nights at the moment, and in between I take charge here, trying to help out as much as possible. I go across the fields on my bicycle, with no lights at this time of year – it is certainly very interesting, my deah!’ she joked.

  Jean seemed satisfied by this, but she still refused the cup of precious black tea on offer, and after struggling to her feet she finally walked off into the bitter weather to try and do something useful about the place. Cows had to be brought in for milking.

  The cows were out today, and they might be hard to get in, but they were good girls all of them, no trouble to milk, no trouble to feed, not a kicker amongst them, and, despite the land girls being down with the influenza, with the Lindsay boys to help her she could cope.

  Freddie yawned as she watched Jean waddling off, bursting out of her woollies and clumping along in her farm boots. Then she gave a small exhausted sigh. She could hardly put one foot in front of the other. She closed her eyes, and sat back down in the chair. Jean was still a very pretty girl with her wild black curls and her beautiful complexion, but nowadays, despite the pregnancy bloom, she was looking tired and anxious. Frankly, now that she was so far gone, she was nothing but a worry, and to Branscombe too. Both he and Freddie complained almost hourly that Jean was doing far too much, most especially in her condition. And now, of course, with the girls all abed with fevers, the nagging feeling that she should have her feet up, and not be chasing cows over all but frozen fields, persisted.

  Freddie never thought she would think it, let alone say it, but only the previous evening she and Branscombe had raised their poor old glasses, and thanked heaven for the Lindsay boys. Without them there would be cows with full udders all over the place, not to mention vegetables not dug, pigs not swilled, and eggs not collected.

  In the end a decision had had to be made, and Freddie had made it the week before. She was so worried about Jean that she had swapped her duties at the hospital for being on nights, the better to keep a sleepy eye on the poor girl during the day. Branscombe could keep an eye and an ear out for her at night, since they were both housed in the stables.

  ‘The moment that baby starts, Branscombe, if it starts at night, you must send Jean to the hospital. If you can’t go with her, send Alec, send Dick, send anyone, not Miss Beresford, obviously, especially not now that she has the influenza.’ She stopped. ‘Have we checked on Miss Beresford, by the way, Branscombe?’

  Branscombe nodded.

  ‘Doctor Blackie visited this morning, after he was called out to the stables to the land girls. Don’t you worry, Miss Freddie, I made sure of that. But you know Miss Beresford, it is all I can do to make her stay in bed, even though Doctor Blackie told me her temperature is worryingly high. Of course one of her troubles is that her room is such a freezing great barn at the best of times, and now – well, frankly, you would be warmer standing outside.’

  Freddie felt impatient. She couldn’t help it. Everything at the Hall, unlike the poor old Court, was half-done, nothing really completed, tiles off the roof, pipes still stuffed with last year’s leaves, chimneys with rooks’ nests. Had the army not been occupying the Court, she would have suggested that they all move into Aunt Jessica’s house, but that was not possible, or even permissible, now. She paused, remembering how hard Jessica had worked to keep the Court going, to keep it in model-farm condition, and now even to pass it on foot or bicycle was too painful for words. She was only thankful that her aunt was away, and could only hope that by the time she came back, something would have happened to right it. Although she somehow doubted that.

  Branscombe kept saying, in a sombre voice, ‘Once the army have been in, Miss Freddie, a house never recovers.’ Needless to say, it was a statement that did nothing to cheer the listener. Now he was saying, ‘We could try and light a fire for Miss Maude in that little grate in her bedroom, but I’m afraid that it will catch the chimney on fire. There are so many birds’ nests stuck down all the chimneys they start to smoke within a minute. It’s a wonder the whole place hasn’t caught fire years ago, really it is, Miss Freddie.’

  It was true. The rooks had long made their homes in the myriad chimneys above the Hall roof. With their nests preventing any fires, it was no wonder that Miss Maude’s room was such a freezing great barn, and all the chimney-brushes Branscombe had managed to find had been too decrepit to use, or too short for the flues. Cleaning these chimneys would be a job for a professional, whenever they could find one.

  Freddie dreaded going up to Miss Maude’s room. It was not just that it was freezing, and that the jugs of water in the pretty flowered
basin and carafes were literally iced over. It was that, despite its lovely Edwardian furnishings, its many covered tables of floral chintz, its plethora of silver-framed photographs, its mahogany bed with velvet trimmings and graceful curtains of such intricately pleated silk that they caught the eye even more than the paintings of ancestors on the walls, it was the saddest place in the world. The room of a spinster daughter who had been left alone to struggle on, to cope as best she could, winter after winter, with burst pipes and freezing weather – and, worst of all, with impossible standards, keeping up the facade all alone, when everyone else had gone.

  There was a painting over the chimneypiece of a young boy with dark curly hair, who was staring out at the onlooker as he must have stared out at Gainsborough. He had a slight frown, as if he was hoping that this dull business of sitting for a painter for his portrait would be over soon, as if he was longing to be allowed to scramble out of his red velvet suit with its large lace collar and its large lace cuffs, and run off into the grounds of the Hall with the gardener, or the gamekeeper, or his tutor – anyone who would allow him to pick up his fishing rod, or chase after his dog, or shoot a rabbit, anyone who would allow him to enjoy himself as he wanted. Freddie knew from something that Miss Maude had said that the boy in the painting was the spit of her brother Roderick, and it made her sad, so that when she went into the room she dropped her eyes rather than catch sight of the portrait, however beautiful.

  ‘I will check on Miss Maude later, Branscombe, before I leave for night duty, but for the moment I think she should be allowed to rest. So, don’t you worry about it.’

  ‘Miss Maude is a tough old bird,’ Branscombe muttered to the dogs, once Freddie had gone back to bed. ‘Take more than a bout of influenza to carry off Miss Maude, take more than a regiment of Nazi soldiers, take more than I like to think. Come on, off up the kitchen stairs, time we all went for our constitutional.’

  Branscombe looked round at the gaggle of assorted dogs, and then once again, out of habit and before he could check himself, he looked round for young Johnny.