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winter’s chilly heart; and I leaned for a moment on the gate to watch the tractorcrawling round the headland and the gulls sailing like far-off yachts behind the plough.
    Having turned the corner at the top of the field, the tractor began to come down the hedgeside towards me. There was a row of apple trees in the hedge, with low-hanging branches which made Susan duck; but she seemed determined to plough the furrow as close to the hedge as possible and she rode the tractor like a jockey, lying almost flat over the steering-wheel when she passed beneath the trees. One didn’t need to be a ploughman to be aware of the skill and care implied by those dead-straight furrows and narrow headlands; and somehow it stirred me to think of the small girl on the heavy tractor discovering something that her mother and all the generations of mothers had never known – the ancient pride of Adam in his well-tilled earth.
    Like a jockey: surely it was her green jersey and the bright handkerchief tied on her head which gave me that idea. But as she reached the end of the hedgerow and began to turn the corner within a score of yards of me a curious thing happened; the ploughshare must have caught in a root or fouled one of the suckers growing out from the old apple trees; for the tractor suddenly bucked like a horse, its front wheels lifted a good six inches off the ground, then as Susan pulled back the throttle they bumped down on the earth again and I saw Susan rise in her seat as a rider does when his horse plunges.
    She reversed, and lifted the plough clear; then opening the throttle she roared past the gate and I had an impression of tousled blonde hair and a flushed excited face from which the momentary alarm was just fading. She saw me, and grinned as if to say ‘That was a near shave!’ and indeed if the tractor had come over backwards on top of her she would have been crushed to death by it as many an inept ploughboy, used to his slow-plodding Dobbins, has beenbefore now. She stopped, and we had our brief conversation, and then she went off full tilt up the hill, with a wave of her hand and a toss of her head, and a lump of earth from the mud-caked wheels came spinning through the air and plopped down at my feet.
    What a mere trifle, sometimes, can change a man’s mood! As I walked back towards the village I was light-hearted for no better reason than that the sun had shone for a moment on a green jersey and that I’d seen a young girl ploughing as straight a furrow as a man. I paused at the bottom of the lane and looked over my shoulder just as the sunlight was beginning to fade, and the tractor no bigger than a ladybird was crawling along the horizon, churr-churr, churr-churr, etching yet another of those long parallel lines which made the hump-backed field look like an old engraving.
    But while I watched, the sunshine was extinguished as dramatically as if someone had pressed a switch, and the light went out of the land. The wind seemed to blow harder as it lashed the laggard clouds to close the narrowing gap; and soon they caught up with the leaders, piling grey on grey, hastening the swift evening. I went on down the road; and with the gale at my back I felt as if I had seven-league boots on. That trivial fragment of experience, the bucking tractor, Susan’s alarmed, excited face, her sudden grin, still warmed my heart; and romantically I cherished it.
Frolick Virgins
    Susan was one of a score or so of land girls who were accommodated in a big rambling house which had long been empty, next door to the Gables. (‘The Land Girls in theirHostel, the Young Men at their Gate!’ chanted Mr Chorlton with a sigh.) The young men, however, were strongly discouraged and sometimes driven away, by the mournful and harassed-looking woman who was the land girls’ janitor and whose unsuitable name was Mrs Merrythought. She was a disillusioned creature with thin sandy hair and the faint beginnings of a