“Don’t you love me, too?” he demanded, crouching down beside me and helping me take out a rather grubby old metal bucket with several holes.
“Of course I do,” I replied, carefully bringing out an old pot with candles poking out the top. “But we can’t just get married. What about David? He’ll come home and find I’ve gone.”
“He’s a man now, although he’ll always be your boy. He can always come and stay. You can’t just sit here waiting for him to come home.”
“And what about your girls?”
“They’ll adore you. Everyone does.”
I got up to find an old cloth to wipe the shelves inside the cupboard, then knelt back down, proceeding to give it a severely hearty scrubbing down.
“And what about me? My independence? My home, my village? Ivy House?”
“We can come home after the war, if you want.” He took my hands in his, prizing out the old scrubbing cloth and throwing it on the floor. “I don’t want to take over your life. I just want to be part of it. Living together, just like we have been. Two people together, happy.” He took a deep breath, his fingers lacing between mine. “There’s a war on, and everything seems to be getting a lot worse out there. You never know what’s going to happen to any of us. We need to grab any happiness we can while there’s still time.”
I sat gazing at him for a long moment.
“I need time to think it over. I’m not one of those people who can jump into something new straightaway.” I leaned into him, tucking my hand behind his neck and bringing him close. “And yet,” I began, pausing for a moment with the truth of it. “I’m not sure I can just let you leave.”
We sat there for some while, on the kitchen floor, holding hands and kissing, talking about it all—the war, David, his girls—until the sirens went off at around two, and we headed downstairs to the cellar.
Friday, 6th September, 1940
An Unexpected Wedding
What an extraordinary week this has been! With astounding decisiveness, Mrs. Tilling married the Colonel yesterday in our little church before they vanished off to London. I know whirlwind weddings are the thing at the moment, since we don’t know if we’ll all be here from one week to the next, but I was impressed with Mrs. Tilling making such a forthright move. She stepped forward to conduct the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir one final time during the ceremony, choosing “All Creatures of Our God and King,” a magnificent smile across her face as we sang the words:
Thou burning sun with golden beam,
Thou silver moon with softer gleam.
Mama threw a party of sorts for them afterward, a few cucumber sandwiches and cardboard cake, as usual. Yet there was a joviality about the place, as if our choir felt somehow responsible for giving Mrs. Tilling a new lease on life.
“It’s what we have to do these days, Kitty,” she said as she kissed me good-bye. “You need to find where you fit in this world, where you are happiest, where you can make a difference. And don’t be afraid of change.”
“But you can make a difference here in Chilbury,” I told her. “You don’t need to go to London.”
“I’ve done what I can here, and now it’s time to go and help out elsewhere.” She smiled in a way I don’t think I’d ever seen—not like her usual caring smile, or her polite smile, but a whole deeper level of smile, as if radiating a force of sunlight breaking through a stormy sky.
“We’ll miss you—you will write to me, won’t you?”
“I will. And you keep the choir going. I know you will, though, but somehow it seems a lot to be asking a thirteen-year-old.”
“I’m almost fourteen,” I snapped. “And I’m planning on taking the choir to bigger and better things. Just you wait.”
The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir
With Mrs. Tilling leaving, the choir voted for me to take over concert planning, which is an extraordinary honor. To her utter relief, Mrs. B. was finally voted to take over the conducting, so she and I have become quite a team, visiting bombed towns to offer our services. Can you believe that the Mayor of Dover has asked us to perform there? They’ve had more than their fair share of bombs and hundreds of people are now homeless. Mrs. Quail and I have started collecting blankets for them.
I’m sure there’ll be other places in need of our blankets and singing concerts soon, as there seems to be a never-ending stream of Nazi planes flying over to bomb us, our Spitfires fighting fiercely back. They’re saying that the more we shoot them down, the less likely they are to invade, so we’re putting our all into it.
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