STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN - Prologue

Setting the scene as Daisy Bloom becomes a confident grown up young woman in the early years of the twentieth century.

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

Prologue

By the time Daisy Bloom had struggled her way through her childhood in Edwardian England and then the privations of the 1914-1918 war, and was stepping brightly and confidently into her late teens she discovered that most of the lads of her age, lads that she might well have fancied with a fervour that echoed the hormones swirling through her body, were dead and buried or still decomposing in the soils of a foreign land. There had been the war, some said, to end all wars. Would that had been true!

So she found herself employment, secretarial because that was the kind of thing she’d been pushed into by the staff of the school she’d attended when they recognised her native intelligence. It was a factory where she worked, and after work the aforementioned hormones sent her on a fruitless search for manly companionship.

So she found Phoebe and they became best friends. Their interests matched, and as the nineteen twenties came to an exciting end they discovered that their minds might have wanted the warm and manly arms of a male companion but their bodies satisfied some of the hormonal insistences and they were forced to be satisfied with all they had: each other. And they did discover quite a lot about love and life in each other’s arms.

They even holidayed together, packing a small tent and cycling off to adventures new. Camping was cheap and needed little in the way of advanced planning. Two pretty young women never failed to find a farmer willing to lend them the use of a corner of a field!

By the nineteen thirties they were a couple of still young women, stuck in a friendship that occasionally bordered on the physicality of hugs and kisses, especially when they were away camping, and the old lies of wars to end all wars were proved to be the optimistic lies that they were, as another major war loomed.

Such is the folly of the human race, the one instinct that they don’t seem to be able to control, that young men once more gave their lives for a cause they didn’t understand because rich old men told them to, even made it impossible for them to refuse. And it was then that Daisy met Fred. Also an office man, a clerk in the same factory where the manufacture of cutlery became the creation of munitions. H had beene was forced to migrate from a quite distant part of the country to Brumpton, where Daisy found him sweating over a filing cabinet.

Fred did a lot of sweating, when he wasn’t coughing, which he also did a lot of, probably as a consequence of the cigarettes he smoked whenever he could. He’d been unfit for the first world war due to his health, and it was that same health thatmade him unfit for the second. But he could use pens and paper clips, so he was transferred to a Brumpton office where he met Daisy.

And they were both single. She had Phoebe, but Phoebe wasn’t a man, not even a weak one like Fred, and eventually they learned to hold each other by the hand. Despite the fact that she much preferred holding Phoebe by the hand she found herself falling for Fred.

Phoebe, of course, saw Fred for what he was, a weak man who coughed too much, but Daisy fell for something about him. Maybe it was an any port in a storm affair, and there was no doubt that, in her thirties, he was the first man who ever kissed her. Not as well as Phoebe had, but she was sadly a woman and other considerations came into play.

Instinctively, she wanted a family. Children, babies, whatever, and so when he proposed to her even though there was a small age gap (he had been born towards the end of Victoria’s reign in the failing years of the nineteenth century whilst she was Edwardian, from 1905), she accepted and Phoebe was sickened.

“It won’t go well,” she warned Daisy.

Phoebe was never to find a spouse of her own so it was probably jealousy that drove her hatred of Fred rather than anything to do with the man himself. But she did accept her best friend’s decision, reluctantly but they were friends and always would be, and agreed to be her maid of honour when Daisy and Fred were married. He didn’t have a best man, still being newish to the town and too far from the friends that he hadone had to expect any of them to make the long journey when transport was extremely difficult, what with a war raging and unless you were a young soldier going off to die. Yes, a new generation of men who in a later age would still be called boys were off to probably die.

Human affairs have been governed by the need for tribes to fight So there were wars and in the twentieth century the tribes had become whole nations and the fighting was brutal. Remember Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Death had become the order of the day. A handful of privileged older men couldn’t see why the young should have any fun… or any life.

And so there were wars.

It was during that war that Isabel was born to them, followed at the end of the war by Brian. Fred may have had his weakness, but not in the fertility department.

Two years after that war ended his cough took a down turn and he became seriously ill. Then he died, making his way to paradise and leaving Daisy as a widow with two young children and a yawning chasm in her life.

© Peter Rogerson 19.02.23

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