Everyone looked around. It was Hattie, standing at the door with her blue pram. “What on earth are you all doing?”

“The Brigadier started it,” Mrs. B. began. “It’s our rightful turn to use the hall and they barged in and tried to intimidate us.” She looked proudly around at the ladies. “But we showed them, didn’t we?”

“It was our turn and they wouldn’t leave,” Daddy said, nose in the air as if even discussing it were beneath him.

“Well, I suggest that everyone put down their weapons and shake hands,” Hattie said. “And then after that let’s put on the wireless and listen to news of a real war.”

Everyone quietly began putting things away, although Mrs. B. snapped, “That’s precisely what I’ve been telling them to do all along.”

Bad news for the choir—and my singing career

The choir competition has been postponed indefinitely. Prim announced it at practice, although she quickly said we’d have a special choir practice next week, and everyone in the village is invited. At least I still have singing lessons. Prim has lent me a pile of modern records for me to try to sing along to at home. Some are jazz, which is quite thrilling. We’re to try them out in our singing lessons.

Tonight at choir practice, we sung an especially aggressive rendition of “Jerusalem,” becoming quite raucous toward the end as we’re so peeved with the Nazis for preventing us from singing in St. Paul’s Cathedral. You’d have thought that our higgledy-piggledy assortment of ladies was ready to pick up handbags and charge toward the enemy. Does Hitler have any idea of the force and determination of thirteen impassioned women? At the very least, I suspect he’s never considered the lethal potential of a three-tiered cake stand.

3 CHURCH ROW, CHILBURY, KENT.

Monday, 17th June, 1940

Dear Brigadier, After waiting more than a month for the money owed which is rightfully mine, I have taken it upon myself to remind you that we had a deal, and you owe me the second half of my money. I carried out my role, and now you must fulfill yours.

I will be waiting at the outhouse Saturday morning at 10.

Miss E. M. Paltry

Wednesday, 19th June, 1940

We arrived early for Prim’s special choir practice, some chattering about what Prim had for us, others with our own thoughts after Dunkirk. I had convinced one of the Sewing Ladies, Mrs. Poultice, to come. She lost her only son at Dunkirk. She hasn’t spoken a word since, just sews, in her own world.

I was surprised that so many people were there. The whole of the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, the Sewing Ladies, and some other women not in the choir. Then there were men, too, including the Vicar and Mr. Slater, and even Colonel Mallard. I tried to ignore him, but he insisted on coming to speak to me. Fortunately, as he came near, the heavy door swung open and Prim came down the aisle and we were saved the need to speak to each other.

Instead of her usual dramatic voice, Prim gestured for us to be quiet.

“Tonight is a special evening for us to come to terms with what has happened and what is upon us. Please take a chair from the back and bring it to the altar, making a circle.”

We all did so. I had poor Mrs. Poultice beside me, looking so pale and sad, as if something inside her had stopped living but her body lived and moved, like a lifeless machine.

“In my youth,” Prim began, “I traveled to Italy, and it was there that I learned a different type of song. A song to bring peace and acceptance of the natural cycle of life and death. The chant.” She put out her hands on either side. “Let us take each other’s hands, complete the circle.”

We gingerly held hands. Such a simple, childish thing, but so rare in our busy, untouching world. I felt the back of Mrs. Poultice’s wrinkled, veined hand in mine, and felt her tremble slightly with the strange intimacy of it all. It was as if we’d torn down our everyday masks to expose the scared children inside.

“Now let’s close our eyes, and start with a single held hum.”

The sound of a faint hum, a middle note, neither high nor low, emanated from Prim, at first soft and then growing with confidence.

Then I heard Kitty’s soft tones joining in, then Mrs. Quail’s, and before long a sonorous single note was echoing around us, filling all the gaps between us with a vibrating connection. A noise that drowned out all the mess.

The hum petered out, thinning into the air until it was a whisper, or an echo of a whisper.

After a few poignant moments of silence, she handed out some music. “This is a simple Gregorian chant,” she told us. “It is for the mourning of the dead.”

She hummed the note to begin, and then we all came in, Kitty’s voice leading the descant. It was beautiful. At the end, when the echoes had faded into silence, we sat a few moments in the warmth of the silence, our hands linked.

Prim was the first to get up, ushering everyone to follow suit, quietly taking her chair to the back, finding her music bag.

“Keep calm and peaceful for the rest of the night,” she said gently, and drifted out as if on a wave of calm.

We slowly began to get up, chattering softly among ourselves. Even Mrs. B. seemed pacified for a moment. “What an extraordinary evening,” she said. “I really wasn’t sure at the beginning, but it was like we were nuns,” she chortled.