The Chilbury Ladies' Choir(71)

At first, I couldn’t bring myself to sing, the feeling was too immense, the extraordinary sound of our procession echoing around the empty church too tragic to eclipse the dreadful finality of death, the weight in the box making me shudder with discomfort. In front of me Kitty was struggling to hold the coffin up, her voice coming out piecemeal like fragile broken china, and behind me Venetia was inconsolable, heaving huge gulps of tears. I know that we are taught to think of death as a gentle passage of the soul from one place to the next, but the brutal bombing of a young mother seemed to contradict all of that, make it into the abominable destruction of a very real, strong spirit.

I felt Venetia’s hand on my arm from behind me, and suddenly felt less isolated in my dismal reckoning of mankind, and found my voice. At first gravelly and croaky with tears, it soon gathered strength, clarity, deliberation, until I felt the sound of our combined voices encompass us like a warm halo of protection, making us aware of the precious life we all have—what it means, and however long it may last.

As we reached the last majestic notes, we stood tightly at the front, breathlessly listening to the sounds of the closing song reverberating around us.

With some effort, we gently lowered the coffin onto the low table, Mrs. B. hoarsely whispering, “Gently, Mrs. Gibbs. Gently!”

Then we glanced around at the looming emptiness of the space. On one side were the mothers and children from the school, and on the other was only old Mr. Dawkins, the Brigadier with Rose, and now Henry, who had arrived while we were in the vestry.

Then, at the very back of the church, I noticed that the Colonel had slipped into the row on the left—my spot, the place I always like to sit. He gave me a sad, tight-lipped smile, and I nodded in the direction of the Brigadier, hoping he would get the hint and go and collect Rose from him, which he did, remaining at the front as the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir went quietly into the choir stalls.

Clearly upset, the Vicar led us through the ghastly service, a series of words that seemed all too inadequate to describe the grief I felt inside, and although I tried to hold them back, thoughts of David, and what I’d do if that telegram arrived, sprang into my mind, an ominous gleam of a possible future.

I was snapped out of my miseries by the Vicar announcing, “The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir will now sing for us.”

We stood, and I took a few deep breaths before walking to the front, feeling unnerved and unable to go through with my task of leading, such a new endeavor to be making at this awful moment, at once stepping into a dead woman’s shoes—and Prim’s, no less, with her magical presence gone—for the sake of poor Hattie.

And then, a sudden anger shot through me: What vicious brutes did this to them? And a new emotion overcame me: integrity, and a feeling of pride for everything we stand for. Pride in Hattie for striving on with Victor so far away in danger at sea. Pride in Prim for having the faith to take our choir to new heights. And pride in us, the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, for carrying through with our duty: to rejoice in their lives, to be strong and resilient enough to hold off our enemies, and to make sure their deaths are not in vain.

The organ’s introduction of “Amazing Grace” filtered through the empty church, sweeping through us like a clean, crisp wind, and I took up my baton and prepared the choir to give the finest performance of our short, eventful existence. And a tragic awe overwhelmed me as the clear, crystalline voices pierced the air with all the beauty that a woman’s voice can attain, a soaring white dove in the everlasting tumult of war.

When we had finished, the Vicar announced that the children of the school wanted to sing for their dear teacher. And my heart broke as I watched the children, most of them eight or nine, wondering what had happened to wonderful Mrs. Lovell.

It was the most tragic scene I’d ever encountered. The children covering their faces with their small hands afterward to avoid looking at the coffin, in shock by the raw reality of death: how it could totally destroy something so warm and alive.

—

At the burial, our sorry group stood silently as Hattie’s coffin was lowered into the sodden ground beside her parents, before we made our way back to Ivy House for tea and sandwiches. I walked home with the Colonel, who had slipped the sleeping Rose into her pram—a black one that had been lent to me by a nurse friend in Litchfield, as Hattie’s blue one had been crushed in the bombing. She’d been so proud of it. I remembered when she brought it round to show me, pleased as punch, the first of many such memories to haunt me.

I began pondering about Hattie and Prim and their lives, and thinking of my own insignificant time left on this planet, and how it might be shortened by bombs or invasion, or who knows what. And later that day, after our desolate assembly had left with tears and embraces, I found myself talking about it to the Colonel.

“That could have been my funeral,” I said quietly, sitting at the kitchen table, drawing my fingernail down a crevice in the wood. “That bomb could have come a hundred yards in this direction and hit us.”

“Yes, but let’s not think about that until it happens, eh?” the Colonel replied, and drew up a chair. It was early evening and the gloomy gray of the day was dimming into a stormy-looking night.

“But if we don’t think of our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live?” I looked at my hands, thin and wrinkled and bony, their freshness lost. “If it had been my funeral, it would have been a sorry affair.”