Elizabeth Elgin - Where Bluebells Chime

‘But I can’t imagine Mrs Sutton fighting, nor Mrs Dwerryhouse. What had they done?’

‘Gone to a suffragette meeting, that’s what. Those suffragettes were agitating for women to get a say in things. Women couldn’t vote, in those days.’ Jack Catchpole wasn’t altogether sure that giving votes to women had been a wise move, though he’d never said so within his wife’s hearing.

‘So then what?’

‘Then nothing, Gracie Fielding. It’s a quarter to six and time us was off home. Lily’ll have the supper on and her can’t abide lateness.’

‘But you’ll tell me some more tomorrow?’ The Sutton story had the makings of a love book about it, but unlike love stories it was real.

‘Happen I will. But what’s told within these walls isn’t for blabbing around the hostel, remember!’

‘Not a word. Hand on heart.’ Besides, she liked Drew and Daisy too much to pass on scandal about them – if scandal there was to be.

‘Right then, lass. We’ll shut up shop for the night. See you in t’morning.’

Amicably they walked together to the ornate iron gates that Catchpole regarded as his drawbridge and portcullis both, though Gracie knew they would not be chained and padlocked until he had made his final evening rounds – just to be sure. On the lookout for cats an’ things he’d assured her, but it was really, she supposed, to bid his garden good night.

‘Wonder what’ll be on the six o’clock news,’ Gracie murmured. ‘It’s worrying, isn’t it?’

‘It is. All those German bombers coming day after day cheeky as you like in broad daylight!’

‘But they aren’t getting it all their own way!’

‘No.’ And thank God for a handful of young lads and their fighters and for young girls, an’ all, that were in the thick of it. He wouldn’t want a lass of his firing an anti-aircraft gun. If they’d had bairns, that was. Happen, he thought as he clanged shut the gates, if him and Lily had no family to laugh over then they had none to worry over now. It worked both ways. ‘Good night, Gracie.’

‘’Night, Mr Catchpole. Take care.’

Reichmarshal Goering had sent a signal to his commanders that his Luftwaffe was to rid the skies of the Royal Air Force, though how the papers knew what Goering was saying to his underlings, or how our own fighter pilots knew the German bombers were on their way – as soon as they had taken off, almost – no one rightly knew. All the man in the street could be sure of – and the Ministry of Information could, sometimes, get it right – was that for every fighter we lost, the Luftwaffe paid three of their bombers for it. Talk even had it that one German bomber ace had asked Goering for a squadron of Spitfires to protect them on their raids over the south of England and that fat Hermann Goering hadn’t been best pleased about the request!

Only talk, maybe, but it lifted people’s hearts. Because we were not only going to put a stop to German air raids, Mr Churchill had growled in one of his broadcasts to the nation; we were going to win the war, as well! Even though we might have to fight on the beaches and in the streets we would never give in. And such was his confidence, his tenacity, his utter loathing for Hitler, that people believed him completely – about not surrendering, that was – though how we were going to win the war and when, took a little more time to digest. And as farmers and land girls cut wheat and barley and oats, battles raged in the sky above them – dogfights, with fields in the south littered with crippled German bombers. They became so familiar a sight that small boys stopped taking pieces as souvenirs and returned to more absorbing things such as searching for conkers, raiding apple orchards and queueing at the sweet shops when rumours of a delivery of gobstoppers circulated the streets.

Yet hadn’t Mr Churchill warned, years ago, that Germany was becoming too strong and too arrogant and no one took a bit of notice of him, except to call him a warmonger? He’d been right, though, people reluctantly admitted.

So now the entire country listened to what he said and believed every word he uttered. We would win this war, no matter what, because good old Winston said so. One day, that was.

My darling Daisy,

Thank you for the birthday card. I did as you told me and didn’t open it until the twelfth.

Once, we thought we would be together for my twenty-third birthday and the two of us house hunting and planning a wedding. Instead, you are going into the Forces and it seems immoral, almost, that I am away from it all and that we who need each other so much cannot be together. So I promise you this my lovely girl – somehow I will get home. There has got to be a way.

‘Keth, no!’ Daisy whispered. ‘Don’t do anything stupid – oh, please. ’

She screwed up her eyes tightly, refusing to weep. There were thousands of women whose man had gone away and might never come home again; at least Keth was not in uniform and was safe in a neutral country, though Dada said it was a peculiar kind of neutrality that sent us tanks and guns and food and asked no payment in return. The Americans would get their fingers burned taking such risks, if anybody was interested in what he thought, and it would need only one incident at sea and before they knew it, America would be drawn into the war. Remember the Lusitania last time?

‘But would it be such a bad thing for us to have an ally?’ Mam had wanted to know, and Daisy supposed that for us, beleaguered as we were, to have someone on our side would be nothing short of a miracle.

But why should the United States become involved again? They had the wide span of the Atlantic between them and Europe. They were far enough away from Hitler so why should Bas, even though he was half-English, help fight our war?

Daisy jumped impatiently to her feet to stand at the wide-open window, gazing out into the August evening.

At least the weather was kind. There had been little rain for weeks. A farmer who hadn’t got his harvest in wasn’t trying, Dada said. And why, she demanded irritably, had she been so stupid; why was she leaving her home, her parents? Why had she lost her temper that dinnertime because an arrogant woman and her totally unimportant account upset her?

Because she was her father’s daughter, Mam said; because she had the same stubborn streak in her and his quick temper, too.

Mam understood about being in love. Mam was silly and sentimental, too; had buttercups pressed in her Bible, still, just as her daughter pressed a daisychain between the pages of the Song of Solomon beside words written for a lover, by a lover. ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away’; words about winter being past and flowers appearing and birds singing, yet now it sometimes seemed as if flowers had never bloomed and birds would never sing again. But nothing lasted, Mam said; neither bad times nor, sadly, good.

‘Our time will come, Keth,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll be together again, one day …’

The telephone began to ring, calling her back from her dreamings.

‘For you,’ Alice called. ‘It’s Tatiana.’

‘Hi, Tatty,’ Daisy smiled into the receiver. ‘What’s news?’

‘The dance tomorrow night at Creesby – okay?’ Tatiana Sutton’s voice was low and husky as if she were whispering into the mouthpiece. ‘I’m going with you and Gracie – all right?’

‘But I’m not going.’

‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t suppose Tim and I will be there, either. But if he isn’t on ops. – and there’s a good chance he won’t be – I’ll need an alibi.’

‘But couldn’t you just say you were coming over to Keeper’s?’

‘And have Mother ring me to check up? She might. She’s getting suspicious.’