CHAPTER TWENTY
The garden was more or less as Juliet remembered it. A little wilder, but then Mrs Hammett had mentioned that the woman who’d owned the house when Juliet first stumbled upon it had been forced to hand over the reins in recent years. ‘Ninety years old, she was, when she died last summer.’ The gardener still came once a month, but he was slapdash, and, she’d added with a moue of disdain, an out-of-towner. Mrs Hammett said that Lucy would turn in her grave if she could see how hard he’d pruned back the roses over winter.
Juliet, picturing the perfection of the garden in 1928, asked whether Lucy had still lived in the house back then, but Mrs Hammett said that no, it was around that time she’d started her ‘arrangement’ with the Art Historians’ Association and moved into the little place around the corner. ‘One of the stable cottages in the row. You might have seen them? Fewer stairs, Lucy used to say. Fewer memories, methinks is what she meant.’
‘She had bad memories of Birchwood?’
‘Oh, no, I didn’t mean that. She loved that place. You’re too young to understand, I expect, but when one gets old, all memories have a weight, even the happy ones.’
Juliet was perfectly familiar with the heaviness of time, but she hadn’t wished to get into all of that with Mrs Hammett.
The arrangement with the AHA, from what she understood, allowed the house to be granted to students as part of a scholarship scheme. The man who’d handed over the key on the night that they arrived from London, had pushed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and said, ‘It’s not the most modern of houses. We usually accommodate individuals, not families, and not for long stretches of time. There’s no electricity, I’m afraid, but – well, the war … I’m sure everything else will be in order –’ And then the bird had launched itself from above the pantry, straight at their heads, and he’d become defensive, and Juliet had thanked him for coming and walked him to the exit, and they’d breathed parallel sighs of relief as he scurried along the path and she closed the door behind him. And then she’d turned around and been met by the faces of three small displaced people waiting for their dinner.
Since then, they’d settled into a good routine. It had been four days now, each one clear and bright, and they’d become used to early mornings in the garden. Bea had taken to climbing the stone wall that ran around the house, setting up in the sunniest spot, legs crossed, to play her recorder, while Red, who was worryingly less deft but not to be outdone, carried his arsenal of carefully selected sticks onto the thinnest part of the wall to practise jousting. Juliet continued to point out that there were perfectly lovely patches of grass on which they could be playing, but her suggestions fell on deaf ears. Tip, thank goodness, was not interested in scaling the heights. He seemed content to sit in whichever concealed patch of undergrowth he favoured that day, lining up the set of toy soldiers that a kind lady at the local Women’s Voluntary Service meeting had sent home with Juliet.
Home. Strange to think how quickly the word had slipped into her thoughts about Birchwood. It was one of those words of multiple meanings: the perfunctory description accorded the building in which one currently resides, but also the warm, rounded name used to describe the place from which ultimate comfort and safety are derived. Home was Alan’s voice at the end of a long, hard day; his arms around her; the known quantity of his love for her and hers for him.
God, she missed him.
Along with the children, work proved a welcome distraction. Juliet had met the women of the local WVS group as planned at eleven on Monday. Their meetings were conducted in the village hall, across the green from The Swan, and she’d arrived to the strains of what sounded like a lively dance in progress – music and laughter, chatter and singing. She’d stopped on the stairs and wondered for a moment whether she had the wrong address, but when she poked her head around the door Mrs Hammett had waved and called her over to where the group were sitting on a circle of chairs in the centre of the room. The hall was strung with Union Jack flags, and posters of Churchill puffed and glowered from each wall.
Juliet had arrived with a list of questions, but she’d soon turned over a page in her notebook and started taking shorthand summaries of the free-ranging conversation instead. For all that she’d sat up late the night before planning her articles, her imagination, it turned out, was no match for the reality of these women, whose eccentricities, charm and wisdom made her laugh with them and ache for them. Marjorie Stubbs provided a remarkable insight into the trials and tribulations of backyard pig farming; Milly Macklemore offered a revelatory perspective on the many uses of stockings with holes; and Imogen Stephens had everybody reaching for their handkerchiefs when she told of the recent return of her daughter’s pilot fiancé, who had been missing and presumed dead.
And although the other women evidently knew each other well, many of them mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces, friends since childhood, they welcomed Juliet into the group with enormous generosity. They were as intrigued and amused, it seemed, at gaining a Londoner’s approach to life and the strange times in which they found themselves as Juliet was by their experiences. By the time she left the meeting, promising to come back for the next, Juliet had learned enough to keep readers of the newspaper engaged until the year 2000. If the war was going to be won, she had decided as she made the short walk back to Birchwood Manor, it was going to be won in part from rooms like that one, all over the country, where steadfast, ingenious women kept their collective chins up and refused to give in.
And so, in their spirit, Juliet had spent much of the past three days at her typewriter beneath the window in her bedroom. For all that it was not the most comfortable place to work – the dressing table upon which she’d positioned her typewriter was pretty, but not ideal when one had legs to accommodate – Juliet liked it very much. Tendrils of fragrant honeysuckle and clematis reached through the open window to clutch at the curtain fastenings, and the view over the orchard towards the village, in particular the churchyard at the end of the lane, was restorative. The stone church was very old and the grounds around it, though small, were beautiful: lots of tumbling ivy and mossy headstones. Juliet hadn’t had a chance yet to visit, but it was on her list of things to do.
Sometimes, when the day was simply too glorious to spend indoors, Juliet took her notebook into the garden. There she worked in the shade, lying on her stomach with her head resting on her palm as she alternated between scribbling notes and chewing on her pencil, all the while carrying out secret observations of the children. They seemed to be adjusting well enough: there was laughter and playing, their appetites were good, they fought and wrestled and thumped and drove her slightly mad as they always had.