The Safest Place in London by Maggie Joel Read Free Book Online Page B

of early winter frosts and the soil had proved too chalky. The failure of the garden would have been inconsequential enough under ordinary circumstances, but in wartime it had assumed catastrophic proportions.
    It was the reason she had come up to London.
    The chalk was the main source of the problem, for the Chilterns was, essentially, one very long chalk escarpment that ringed the outer rim of London from Watford to Uxbridge. And yet they had brought it upon themselves, she and Gerald, choosing to live in a place that was not merely built on chalk but positively boasted about its chalkiness; ‘Chalfont’, they discovered, meant a chalk spring. This had seemed perfectly delightful in 1930 when they toured the pretty little village preparatory to buying a house here. Now, when the beautiful begonia beds had been dug up to make way for marrows and carrots and running beans, the chalk was the stuff of nightmares. Other women tossed and turned at night haunted by ration books and clothing coupons. Diana lay awake fretting about her vegetable garden.
    And yet other people’s gardens did not seem to suffer the way hers did. When one peered into the neighbours’ gardens one saw broad beans as tall as golf clubs, tomatoes as shiny asjewels, carrots as abundant as—well, as carrots had been before the war. Everywhere she saw gardens brimming with bounty. But at The Larches nothing seemed to grow. And yet that first autumn when they had dug up the flower beds and sowed vegetables, there had been a decent enough crop. The second year the results had been disappointing. This last autumn the crops had failed altogether. Baines had left instructions. It had seemed straightforward enough. Diana had sowed when he had told her to sow, she had planted, she had fertilised, she had watered. She had watched as the shoots wizened and died, as no shoots appeared at all, as the chalky earth coughed up a tomato the size of a marble, a solitary dwarf carrot, a runner bean fit only for a doll’s tea party.
    The vegetables had failed. She had failed.
    She had wondered then, What am I good for? She had passed a handful of exams and done moderately well at a secretarial college; she had learned shorthand, though she doubted she could remember much of it now, and could type at a speed of thirty words a minute (a good typist could do forty-five). She still had a sound backhand, though she had not played tennis in four years and could not find a way, in her present circumstances, to put this particular skill to any practical use. She was a wife and a mother and she supposed that she had made a fair job of both these things—and were these not, when all was said and done, the two most important roles a woman could have? But she had not seen her husband in more than three years and she had failed to put fresh food on the table for her child. She had lived with her failure for many months and told no one because defeatism was now a crime in wartime.
    In the weeks leading up to Christmas, she had decided to go up to town to do her Christmas shopping, even though Christmas in wartime (and this was their fifth) was a pitiful affair. Abigail, however, was excited, though having only experienced wartime Christmases Abigail’s expectations were set rather low.
    She had taken the nine o’clock train, arriving at Baker Street a little after ten o’clock. She had made her way by bus to Bond Street and there ran into Lance Beckwith.
    ‘Diana Pettigrew! Is that really you?’
    He came out of nowhere (in fact, he came out of Boots, the chemist, but she wasn’t to learn this until later) and the use of her maiden name disorientated her for a moment. It was another moment before she realised who he was, this tall middle-aged man, incongruous in a light grey suit and a paisley-pattern silk scarf on this drearily overcast December day, a soft felt hat pushed to the back of his head and a smile in his eyes.
    ‘Lance!’ And at once the drearily overcast December