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said Cassidy.
    ‘Just trying to make you feel at home. Climb aboard.’
    ‘Where?’ asked Private Peterson.
    ‘Sergeant up front, privates in the back.’
    Cassidy, already a friend, said, ‘You’re kidding, Tim old boy, it’s a mousetrap.’
    ‘Well, try it for size,’ I said, ‘and if you find any cheese, save some for me.’ I parted the rear canvas. ‘Hop in.’
    ‘OK, I’ll play,’ said Cassidy. She hitched her skirt and swung a leg up. It looked good enough to eat and probably would have been if she’d spent eighty days in a lifeboat and had drawn the wrong straw. I helped her aboard as decently as I could. Private Peterson was a different kettle of fish. Having watched her sister soldier’s leg show with visible disgust, she was dead against being helped.
    ‘Get lost,’ she said and unwisely tried to hurl herself aboard at a reckless speed. She made a terrible mess of it. In the little van her legs suffered seconds of exposure before she was able to right herself. I closed the canvas on her yell of mortification. Poor girl. Insecurity, that’s what it was. There was a lot of it about among some girls, mostly due to the way roving GIs addressed the problem of being far from home.
    Sergeant Masters sat next to me as I tanked my way back to the village. I asked her what she thought of life in the American Army. She said it was a temporary condition that couldn’t be helped and she was trying to learn to love it.
    ‘I don’t know if you’ll learn to love Suffolk,’ I said, ‘it’s pretty rural.’
    ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said, taking a keen interest in what she could see of it right now. She’d just been railroaded from Chelmsford she said, in a funny old toy train. She had a very self-confident air. I had a gloomy feeling she was faultlessly efficient. I wasn’t too keen on that kind of woman. I didn’t mind Aunt May’s motherly efficiency, it had been a blessing to me, but I had fixed ideas about women and top of the list was the conviction they were designed by nature to be kind, loving and a bit incompetent, except in a kitchen. Sergeant Masters said she hadn’t been long in the UK but liked what she’d seen of it so far. Entering the village, she saw a medley of thatched roofs and said they were really cute, part of old England.
    ‘They harbour livestock,’ I said, ‘but they’re pretty, I suppose.’
    ‘Pretty?’
    ‘All right, cute,’ I said and pulled up outside Jim’s cottage. He was at his gate, the petrol can wrapped in sacking under his arm and a cardboard box in his hand. Up to my window he came and handed in the cardboard box.
    ‘Six eggs,’ he said.
    ‘Ta, old love,’ I said, thinking of what they could do for my empty stomach. ‘Big ’uns, are they?’
    ‘Ain’t pullets’ marbles,’ said Jim. ‘’Ello, ’ello, who’s yer lady friend, lad?’ He gave Sergeant Masters an interested look. She had an attractive curve to her jacket. ‘Found a good ’un there, Tim, ’ave yer?’
    ‘American,’ I said, thinking of fried egg sandwiches if I could get some bread from our sergeant-cook.
    ‘Ain’t ’er fault,’ said Jim, ‘people can’t ’elp where they’re born.’
    ‘What’s he saying?’ asked Sergeant Masters, obviously foxed by cockney twang laced with a little Suffolk burr.
    ‘That you’re rare,’ I said.
    ‘Watch it, Hardy,’ she said.
    ‘She’s a sergeant,’ I said to Jim. I was no longer in a hurry.
    ‘That ain’t ’er fault, neither,’ said Jim, ‘it’s the gawd-help-us war that’s done it. Unnatural, though.’ Jim considered females were for cuddling, not soldiering. Nor saluting. ‘It’s the war done it all right, Tim. I’ll put the porridge tin back.’ He disappeared.
    ‘What’s a porridge tin?’ asked Sergeant Masters, who’d at least heard that correctly.
    ‘Oh, nothing very—’ A shriek interrupted me.
    ‘You dirty old ratbag, I’ll get you run in!’ It was Private Peterson. I’d