The Daisy Club (9 page)

‘Crikey, Mr Russell, I am so dim! I never realised it was all so complicated. I am afraid in the excitement I clean forgot everything you told me. Please continue.'

The motor car moved slowly and surely down the drive before Mr Russell stopped it, and reversed back to the same spot, and then he and Daisy changed positions, and Daisy started the exciting exercise known in the manual as ‘Starting Your Motor Car'.

Aunt Maude had long abandoned her piece of white fish to stare out into the drive. She could not help feeling excited by the idea of a motor car being in the drive again. It reminded her of her brothers and herself before the First World War, of their father arriving with their mother sitting up beside him, wrapped in driving veils and large coats with fur collars. Those had really been the days, and perhaps they might soon return?

Lunch at Wychford with Joe was proving interesting to Jean Shaw.

She and Joe had known each other, off and on, all their lives, growing up in Twistleton, going to the same village school, until time and age parted them, and Joe was sent on somewhere else, and Jean was taken on at the Hall to help out as under-housekeeper, or that at least was how Miss Maude Beresford always described Jean, much to everyone's, including Jean's, amusement – since there was no actual housekeeper Jean could be ‘under'.

But supervising herself doing the dusting, telling herself that the house was running on really rather straight lines, making sure that the maid and the under-maids – all about the same age as herself – were doing what they should do, was finally much too dull. Jean had no wish to upset Miss Beresford, but she knew that if she was not to go mad she had to give in her notice and strike out in a different direction. This new direction, however, was somewhat of a surprise to both Miss Maude, and Jean.

‘You want to do what?'

‘I want to farm.'

‘Why? If you don't mind my enquiring, Shaw?'

Jean hesitated. She could read, and she could read fast, no putting her finger under the words or any of that nonsense. One of the perks of working for Miss Maude at the Hall was that they took all the newspapers, every day. No one who worked there had ever quite dared to ask why, and no one did, although Jean had always assumed that it had been the habit of the large, bustling, pre-Great-War household to take newspapers for everyone at the house, and that meant literally everyone, even the servants. So every morning, willy-nilly, to the house came the
Daily This
and the
Daily That
, and unlike the rest of the girls who could not wait to put them on either the fire, or the floor after washing it – as was the custom – Jean read all the newspapers, and what she read, alone by candlelight at her cottage, made her uneasy, and at the same time savvy. There was not enough food being grown at that moment in England. A great deal of it was being imported, so if there was a war and imports stopped, there would not be enough for everyone to eat. It did not make sense. Someone had to start growing more food, and quick, in however small quantities, because every last crumb was going to be needed.

‘Land is what you need, my girl. Land will never let you down,' Granny Shaw used to say to her. ‘If you have land you will never starve, believe me.' She used to point out of the cottage window to her own couple of acres. ‘I can grow my own food, and that way I need answer to no one.'

Answering to no one became Jean's ideal. She did not want to answer to anyone, probably because she never had. She had been unfortunate in her mother, but fortunate in her grandmother, so her ill luck had been her good luck, and thinking that way had become a habit, as she was now telling Joe.

‘Good comes out of bad, I am sure of it,' she stated as they finished lunch.

‘No good can come of war, Jean. Look at the Great War, no good came of that. No, war is not good, Jean, no one can say that,' Joe told her in a vaguely patronising voice, sounding as if he was speaking to someone a great deal younger.

Jean considered this, and then began again, reluctant to let go.

‘Some people say that had there not been the Great War we would have had a revolution in England, because of all the rich folk having too much, and all the poor folk having too little, and that there would have been a bloodbath like in France at the end of the eighteenth century. That is what some people say.'

Joe stared at her. Jean was such a pretty girl, with her thick dark curly hair and green eyes and pale skin, such a pretty girl, and with such a heart-turning smile, why would she want to talk like that? Like some sort of politician, or suffragette, or something?

‘I hope you're not going to turn out to be intelligent as well as beautiful, are you, Jean?' he asked, all innocence.

Jean put one elbow on the table, and laid her other arm across so that her hand held the crook of the first arm, and then placed her head a little lower and widened her eyes, making it her turn to look falsely innocent.

‘Why, Joe Huggett, you are such a tease, truly you are. Do I look intelligent? I ask you, I mean, do I? God forbid that I should. Surely it is against the laws of nature for a woman to be beautiful
and
intelligent?'

Jean widened her eyes mockingly as Joe stared at her holding her ridiculous pose, and then he started to laugh.

‘Where did you learn that little party trick, Miss Jean Shaw?'

‘I didn't never learn it, Mr Huggett, what I did was observe it, when I worked in my holidays at grand houses. Before I left school and went to help Miss Beresford at the Hall, I observed that whenever the men were around, the ladies of quality always pretended to be half-daft. Never could understand the need for it, to tell you the truth, not never, no how – why would someone want someone else to be stupid?'

Joe frowned, realising all of a sudden that he couldn't understand it, either. It was a silly way of carrying on, and at the same time he realised, too, that the reason he was attracted to Jean was that she was not like that. She was, and always had been, her own person, ever since she had kicked around the playground with him and his brothers, she one of only two girls at the otherwise all-boys village school.

‘I don't want a girl to pretend to be anything, I just want a girl to be a girl, not a boy, but with a mind of her own nonetheless,' Joe stated.

‘Well, that is good to hear, Mr Huggett,' Jean went on, but her voice was still vaguely mocking.

Joe put his napkin down in a gesture of finality, as if he was preparing to leave.

‘I don't really understand where all this is getting us, Jean. I didn't bring you to lunch here for you to make fun of me. There is a war coming, sure as your eggs are your eggs, and your chickens are your chickens,' he went on, referring to Jean's newer acquisitions. ‘And all that land you have been renting from Miss Beresford for tuppence three farthings is going to be commandeered, and you are going to have to change your ways. There will be no time for mockery soon, Jean Shaw, and I have a uniform, and only one day left of my leave. We may soon all be dead, and, believe me, we will be regretting every minute that we have wasted.'

Jean stared at Joe. He was tall, and he was handsome in a pleasant even-featured way, and, which was pretty rare in Twistleton men – whose dentistry consisted only in ‘having 'em all out' – he had great teeth.

‘What are you trying to say, Joe Huggett?'

‘Marry me, Jean. Before I go to war, marry me, and make me happy for a few days, or hours. Soon our whole world may be gone, every last bit of it, my mum's house, your cottage, the Hall, everything covered in Nazi flags. Hitler youth striding through the streets, Hitler standing on the balcony at Buckingham Palace waving to the crowds below—'

‘Stop it, Joe. Stop it. You're exaggerating!'

‘Am I?' Joe reached down and picked up her gas-mask case and placed it on the table. ‘Is this an exaggeration?'

Jean stared at him, seeing the bleak landscape ahead of them both – the bus had already passed children playing in gas masks in the playgrounds – seeing everything as he, perhaps, was seeing it. Perhaps Joe was right? Perhaps she should marry him before everything disappeared?

‘Whoosh!' Maude was sitting beside Daisy in the new motor car, holding on to her hat, despite the fact that she had secured it firmly with motoring veils. ‘Whoosh!' she shouted again, her cheeks pink from the breeze. ‘This is just how it used to be.'

Naturally Daisy was thrilled with herself, not just because she was driving so well, and so fast, and after only a few lessons with Mr Russell, but because she had actually managed to persuade Aunt Maude to leave the Hall. It was a big decision for Maude, and they both knew it.

She had probably stayed at the Hall, Daisy thought, ever since Daisy had arrived, Nanny in tow; or was it Nanny arriving with Daisy in tow? It did not seem to matter much now. What had mattered was that one day Nanny had left, and with her had gone Daisy's childhood belief in the idea that everything was going to be all right.

A maid, Patty Bywater, had taken Nanny's place, for no reason that anyone ever explained, but she had proved endlessly cruel; not just painting Daisy's fingers with bitter aloes at Aunt Maude's request, but making fun of her because she was ‘grand'. Every evening Patty would switch off Daisy's light, leaving her in the pitch black of countryside darkness, and make her own way down the corridor by the light of a torch. And just before, instead of reading to Daisy, she would dress up in frightening clothes, and, pretending to be a grotesque of some weird kind, would dance up and down in front of her charge, her shoulders hunched as if there was a string at the back of her, and she was a puppet. Too proud to admit, even to herself, that she was not frightened – but actually terrified – Daisy would sit bolt upright in bed staring at her, pretending to laugh at her antics, hating her all the time.

One day, as is natural to all bullies, the wretched creature went too far, and while in the act of pretending to suffocate Daisy with a pillow, caused her to black out, upon which Patty immediately panicked, and ran screaming from the nursery. The sound alerted another of the servants, who, upon finding Daisy, brought her back to consciousness.

Aunt Maude, not a minute too soon, in her own words, ‘dismissed the ghastly creature', and her replacement, Nippy – so nicknamed because rumour had it that she had once been a waitress – took her place.

Nippy was a cockney, and proud of it. On marrying a local boy, as a result of a country holiday sponsored by the vicar of her church, she had taken a daily job at the Hall. She liked Miss Maude, ‘one of the old-fashioned sort' was how she described Maude to her farm-labourer husband, but she would have none of the old-fashioned sort's Victorian methods. The bottle of bitter aloes was ceremoniously emptied down Mr Thomas Crapper's brilliant Victorian invention, the water closet, and a night light installed beside Daisy's bed.

‘Don't give that Patty Bywater another thought,' Nippy would say, when once or twice Daisy confided in her. ‘She was just out to get yer, 'cos of you being 'ere, and she not being 'ere, and all that. My Bert, he says she was always a tyrant on account of her father spoiling her. Myself, I hope she falls down in a ditch and
no one
finds her, until it's far too late. She turned the back of your hair white, I'm sure of it, but no matter, no one will notice once yer grown up, it'll just tie in with the rest of the blonde, yer know?'

How Nippy had known that Daisy's light mouse-coloured hair would eventually turn blonde, without any help from a bottle, neither of them would ever know.

‘Just me intuition, love, that's all. Me intuition, always has been one of me main attractions for Bert, you know? Ever since I come on holiday here, and I told him he would marry a girl from another place with red hair . . .'

This was a great joke, as it might well be, since Nippy herself was indeed from another place, and had the brightest red hair imaginable. Of course she had retired now, and Daisy still missed her, but only occasionally, because she knew Nippy was happy with her Bert.

Aunt Maude climbed out of the motor car, a suddenly decorous figure, standing on the pavement outside Mrs Bradshaw's confectionery, newsagent, post office, and general grocery store, the potatoes and cabbages spilling from boxes outside the long, low sprawling shop seeming to make her look even more elegant, already a figure from another, calmer era.

‘It is such a good idea, this motor car,' she said, sighing happily, and looking around and about her, as if she had just arrived from a different planet. ‘We can take shopping home in it, Daisy dear. And we can come to the village more often.'

‘Not if there is petrol-rationing, Aunt Maude,' Daisy murmured. ‘If there is petrol-rationing I shall have to put the pony at the front and get
him
to pull it into the village!'

Aunt Maude looked away, suddenly deaf, as she was wont to become at any hint of another war to come. Daisy knew that her beloved aunt had set her heart against the idea, that she simply would not believe it, she simply could not believe it, and moreover she did not have to believe it, because, despite every possible newspaper being delivered, the truth was that Aunt Maude never paid the slightest attention to any of them, never even so much as glancing at a headline.

Nor would she countenance a wireless. It would have been ridiculous to even suggest that she should buy one, or, worse, listen to it. Daisy herself had secretly asked her godfather for one and installed it in the butler's pantry, where she sneaked off to listen to plays, and the news, and even comedy and variety shows of an evening, while Maude sat in front of the great fire with her photograph albums.