Elizabeth Elgin - Turn Left at the Daffodils

‘You better hadn’t be, or you’ll be on your way back to Liverpool before you can blink! And you’d better get yourself to the Food Office in the morning – see about an emergency card for your rations.’

‘I will.’ And look for the nearest recruiting office, because the sooner she got herself into uniform, the better. She would have to have a next-of-kin, of course. You always did when you joined up, but that was all right, because Auntie Mim was her next-of-kin, now.

She thought about it that night as she lay in the bed that was hers for four weeks. It struck her like a thunder clap. What if it took longer than that to get into the Army? Where would she go when the lodger came back? Cyprian Court, would it have to be, tail between her legs?

She pushed so terrible a thought from her mind, closed her eyes and thought instead about her father, wishing he could know she was going to be all right. Poor dad. He hadn’t had much of a life. Losing Mum, then getting himself saddled with the Queer One, and Georgie.

And thinking about Mum, what about that birth certificate? But she would worry about it tomorrow. Beautiful tomorrow, when she would present her touch-typing certificate to the Recruiting Officer. Bright, shining tomorrow, when her new life would begin.

May, without any doubt at all, was the most beautiful of months; a green, blossom-filled goodbye to winter; to short days and blackouts that came too early, and fogs and cold houses and everything that was depressing.

Caroline Tiptree leaned on the gate, gazing over the cow pasture to fields green with sprouting wheat, and hawthorn hedges coming to life again and the distant blue haze that carpeted Bluebell Wood.

So precious, this Yorkshire hamlet in which she lived; in which Englishmen had lived since Elizabeth Tudor’s time. So comforting to know that wars had come and gone, yet still Nether Hutton remained unchanged. Twenty-one houses, and all of them built of rose-red brick; all of them with flower-filled gardens; most of them with chimney stacks twisted like sticks of barley sugar. She turned to lean her back against the gate, reluctant to go home, to face the recriminations and tears she knew would follow. When she told her mother, that was.

Sighing, she made for Jackmans Cottage, named for the long-ago sea captain who had built it with a purse of gold, given by a grateful queen. A house with low, beamed ceilings and wide fireplaces and two kitchens and small windows. A thick-walled house that had not and would not change.

She closed the gate carefully behind her, standing for a moment to take in the courtyard garden thick with the flowers of late spring, for this was the picture she would carry away with her, if she left it. When she left it.

‘Hello, darling. You’ve missed the News,’ Janet Tiptree called from the sitting room.

‘Sorry.’ Carrie hung up her coat, knowing she’d had no intention of getting home to hear it. She’d had enough of gloom and doom, was fed up with the war and living in a rural backwater whilst everywhere else seemed to be getting bombed, and Dover shelled every single day from across the Channel. ‘Don’t suppose there was anything worth listening to – like Hitler wants an armistice…’

Or perhaps two ounces on the butter ration? She would settle for an ounce, even.

‘Don’t be flippant, Carrie. And why the badly-done-to look? Missing Jeffrey – is that it?’

‘Not particularly, mother. After all, he wanted to go.’

‘Which was sensible, really. Better to volunteer now for the Navy than wait another year to be called-up and put in the Army or the Air Force. Jeffrey’s uncle fought at Jutland, don’t forget and with a name like Frobisner – well, what else could he join? And you are missing him – admit it – or why are you acting like a bear with a sore head.’

‘My head is fine, mother. It’s my conscience I’m more bothered about. I’ve got to accept that working in a bank isn’t doing much for the war effort. I’m not pulling my weight.’

‘But you are!’ She patted the sofa beside her. ‘Now come and sit beside your mother, and tell her what’s wrong – have a little cuddle, shall we?’

‘Mother! I’m too old for cuddles. I’m twenty-one, soon, and I’m not doing enough. I’m having an easy war, and it isn’t right.’

‘Now you’re not to talk like that.’ Her mother was using her coaxing voice, her talking-to-awkward-daughters voice. ‘You have a job, you travel ten miles to work each day, and back, and two nights a week you fire watch for the ARP, leaving me all alone here. But do I complain?’

‘No.’

She said it snappily, because doing a clerk’s job did not seem at all like war work. The local bus picked her up at eight each morning and got her home by six forty-five each evening, and as for the fire-watching duties – well, there had been no fires; not even an air-raid warning, so what was so noble about that?

‘Why you and Jeffrey don’t fix a date, Carrie, is beyond me. I mean – you’d get a naval allowance and nobody could make you leave home if you were a married woman. Why all this soul searching? What’s brought it on, will you tell me?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me, if I did.’ She turned abruptly to stare out of the window.

‘Try me, dear. And please don’t turn your back when you speak to me.’

‘Sorry – and all right, if you must know…’ She went to sit beside her mother, then stared at the empty hearth. ‘What has brought it on? Seeing everything so beautiful, I suppose. Hutton in the spring and this lovely little village and – and the invasion. Because there’s going to be one, and I don’t want us to be invaded. All this is worth fighting for, mother.’

‘And Jeffrey has gone to fight for it. All the young men in the village, too. Nether Hutton is well represented.’

‘Y-yes…’ Her mother was right – except that there were only two young men of conscription age in the village. And herself, of course. ‘And it’s going to be better represented,’ she blurted, red-cheeked to the brass fender. ‘Because I’m going, as well. I’m going to join up.’

‘ Join up! I have never in all my life heard such nonsense! Have you forgotten your duty to me, Caroline?’

‘No. But I really am going. Into the Army.’

‘But you are all I have!’ Janet Tiptree jumped to her feet and began to pace the room. ‘Haven’t I suffered enough from war? Didn’t I lose your father to the Great War, and must I lose my only child to this one? Your father came home a sick man; came home to die of his war wounds and -’

‘And Todd’s father was killed, trying to get him out of No Man’s Land.’

‘Todd Coverdale? Why bring him into it after all these years?’

Her mother’s red cheeks and trembling mouth warned Carrie to have care, but still she said,

‘All these years? It’s not all that long since he left.’

‘And did you expect me to keep him out of a sense of duty?’ she demanded shrilly. ‘I couldn’t help it if his mother died. Your father, out of gratitude, told Marie Coverdale that she and her son would have a home here as long as she lived.’

‘Yes, and out of gratitude she worked in this house like a servant, almost, and – and -’

‘And Todd wanted for nothing. Even after your father died, I saw to it that nothing changed. They continued to live here and Todd went to Grammar School!’

‘He got a scholarship! Todd was like a brother to me, yet you sent him away, when his mother died.’

‘To his aunt, who was willing to have him. But why all this raking up of the past? You said nothing about his going, at the time. And we are talking about now, and you leaving home! What is to become of me, when you go – if you go.’