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moustache, and her life was made wretched by her unceasing preoccupation with the wolfish ways of Men. ‘Ah,
Men!
’ she would declare darkly. ‘They’re after my poor girls all the time’ – as if the girls were a flock of juicy sheep and the village lads sat howling round the hostel with lolling tongues and burning eyes. Because of this preoccupation she had caused the high wall round the garden to be topped with broken glass; and she took such elaborate precautions about locking up at night that on several occasions she locked some of the girls out, with consequences on which it would be idle to speculate. Moreover, because she herself knew so little about men (with the exception of certain legends about their unflagging concupiscence) she gave them credit for a much greater degree of agility, and a much more reckless disregard for danger, than in fact they possess; and she was firmly convinced that they could and would climb the sheer walls of the hostel for the purpose of looking in at the bedroom windows or even – dreadful thought! – crawling through them. She had, therefore, had all the spoutings down the side of the house wrapped round with tufts of barbed wire.
    Luckily for her charges, Mrs Merrythought was so concerned with the problem of keeping the young men out that she gave less attention to the task of keeping the girls in; it never occurred to her that the sheep, from time to time, went off in full cry after the fleeing wolves. Nevertheless I am reliably informed that this phenomenon sometimes happened.
    The first batch of land girls had arrived in 1939; and since then they had intruded more and more into the accepted pattern of village life, so that they became part of Brensham, and we should have missed them sorely if they had been taken away. One or two of them had been with us from the beginning. These were practically Brenshamites by now; and the newcomers, taking their cue from them, quickly fell into our ways. This was all the more surprising because few of them belonged to our part of England, and many of them came from the cities. Susan had been a manicurist, of all things, before she became a plough-girl. Margie was an East End Cockney, Lisbeth came from Lancashire and talked like Gracie Fields, Betsy with the freckled face belonged to Ayrshire, the one whose demented parents had christened her Wistaria had worked in what she called a gown shop in Putney, and the red-headed Ive was from Birmingham. These were the six whom Mr Chorlton called the Frolick Virgins. The quotation was from Herrick:
    Frolick Virgins once these were,
Overloving, living here,
    and indeed the innumerable, intertwined and continually fluctuating love-affairs of Susan, Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive were the talk of the village. These affairs provided a source of unfailing entertainment when they were going well, but at moments of crisis they preyed upon our minds and tattered our nerves, for they were always conducted more or less in public, and if Lisbeth had been jilted or Betsy had stolen Ive’s young man the whole of Brensham knew about it, sorrowed and sympathized and took sides. What made these dramas all the more wearing for everybody was a perpetual uncertainty about who was in love with whom; as Mr Chorlton pointed out, in order tocalculate the permutations and combinations of the Frolick Virgins and about a score of young men one would require a slide-rule. For among the six girls there was only one constant, one whose love did not veer and back like the mutable winds or ebb and flow like the tide. Susan loved George Daniels with the single-minded passion of a Juliet, and George Daniels’ devotion to her was as steady and unshifting as the Pole Star; and yet, alas, their affair went ill.
Young Corydon
    The trouble was a combination of two of the oldest obstacles which beset the thorny path of lovers: the pride of parents and the lack of money. Susan’s father and