Free The Daisy Club by Charlotte Bingham

Maude, but I’ll make sure to do it myself.’
    â€˜Good girl.’ Jessica dipped the pen she was using in the bottle of ink in front of her. ‘Lists, lists, lists, that is what we need for the coming evacuation of the cities. Because, believe me, without lists we shall be sunk. Whether we like it or not, we will soon have more evacuees thrust upon us any day now than even you and I have had hot dinners.’
    Daisy took this in, as she was meant to, as if she, and not Aunt Maude, was head of the household at the Hall – but as Freddie was driving her back home for luncheon, and they were chatting, it occurred to Daisy that if she didn’t get a car of her own soon, it would be the next century before she completed her flying lessons, or logged up the required number of hours. She needed a motor car, fast.
    â€˜Where did you buy that ?’ Laura stared at the brand-sparklingly-new motor car that stood, a few hours later, outside the stables at the Court.
    â€˜In Wychford yesterday,’ Daisy told her proudly. ‘Freddie helped me choose it.’ She turned to the salesman who had brought it, and gave him her warmest smile. ‘I say, would you be an absolute ducky and show me how to drive this lovely thing?’
    Laura closed her eyes, and then quickly opened them again as Daisy hopped in beside the salesman, and the car started to move towards the back entrance of the small estate, and so on to the open road.
    â€˜Do you think you should have encouraged Daisy to buy that motor car? I mean, she hasn’t even learned to drive yet. It’s really rather powerful, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Oh yes, very,’ Freddie agreed cheerfully. ‘But she needs a powerful motor car with what she has in mind.’ A questioning look from Laura brought forth a further even more wide-eyed response. ‘She wants to go for flying lessons at that place outside Bramsfield!’
    â€˜ Flying lessons?’
    â€˜Flying an aeroplane is the only way she will get away from the Hall, and Aunt Maude.’
    â€˜Lord love a duck.’
    â€˜And the Lord does love his ducks, Laura,’ Freddie told her in a pious voice. ‘What He does not love, I wouldn’t think, is war.’
    â€˜Is it always men who make war, do you think?’
    â€˜Oh yes indeedy, the males of the species will insist on killing each other, because of wanting to be top dog. Mark my words, there would be no more war if men started having babies. Mrs Budgie says they would die if they had to have babies, and she knows, she’s had six.’
    Laura stared at Freddie with something approaching admiration. She might look fifteen rather than seventeen, being small, brown-haired, freckle-faced, and still with a long braid of hair down her back, which she had the habit of tossing impatiently behind her, but she was always thoughtfully working things out. She was quite mature, as if she had an old head on her young shoulders, or as if she was used to looking out for herself, not having had parents for long, and not having been brought up by anyone but a spinster aunt and a butler . . .
    â€˜You should be a lady MP, like Nancy Astor, Freddie.’
    â€˜Apparently, Aunt Jessica says, Nancy Astor is many things, but a lady is not one of them.’
    â€˜Do you know they change the flowers in the vases at Cliveden every two hours?’
    â€˜Have they nothing better to do?’
    â€˜Apparently not, at least not until the war comes. Once it does, well, things will be different – for ever, won’t they?’ Laura asked over-brightly. The look in her eyes was sad, for to her mind things had already changed. Her mother had died so suddenly, leaving her in a world that to a young lonely girl was really rather confusing, particularly with a father going off the rails at what seemed like every and any opportunity, but then perhaps he always had, and it was only now that her mother was gone