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Where Bluebells Chime
Elizabeth Elgin
Will Daisy Dwerryhouse’s love for childhood friend Keth Purvis, survive the combination of geographical divide and the trials and tribulations of a world at war? Panoramic and engrossing, this is the third book in the unforgettable and hugely successful ‘Suttons of Yorkshire’ series.Blackouts, munitions, kitbags and rations once again pepper daily life. Daisy Dwerryhouse, the spirited daughter of gamekeeper Tom and his wife, ex-sewing-maid Alice, finds herself apart from her true love, Keth Purvis.Joining-up fever is infectious. Daisy is now a Wren, based in perilous Liverpool; Keth involved in secret war work in America. Will their mutual passion survive such a divide, as well as the tribulations and untold dramas of a world at war?Britain fights with desperate stubbornness, as the stench of undignified death and the snarl of enemy fighters touch Rowangarth. For Daisy and Keth, and for all the Suttons, these are years of danger and change: a bewildering time when a nation cannot even begin to hope for an end to the conflict.
ELIZABETH ELGIN
Where Bluebells Chime
Dedication (#ulink_17820a48-6310-54be-b504-95be2e688584)
To
my husband George
and to
my daughters Jane and Gillian.
Contents
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About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
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1 (#ulink_1c31baa7-76c6-53f9-b02a-045c8a562cd2)
June 1940
She saw Keth’s letter when the alarm jangled her awake at half-past seven and reached for it, sighing contentment, turning the envelope over to read ‘Open on 20 June’ written across the flap. It must have arrived yesterday, or the day before and Mam had hidden it away then tiptoed into her room last night to prop it against the clock.
She gazed at the colourful American stamp and the air-mail sticker so she might stretch out the seconds before opening it, then frowned to read the postmark. Washington DC instead of Lexington as it almost always was. Why Washington? Quickly, she slit open the envelope.
My darling,
Happy birthday. Close your eyes and know I am thinking of you and wanting you and needing to touch and hold you.
I miss you so much. It should not have been like this. A week ago, I sat my last exam and I know I shall get a good degree. Now I should be packing my cases, heading for New York and a passage home, but nothing is simple any longer. The Atlantic is forbidden, now, to people like me, but I will find a way to be with you.
Since France capitulated I have thought of little else but getting home. Please, darling, take care of yourself and try to keep out of harm’s way. The papers here talk about England being invaded but I can’t believe it can happen – not when I am not there to take care of you and Mum.
There must be a way for us to be together and I will find it. I know you want me to stay in Kentucky, but that is not possible when I need you so desperately and love you so much.
Always remember you are mine.
Keth.
She closed her eyes tightly, trying to smile away the tears that threatened because if she were to weep on her birthday then she would weep all year, Mam said.
‘The summer of ’forty I’ll be back,’ Keth promised, when they parted, but he could not, must not come home.
Today she was twenty and next year, when she came of age, was to have been her wedding day – well, not quite on her birthday, it being a Friday and Friday an unlucky day for weddings. That was why she had ringed round the day after; ringed it on every calendar in the house.
June 21 1941. At All Souls’, Holdenby, by the Reverend Nathan Sutton. Keth Purvis to Daisy Julia Dwerryhouse.
She had read the announcement of their wedding so often in her dreamings. Daisy Purvis. Mrs Keth Purvis. She had promised never to write her married name – not before the wedding that was. As unlucky as a Friday marrying, Mam said, so she had never done it. But it hadn’t stopped her saying it secretly and softly. Daisy Julia Purvis. It made a sound like a love song, like nightingales singing, like the sighing hush of silence before two lovers kiss.
The summer of ’forty. It had been her watchword; words to wear like a talisman, to say over and over when she missed him and wanted him unbearably.
Yet now the summer of ’forty had come and there should have been a letter telling her that soon he’d be sailing from New York, and would she be at Southampton – or Tilbury or Liverpool, perhaps – to meet him when he docked?
Sometimes it had been like that, but sometimes in her dreamings Keth had surprised her, had been waiting where Rowangarth Lane branched off into Brattocks Wood and the footpath that ran through the trees to Keeper’s Cottage; standing there in grey flannel trousers and a white shirt, just as he had been two years ago.
The summer of ’thirty-eight, it had been – their daisychain summer – yet now that longed-for summer of ’forty had arrived and Keth was still in Kentucky. It was where, truth known, she wanted him to stay.
Don’t come home, Keth. Stay in America where you’ll be safe.
America wasn’t at war. America was safety and young men living their lives without fear of call-up; young men knowing they could make plans, go to university, get jobs, stay alive. So she didn’t really want that letter saying he was coming home because if he did, They, the faceless ones, would take him. There had been no heady, patriotic rush to volunteer as there was in Dada’s war. This time, They had already put their mark on every fit young man of twenty-one and dubbed them the militia. Conscripts, really. Six weeks in barracks; forty-odd days in which to accept the discipline of life in the armed forces, to march like automatons in foot-blistering boots; learn to salute Authority and acknowledge that henceforth and for the duration of hostilities, each was no more than a surname and a number. Then away to active service, and some of them killed already.
Stay, Keth. She sent her thoughts winging high and far. I’d rather wait four years, if four years it takes, than have you no more than a name on a gravestone in some foreign cemetery.
She heard the creaking of the stairs and laid her lips briefly to the letter in her hand. Then she swung her feet to the floor. Mam was coming to wish her a happy birthday. Daisy forced her lips into a smile …
When Daisy said goodbye to Reuben Pickering that night, he stood at his almshouse door, waiting to wave to her as she reached the corner. She always turned for one last wave and every time she did she wondered if she would see him again. You never knew what might happen in wartime, and besides, Reuben was frail and old; very old. Over ninety, Mam said, though she would never tell how many years over ninety. You didn’t remind people, especially Uncle Reuben, about their age, she admonished when Daisy once asked. So Daisy always tried, now, to treat the retired gamekeeper as if every time she saw him would be the very last and to be especially kind to him, not just for the sake of her conscience, but because she loved him very much.
Reuben was a part of her life, had always been there – a part of Mam’s life, too. A sort of father, really, because Mam had never had one – or not that she remembered. That was why today in her dinner hour, Daisy had stood in a queue outside a sweet shop and when she reached the counter, had chosen humbugs because they were Reuben’s favourite, though she would have to tell him she was sorry there had been no tobacco queue, but that she would try to get him some tomorrow.
Tobacco and cigarettes were even harder to come by now than humbugs. But yesterday she hadn’t looked for queues during her dinner hour. Yesterday she had –
Daisy blinked her eyes as she stepped from the mellow evening sunlight and into the green-cool dimness of Brattocks Wood, breathing in the damp, mossy scent of it to calm herself, because whenever she thought of what she had done yesterday in her dinner hour, her heart started to bump – especially when she realized that before so very much longer she would have to tell her parents about it. She had almost decided it must be tonight, though it would be awful, telling them on her birthday.
Then she salved her conscience almost at once by remembering that Sunday was to be her official birthday, with Aunt Julia calling for Reuben and bringing him to Keeper’s in her car and the two of them staying for a birthday tea. It was good of Aunt Julia, come to think of it, since petrol was rationed now, and no one got half enough.
But yesterday had started badly. She had awakened and thought that this day next year should have been her wedding day and it wouldn’t be, now, because of the bloody awful war. She had known with dreadful certainty it would not. Keth would not be home, now, though she knew she should be glad he was in America and out of harm’s way. There was no way, now, of crossing the Atlantic unless you were a merchant seaman, sailing square-packed in convoys or unless you were in the Air Force and could fly across in a warplane.
Civilians could no longer buy a sailing ticket or a seat on a flying-boat, because all transatlantic liners were troopships, now, and flying-boats had been commandeered by the Air Force and painted in the dull colours of camouflage to be a part of Coastal Command. Besides, the Atlantic was a dangerous place to be, packed with German submarines and battleships sailing where they wanted, doing exactly as they pleased because Britain was still licking its wounds after Dunkirk and could do little to stop them.
An aircraft flew low overhead, crashing into her thoughts. She could not see it through the denseness of the branches above her but she knew it was one of the bombers from the aerodrome at Holdenby Moor. There were two squadrons there now and last night they had flown over Germany again, dropping their bombs – an act of defiance, really, when everything was in such a mess and everyone worrying about the invasion. But when it came people would make a fight of it, though in France they hadn’t been given much of a chance. Hitler’s armies had just marched on and on …
But we had the Channel – the English Channel – and Hitler had to cross it first. And we had a navy, still, to help stop them, so perhaps it would be all right. Maybe the Germans wouldn’t come.
Daisy looked down at her watch. Mam wouldn’t be home from the canteen yet, nor Dada from his meeting. She squinted up at the sun dappling through the trees. Soon, when it reached the cupola of Rowangarth stable block it would start slowly to set. Blackout tonight would be at eleven o’clock and remain until daylight came about five tomorrow morning.
The blackout, Daisy frowned, was the strangest thing about the war, especially in winter when it began at teatime and lasted until long past breakfast time, next day. Last winter had been bleak and cold and very dark, and the blackout had taken a lot of getting used to. Stepping out into it, even from a dimly lit room, was like stepping into sudden blindness. So you stood there, if you had any sense, and gave yourself up the the blackness, eyes blinking until shapes could be picked out against the skyline. Shapes – outlines of buildings, that was, and trees – and especially in towns you stood still until your eyes could make out not only shapes but the white bands painted on gateposts and lampposts and telegraph poles and corners of buildings; unless you wanted a bloody nose or a black eye, of course, from walking into things you couldn’t see. ‘Bumped into a lamppost, did you?’ people would grin, with no sympathy at all for bruises or shattered spectacles.
But there would be virtually no blackout tonight because it was June and would hardly get dark because of that extra, unnatural hour of double summertime. She must remember to think about June evenings when the drear of November was with them.
Drew, her half-brother, had joined the Royal Navy. His last letter had been from signal school where he was learning to read morse. And when he had, he’d be sent to a ship and only heaven knew where he would end up.
