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yesterday. He is well and in good spirits.
    Your loving niece,
    Midge
    The railway platform was long and narrow with a line of buildings on one side: the ticket office, the waiting room (now the storeroom) and the station master’s office. There was no spare room for the canteen, which was a nuisance when it rained. But after the first two days of drizzle, Ethel had found a man to rig up an open canvas tent tocover their four trestle tables, two coppers for boiling up the cocoa and two coke braziers. This made up the canteen.
    Now in the dawn’s grey light French soldiers tumbled out of the trains bleary-eyed from travel. They lined up along the platform for their cocoa, then took the pannikins and their bread and beef out to the station courtyard and sat propped against their kitbags or the walls. They were cheery for the most part—or at least put on a good show for the canteen girls.
    At times like this, the war seemed very near, thought Midge, as she lugged yet another box of cocoa along the platform and tried to ignore her cold fingers. But at other times, the rumble of the guns could have been simply thunder. And on the other side of the railway lines stretched farmland: neat fields still untouched by war; cattle that gazed curiously at the commotion at the station; and geese that grazed the grass along the line, herded by small boys with bare feet and ragged pants.
    The dawn was brighter than the gaslights as Midge dropped the box by the two big coppers Ethel had scrounged to heat the cocoa on the two small braziers of coke or coal.
    ‘Thanks, lass.’ Ethel began to tear open the box. ‘I’m fair clemmed this morning. It was hard work last night.’
    Midge nodded. It would be good to hand over to the others in an hour or so and get some sleep. She glanced at Ethel. Ethel didn’t look ‘clemmed’. Ever since they’d left school, it was as though she’d found a new source of energy. She was like a steam engine, Midge thought with a private grin, as another train clattered into the station.
    It thundered through without stopping. Hospital train, she thought. Six of them went through the station each day. Ethel had discovered that each carried four hundred sick and wounded men, with two or three medical officers, four nursing sisters and about forty orderlies to tend them.
    Midge yawned and trudged over to the pump to fill a bucket of water to pour onto the powdered milk in the copper. Add half a bucket of cocoa, she thought as she pumped the handle up and down and watched the water splash into the wooden bucket, ten more buckets of water, stir for an hour, and there’d be cocoa for the next troop train later that morning.
    The noise of a different sort of engine floated over the morning sounds of roosters and the cows plodding off to be milked by Monsieur Brabant, the dairy farmer down the road. Midge looked up. A van was pulling into the courtyard. It looked like one of the new motorised grocer’s delivery trucks—there had been great excitement at school when one rumbled up the drive instead of the usual horse and cart. But this one was painted white, with a wobbly-looking red cross on the side.
    The driver leapt out, followed by a large spotted dog. His boots clicked on the cobbles as he dodged through the few civilian passengers waiting for the train, then strode up to Midge, the dog’s ears flapping at his heels.
    ‘Down, Dolores! Hello there! Any chance of a couple of quick cups of tea?’
    Midge stared. The driver was a girl.
    Midge had learned to drive Dad’s car back home. But she’d never seen another female drive before. The girl was a few years older than Midge, and tall in men’s trousers, boots and jacket. She grinned and held out a hand. Midge shook it, stunned. It was the first time she had ever shaken hands with another woman, too.
    ‘I’m Slogger Jackson. That’s Jumbo.’ She gestured to another girl leaning in to do something in the back of the van. ‘And this is Dolores, and