The Daisy Club Read online

  ‘No, Relia, it’s people who let Hitler stroll across Czechoslovakia unhindered who are the warmongers, just too lily-livered to recognise a tyrant. Now, come on, everyone, it’s off to the Golf Club for a bit of practice.’

  ‘What sort of practice—’

  ‘First aid, gas masks, anything you care to name, apparently.’

  Aurelia sniffed.

  ‘I wish I’d never come down, now. I thought we were going to have fun.’

  ‘I know, dear, and you’re not the only one,’ Laura told her affectionately. ‘Now belt up, buckle up, and look on the bright side, it’s something to do when you get back to London. You can practise bandaging Mummy and Daddy.’

  ‘I wish you weren’t always so horrid to me, Laura, truly I do. It makes me feel sick when you are horrid.’

  ‘At least you’re not pregnant,’ Freddie said, putting an arm round Aurelia in a vaguely patronising manner.

  ‘Now you’ve only gone and reminded me of that awful man—’

  Aurelia shook her head, looking tearful once more.

  Laura walked ahead with Daisy.

  ‘Oh well, at least we have our very own secret weapon—’

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘Yes, if Relia doesn’t get Herr Hitler down, no one will,’ she agreed. ‘Five minutes with her, and Hitler will turn tail and flee back to Germany.’

  Chapter Two

  The party from Twistleton Court could walk round to the golf club, where the ARP meeting was being held, because the club backed on to Twistleton land. Laura appreciated that they must make a strange-looking party. First, leading the way at a brisk pace, was Aunt Jessica, her head a little forward, her brogue shoes supporting surprisingly elegant legs, her tweed skirt and twinset of pale blue, and her single string of pearls all looking as they should in the countryside setting. Next came Branscombe in eyepatch and his faded butler’s jacket and trousers, looking brave because he was walking beside Blossom and the dachshunds, and then the four of them, Laura, Freddie, Daisy and Aurelia, all wearing expressions of solemnity, as if they were going to church, while sporting rather less countrified clothes than Aunt Jessica. Laura was once more wearing lipstick, which she knew was just not done in the country, but about which she cared less, since she always thought she looked fawn without a dash of red on the mouth, and looking fawn was not something that suited her, it made her feel fawn – so too bad about the proper rules of how to look in the country.

  They were all so busy chatting that they walked past a notice on the open gate. As always Branscombe was the only person to stop and bother to read it.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Aunt Jessica, having rattled the door handle on the thin wooden golf-club door, stepped back, and turned to the others.

  ‘They must have forgotten we were coming.’

  Branscombe hurried up.

  ‘There’s a notice on the gate, Miss Jessica, says all ARP meetings are to be held at the village hall.’

  Jessica stared at her beloved general factotum of many years, and then at the gate, as if it was a badly behaved visitor.

  ‘It says what, Branscombe?’

  Branscombe sighed.

  ‘I told you, Miss Jessica, the gentlemen of the club would not countenance anyone of the opposite sex—’

  Jessica turned towards the door of the golf club and rattled the handle.

  ‘This is a disgrace, Branscombe,’ she protested, quietly. ‘Quite, quite disgraceful.’

  ‘They’ve never yet allowed a woman into Twistleton Golf Club, Miss Jessica, not even though Miss Manningham won that cup off of them, disguised as a man.’

  ‘Oh yes, dear Dorelia Manningham, dear well-named lady.’ Jessica sighed nostalgically, momentarily distracted. ‘Was that before or after she won the Wychford pipe-smoking competition, Branscombe?’

  ‘As you may remember, Miss Manningham attracted so much publicity for that particular incident, it put paid to her sporting exploits. Whereupon she retired to Scotland and took up whaling, only to return here after an unhappy incident involving some nets, a grand Scottish lady, and a dozen lobsters found hidden in a suitcase. Chutney-making is now the order of the day at Needles House, I believe.’

  ‘Good gracious, Branscombe, you are a walking encyclopedia of Twistleton news, truly you are,’ Jessica told him in a distracted, yet admiring voice, before nodding towards the distant church spire of St Mary. ‘Well, I suppose the only thing we can now do is to redirect our efforts to the village hall, as per the instructions on the gate.’

  The elegant man took out a gold cigarette case and, having extended it to his companion opposite, took a cigarette from it himself, and lit it.

  ‘Hosting a dinner party this weekend,’ he said, as they both watched the smoke from their cigarettes drift out of the open window over the London rooftops. ‘Might well get a handle on the two of them, they’re coming over, bringing George Arletti, and un tel.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it is une telle, one Gloria Martine. We’ve been tagging her since 1934, much good it has done us.’

  His elegant friend gave a short humourless laugh.

  ‘Much good any of this has done us, my dear chap, but we must soldier on, keep going, nothing else we can do.’

  ‘It would be easier if we knew just a little of what was going through Chamberlain’s mind.’

  ‘My dear fellow, the answer to that is truly – nothing. Nothing goes through the mind of a ditherer. No defined principles means that you go in all directions at once, spread yourself thin, and fall through the middle – all at the same time.’

  His companion gave a genuine laugh at this.

  ‘An apt description of an appeaser, if I may say so. What have you arranged for the weekend?’

  ‘Apparently Jessica Valentyne is sending me over a quantity of debutantes to dress up as waitresses, who might, now I come to think of it, report back to me, and after that we shall just have to see. The moment the balloon goes up, that little clutch of Fascists, otherwise known as my neighbours, will be thrown into jug, or else I shall want to know the reason why.’

  The speaker stubbed out his cigarette, shook his companion by the hand, and walked with a quick light step from the small sitting room of the nondescript flat, and so out into the summer sunshine. As he walked along he felt, as he always did after such meetings with his contacts in the ever-growing, colossally chaotic security service, distinctly frustrated. The feeling of treading eternal water, of being a greyhound left in the traps, the sheer helplessness of it all, of not quite knowing what could be done, or whether the little they were doing would do any good at all, would sweep over him – and only throwing himself into his motor car, and driving down to his country house just a little too fast, cleared the depression.

  Today he drove if anything even faster, putting it all from him just for that time, and finally arrived at his house feeling better. He had, after all, sought and finally been given a role: that at least was something.

  To her immense surprise, by the time they reached the village hall Jessica found herself and her little party edging past the best crowd that they had yet seen. There must have been thirty or forty villagers, of all ages. Jessica immediately felt heartened. Blossom, understandably cautious, picked up the two dachshunds, and the whole party from the Court made its way up to the front of the hall, where Jessica then took her place at a pre-set table.

  ‘As you all must now realise, this meeting was meant to be at Twistleton Golf Club, but looking round I see you were all commendably more realistic than I was, and redirected yourselves here, knowing as you obviously do that the members of Twistleton Golf Club do not recognise the existence of the opposite sex – it seems they were all born of men.’

  A surge of laughter greeted this statement.

  ‘Now, we must get on with the lecture, but first of all – gas masks.’

  ‘Oh, dear, I think I will faint if we have to wear one of those all the time,’ Aurelia moaned.

  Lau
ra stared ahead at the demonstration on the stage. Somehow, even up until this last week, despite all the talk in previous years – perhaps because of it – war had seemed really quite remote. A little like a thunderstorm raging fifteen or twenty miles away, but which still might miss where you happened to be living. But now, seeing the goodly people on the stage with their gas masks on, it was a dreadful reality for the first time, although thankfully very far away from the ballrooms and elegant townhouses she had left behind in London, where everyone seemed to be still pretending that war would never, ever happen, and nothing would come between them and their social lives.

  Even so, surely something would happen to prevent it? Surely someone would put up a hand, or blow a whistle, and cry, ‘Enough of this dangerous carry-on! Of course we are not all going to kill each other again when hardly twenty years have gone by since we were all burying our dear ones? Please, please, please not.’

  At that moment the door of the hall was flung open, and everyone turned.

  Jessica looked down the room, and smiled, albeit a little wearily.

  ‘Good evening, Jean . . .’

  The tall young girl with a mass of shining dark curly hair and strangely cat-like green eyes limped up the side of the hall, her progress followed with great interest by the rest of the gathering.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Valentyne, I didn’t realise that the brakes on my bicycle were completely bished.’ She turned first one grazed elbow round, and then the other, and stared at them with detached interest. ‘But I do now.’

  ‘Obviously, Jean, but just so long as you are all right.’ Jessica frowned. ‘As a matter of fact you can come up to the stage, if you would, because seeing that you are so conveniently covered in cuts and bruises, I think we will find we can put you to jolly good use.’

  To the sound of appreciative laughter Jean limped up on to the stage, and proceeded to stare with some interest at the array of gas masks on the table.

  ‘Do you want me to put one of these on, Miss Valentyne?’

  Jessica shook her head.

  ‘No, dear, we want you to lie down so we can bandage you.’

  Without more ado Jean prepared to lie down on the floor.

  ‘Shouldn’t we put some sort of sheeting underneath her—’ Blossom demanded from the side of the stage, raising her voice above the sound of the dogs yapping at Jean.

  ‘No point now, Miss Blossom,’ Jean called to her cheerfully. ‘My clothes are wrecked anyway.’

  She promptly lay down on the floor, putting her arms under her head, smiling up at Jessica.

  For her part Jessica stared down at the long-limbed girl with her wild dark curls. Of course, and it was only natural, this was just a game to Jean, but to Jessica it was reality. Here was yet another generation, another set of young people, going gaily into war, as if it was some sort of a game. All of a sudden an unwanted memory came back to her. She remembered writing teasingly to Esmond in about 1915, ‘I bet you are all having a grand time of it in France!’

  How could she have written that? What a fool, what a silly, silly fool.

  But they didn’t know, they just didn’t know, not until much later. They knew nothing of the stinking trenches, the men blinded by the gas, the horror of men being led over the top, the hundreds of young officers dead within a few days of their arrival at the Front. Three-quarters of those sent off with their hand-knitted socks and their home-bred hunters, and their picnic sets – oh, dear heaven, did they really get sent off with picnic sets? – were, like Esmond, never to return, so that even though they hadn’t been married, nevertheless Jessica had been allowed to join the ‘little democracy of valour’ at the Cenotaph on that special day of national mourning after the Great War.

  In those few seconds, too, she remembered the desolation of the empty rooms, and the clothes that would never again be worn by their owners. The suddenness of coming across them unexpectedly, in cupboards and cloakrooms, in tack rooms and attics – their shape retained, the outline of a foot in a boot still visible, the collar of a coat still turned up. It was almost as if the clothes themselves were constantly turning towards the door, expecting the loved one, the owner of the cap or the riding boots, the thickly lined overcoat, to walk in and claim them.

  It took very little effort for her to remember Jean Shaw being born at Number Three, The Cottages, Twistleton. In fact she would never forget it. Why should she? She had helped to deliver her. The first time she had ever seen the reality of childbirth, but not the last. Doctor Blackie had been delayed by the storm, and so Jessica, and Doctor Blackie’s wife – who, thank heavens, was actually a nurse – had delivered the baby. But though the little girl’s arrival had been most welcome to the two impromptu midwives, it had not been to Jean’s mother, Mrs Shaw.

  ‘Take it away, take it away!’

  Well, of course they hadn’t taken ‘it’ away, they had left ‘it’ instead in the hands of Mrs Shaw’s mother-in-law, who fed ‘it’ with bottled milk, and more or less brought ‘it’ up next door at Number Four, The Cottages.

  Old Mrs Shaw had only just passed, the previous winter, of pneumonia, and to the fury of her daughter-in-law was found to have left her cottage not to Jean’s parents, as expected, but to her first, and as it had transpired, only granddaughter, Jean.

  Jessica turned away from the memories, which for some dreary reason were far too busy crowding themselves into her head, positively queueing up to be in the forefront of her mind. There was soon going to be a war again, and because she had known one did not mean she should weaken at the thought of another. She must not, simply must not, go back on determinations already made. This war had to be fought. They had to win it, just had to, or else everything, all that had gone before it, would be for nothing, nothing at all. She was convinced of it, and had been for a long, long time, and now that she could see how crowded her first lecture was, it seemed that at long, long last, she was not alone.

  Since the invasion of Czechoslovakia, local people had stopped calling her a ‘warmonger’, sometimes even to her face, had stopped sneering at her convictions, long ago aired, that there would one day be attacks on the population, gas attacks at that, and that everyone, all of Twistleton, should be arming themselves, preparing themselves. Since the last few days, since Hitler walking into Czechoslovakia, even the village had come to realise that it was actually going to happen, that Hitler and the Nazis were not just a rumour helping to sell more English newspapers.

  ‘Very well, now who would like to be the first to come up and practise bandaging on Miss Shaw, please?’

  A hand shot up instantly, a bronzed masculine hand. Jessica thought that she must know that hand, those hands, all too well, just as she knew the handsome smiling face of the owner. Joe Huggett looked like a grown-up blond cherub, if such a thing was possible, all pink and white skin, blue eyes, and the open expression of a boy who had always been loved. Dear Joe, like all his brothers, born and bred at Holly House in Twistleton. His father was the local solicitor, the son of a barrister, the grandson of a lawyer, and the family had connections with the village going back over a hundred years.

  Joe now walked up to the stage and mounted the few steps that brought him up to their level, smiling with all the proud assurance of a young man in an obviously very, very new Royal Air Force uniform.

  Just the sight of Joe in uniform for the first time seemed to give the Twistleton audience a shock, and to add the necessary authenticity to the scene that was about to take place, a scene that suddenly seemed more to be part of some play that they were all re-enacting for the benefit of, say, the renewing of the church roof, or new gymnasium equipment for the school hall, rather than real life. Joe Huggett in his ill-fitting RAF uniform was so very real.

  A question rose instantly in everyone’s minds, and they all started to shift uneasily in their seats, and look around at each other. If Joe was in uniform why not Tom, or Alan over there, or Doctor Blackie’s son Richard Blackie? Why not all of them, come to tha
t? Very well, Joe was young and fit, and the rest of his brothers were already away in the army, but even so? Even so. No state of emergency had been declared as yet, surely? Or hadn’t they heard? Had they not been told? Was there something they should know? Then they stared at the stage in front of them, and started to laugh as Joe made a hash of trying to bandage one of Jean Shaw’s ankles, blushing to the roots of his blond hair as he did so, while Jean – always a bit of an actress was Jean – acted up no end, pretending he was hurting her.

  ‘Any more volunteers, please?’

  Laura and Freddie both stood up, if only to help out Aunt Jessica, but once on stage Freddie looked back at Laura suddenly, and Laura knew at once what that look meant: ‘Oh Lord, will this really be necessary? Surely not.’

  Laura’s expression set. Who knew? Perhaps not? Perhaps something would happen to save them from a war?

  But first it seemed they had all been corralled into helping out at a local dinner party.

  ‘Who is the poor soul who owns this house where we are expected to disport ourselves as waitresses?’

  ‘One Guy Athlone. You may have heard of him?’

  ‘Heard of him? I worship him, and his plays!’ Aurelia sighed. ‘It can’t be true. Are we really going to his house?’

  ‘Yes, dear, but not to socialise. We have to help him out, not as guests, as waitresses! He telephoned Aunt Jessica. Been let down. They’ve even sent over the uniforms. Here, they’re here, in this basket.’

  Freddie undid the laundry hamper and started to hand out the statutory black uniform dresses, together with the white aprons, and white cotton headdresses.

  ‘How do you wear these awful hats without looking like something brought in by the cat?’ asked Laura.

  They took it in turn to cavort in front of the mirror, putting the hats on at comic angles, before finally settling, amid gales of laughter, for putting them at what they imagined to be at an attractive angle, at the back of their heads.

  Aunt Jessica greeted them in the hall.