The Daisy Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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,