Daisy's Wars (30 page)

17

Once Daisy had arrived back at her hut in Langar she was met by a worried-looking Eileen. It must have hit her, she thought. As soon as Eileen had been left alone in their
room, the reality of Calli’s death had hit her, and instinctively Daisy reached out to hug her.

‘It’s Celia,’ Eileen said, catching Daisy’s arms before they could go round her.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘Daisy, sit down,’ Eileen said, still holding her arms and forcing her to sit on her bed. ‘Daisy, Celia’s dead.’

People talked about everything spinning; now Daisy knew it was true. ‘Was there a raid?’

Eileen shook her head. ‘They’ve told her relatives her appendix burst, but it wasn’t that.’

Daisy stared at Eileen.

‘After you’d been gone a week she came to me in a state. She was looking for you, really, not me, thought I’d know where you were. She was sure she was pregnant and wanted you
to help her get rid of it.’

‘But why? She was married!’ Daisy gasped.

‘She said that it had been a mistake and the last thing she wanted was to be stuck with his child after how it had been conceived. She said you’d understand and that you were sure to
know someone who’d help her. I told her I only knew you were in London, and that you’d be back very soon, and she nodded and left. I thought she would wait, but apparently she
didn’t.’

‘What happened?’ Daisy asked, all sorts of horrific pictures forming in her mind.

‘I don’t know who she went to,’ Eileen said quietly, ‘and whoever gave her the name isn’t likely to talk now. Next day she went into Nottingham, as far as I know,
that’s where she said she was going anyway. When she came back she was quiet, but she had been for a few days. It was the next morning she was found. She didn’t get up and everyone
assumed she’d slept in, which of course she never did, and when they went to wake her she was unconscious. The bed was covered in blood, it was pretty awful. They took her to a civilian
hospital, but it was no good.’

They sat together for a long time, Daisy on the edge of her bed, Eileen kneeling on the floor, holding Daisy’s hand.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Daisy said miserably. ‘All she had to do was wait a few days and I could’ve arranged for someone to see her in London. She wasn’t the
first and she won’t be the last, why didn’t she wait?’

Eileen shrugged. ‘All I can think of is that she really wanted it gone, that she couldn’t bear the thought of it being inside her any longer.’

‘But to think of her in such a state!’ Daisy whispered. ‘I never knew she was feeling so bad, I thought they’d just got off to a bad start.’

‘Who knows what anyone else is really thinking, Daisy?’ Eileen said sadly. ‘It wasn’t your fault, it was no one’s fault. It just happened.’

‘But she came to me so often, all I did was say it would all be better one day soon. What sort of a friend was I? I shouldn’t have gone, I should’ve taken her more
seriously.’

Daisy had woven such a convincing fiction, aided by the constant movements of service life, that no one would have been able to contact her. Dotty, the only one who could have tracked her down,
had been posted at least twice since leaving Langar, and the girls now in the hut, Eileen included, knew nothing of her friendship with Dotty anyhow. Daisy’s tracks had been superbly
covered.

Celia’s new young husband, Bobby, suddenly sprang into her mind. ‘What about her husband?’ she asked.

‘He thinks it was her appendix, too. The other girls said she had been a bit off-colour for a few days, so that helped. One of the others said that was the usual story, that the girl had a
burst appendix, but Celia was married, as you say, so, why did they cover up that she had been expecting?’

‘Oh, to save the boy, I suppose. Didn’t want him to feel it was anything to do with him and leave him feeling guilty about it,’ Daisy said wearily. ‘It’s a
man’s world, Eileen, no matter which way you turn.’

They sat in stunned, sad silence for a moment.

‘And there’s the other thing, not wanting to raise suspicions,’ Daisy said.

Eileen looked at her quizzically.

‘Well, if she wasn’t pregnant then she couldn’t possibly have died as the result of a botched abortion, could she? And it was her appendix, so she wasn’t pregnant, was
she? How is the boy anyway?’

Eileen shrugged. ‘Pretty much as you’d expect,’ she said.

It had all gone, Daisy thought, all her supposed ability to cope. Somehow she had lost any control over what was going on around her, and yet the more she thought about it, the less she
understood how it had happened. Daisy had everything worked out, that’s what everyone said, and what she herself had thought, yet in the past couple of months it had all gone wrong and now
there was a hint of panic in her mind. For some reason her carefully constructed cover was collapsing and she didn’t know how or why.

She’d felt something slip when Lady Groundhog hadn’t come back. There had been real grief where there should have been simple sorrow for lost boys from her squadron. They had got
through the outer shell she had created and she should have been aware of that at the time. She missed them as people, not just as ‘some of our boys’, and found it hard to picture
Bruiser without her eyes filling up. Dear, silly, affectionate Bruiser, who punched people yet didn’t have an unkind bone in his body. Once that crack in her armour had appeared others ran
off it in different directions, so many that she was finding it almost impossible to hold the facade together.

Two weeks at Rose Cottage should have done the trick, but then Mar, who hadn’t known how much Daisy needed the rest, had suggested the disastrous trip to London, culminating in the scene
with Frank and her dreadful attempted seduction of poor, sick Hal. And all the while Celia had been in Langar and in a panic that would cost her her life.

Why hadn’t she taken more notice of Celia’s problems instead of just comforting her? ‘There, there,’ she’d said, when bright red flares should have been going off
in her mind – had she been paying attention, that was, and she hadn’t. She had let so many people down. Now Celia was another one to be mentioned in sad tones around the stove on
domestic nights, another casualty of the war.

For weeks afterwards Daisy had dreams of trying to hold a cracked jug together as the water came out in drops before inevitably exploding in a great flood that she chased after. The jug dream
took its place with the others, of Dessie coming to find her, of the sound of her mother’s breathing.

No one had breakdowns in those days. It wasn’t the done thing, and even Molly, who had been removed from Langar in total secrecy and silence, was regarded as weak, somehow. You coped any
way you could without bending, far less buckling; whatever it took, the stiff upper lip had to be maintained. In a bid to cope, Daisy had become this other Daisy, the one who knew everything, who
supported everyone, who could withstand whatever life threw at her, her own life as well as everyone else’s, and if she wasn’t that Daisy, then who was she?

The war had dictated that coping was all that mattered and, like millions of other people, Daisy was doing that and had been doing it throughout her life. In her early twenties that was more
than enough to break anyone’s resolve, and she was just a girl herself when all was said and done, a girl with no one of her own to turn to.

As if to underline Daisy’s failures, Eileen confided that she, too, was pregnant and was about to marry the dreaded childhood sweetheart, though the child wasn’t his, it was
Calli’s.

‘You won’t think I’m a good girl now,’ she confided in Daisy.

‘You want to keep Calli’s baby and so you have to marry somebody,’ Daisy said simply. ‘Why not? He thinks it was him anyway, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Eileen wept.

The childhood sweetheart had been drinking to give himself courage on their night in London and Eileen had put him to bed. When he woke up the next morning he thought they must have slept
together, so he was doing the decent thing in marrying Eileen before he went abroad on active service, as he had wanted to anyway, even before finding out she was pregnant.

‘It’s not fair, though, is it?’ Eileen asked sadly.

‘Nothing’s fair, Eileen,’ Daisy said, hugging her. ‘Losing Calli wasn’t fair, neither was losing Bruiser; the war isn’t fair and neither is life. You just do
what you have to do.’

Well, that was that loose end safely tied up, but she should have seen, and once would have, that the relationship between Eileen and Calli had been deep and sincere. So she had let Eileen down,
too, left her to deal with her grief because she hadn’t realised it was there.

They went through the motions, going to London for the marriage, with Daisy as the bridesmaid, and she was almost happy to discover how much she disliked the bridegroom. She
had never reckoned much for childhood sweethearts and, as far as she could see, this one was typical of the breed, though Eileen insisted that he was a nice chap. Still, at least he would serve the
purpose of giving Calli’s child a father, though not the father he or she should have had.

It was a quick service in a Registry Office with the bridal party in uniform, as so many were these days, then back to a local pub for a ‘celebration’. Every now and again she and
Eileen would make eye contact, both thinking of Calli, and Bruiser too, who would have been best man, and they had to look away to stop breaking down.

Daisy imagined Bruiser’s silly delight at being a real couple with her, and at a wedding of all occasions, and felt deeply sad. As it was, the best man had been unable to take his eyes off
her breasts all day. At one point she wondered if he would have rather shaken hands with them than her, then realised she was being silly – of course he would.

As they sat in the pub being desperately bright and happy, Daisy quietly picked out a beer bottle in case she should need it. Finally, under cover of being drunk, the best man made the fatal
mistake of trying to stick his hand down the front of her blouse, and in one gloriously graceful movement Daisy lifted the bottle and broke it over his nose, broke his nose, too.

At least it made Eileen laugh, genuinely laugh, for the first time that day. The groom thought Eileen’s sadness was because he had to leave immediately and there would be no wedding night
to make the earth move, so Daisy also got a wry smile out of the proceedings.

Then, the happy event over, the groom and his blood-stained best man made their way back to their ship and the bride and bridesmaid went back to Langar.

Three months later Eileen ‘discovered’ she was pregnant and left the service for home, to become a lady-in-waiting, both for the child and the return of her
husband, the ‘father’ of her child. Daisy missed her desperately.

And there was the Frank situation, or lack of it. It had finally been brought to an end. He no longer wrote to her, which was what she had wanted, and yet she was bereft, suddenly feeling his
loss on top of all the others. She recalled a conversation she had had many, many years ago it now seemed, with Joan Johnstone and Mrs Armstrong in Fenwicks. ‘Don’t let the love of your
life get away from you,’ Mrs Armstrong had told her, ‘no matter what anyone else thinks or says.’ And now, when it was too late, she wondered if that was what she had done.

Long walks in the countryside as autumn turned to early winter were Daisy’s only solace. She tried to think of the past months as a wound that was healing and setting into a scar. All she
had to do was calm herself and move on as she had done before, but there were times when a voice in her head would ask, ‘Move on where?’

Still, there she was, all these terrible things had happened; things she would once have spotted and nipped in the bud; things, further more, that she had caused to happen. Now all she could do
was try to recover and not dwell on the past, because dwelling on the past might well cause the floodgates to open completely and she would drown. Close those doors, Daisy, close the doors.
Don’t think about it; get on with life. Things could have been worse, there were successes. Look at Eileen.

18

One of the good things about friends moving on during wartime was that there were new ones always being recruited to fill the gaps. In Daisy’s case, Pearl was one of her
new friends. And you didn’t always lose the old ones. Edith was frequently at Langar because of her Australian.

‘You always call him my “Aussie”,’ Edith laughed. ‘Can’t you use his name? I mean, surely he’s proved himself a non-bastard by now, Daisy. No secret
wife and children, no other notches on his joystick?’

‘
Other
notches?’ Daisy said, faking shock.

‘Forget I said that!’ Edith said quietly. ‘It was a slip of the tongue.’

‘A slip of something, I’ll grant you,’ Daisy said, looking at Pearl beside them. ‘And since when does clever, serious Edith make slips of the tongue anyway? The security
of the realm depends on you and you make slips of the tongue?’

‘Oh, shut up!’ Edith said, embarrassed. ‘Anyway, his name’s Doug, I want you to call him that, OK?’

‘Seems, Pearl,’ Daisy said archly, ‘that we are being presented with a true romance here.’

Edith pushed her and they all laughed. ‘He’ll be here tonight,’ she said, ‘and I want you to be nice to him. You remember nice, Daisy, it’s when you bare your teeth
without biting!’

They were on their way to an ENSA concert, one of the entertainments put on for service personnel, though things didn’t always work out for the artistes who thought they were doing their
bit for the war effort by performing for those actually involved in it.

It was here that ‘Edith’s Aussie’ truly became Doug. He earned his stripes as far as Daisy was concerned, though she already half-approved of him because Edith had asked her
to. He was a solid little man, dark eyes and fair hair and quiet, it seemed, until during the variety show a conjurer by the name of the Great Walendo asked for a volunteer from the audience and
Doug got up and joined him on stage. When he was asked to pick a card he chose the wrong one, only to produce the right one from his pocket. The conjuror looked confused. Next was the hidden bottle
trick, or it was hidden until Doug stepped forward and uncovered a whole collection of different bottles all hidden under each other, until the hapless conjurer’s table was covered in
them.