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would their poor mothers cope with such inhumane treatment? It would send you mad.
    She shut her eyes, and other dreadful stories – like the Nazis’ slaughter of a whole Czech village, in reprisal for two members of the Free Czech forces killing Reinhard Heydrich, the Hangman of Europe and architect of the Final Solution – crowded her mind. But she didn’t want to think of such things today, not on this one special day.
    Jumping up again, she walked over to the dress, fingering the folds of lace and satin and imagining Monty’s face when he saw her walking down the aisle. She loved him so much, and with life being so precarious – especially for him, as a fighter pilot – she longed to be his wife. They would make the most of his leave and the one-week holiday she was allowed from the farm. Her work-roughened hands caught on the soft material, and she grimaced as she looked at her red skin and broken nails. The work that she, as a volunteer in the Women’s Land Army, had to tackle was as varied as agriculture itself. Hand-milking cows, lifting potatoes, helping with land reclamation and drainage, operating heavy earth-moving machinery or driving a tractor, mucking out pigs, thatching ricks, hedging, hay-making, harvesting, planting, weeding, muck-spreading – she had done it all, and would no doubt do so again. It was a far cry from the country-house parties and tennis tournaments, the London Season and delightful social whirl that would have been her lot, had Adolf Hitler not forced Britain to declare war on Germany on a sunny September Sunday three years ago.
    But – and she couldn’t have discussed this with anyone, not even Monty, close though they were – she was glad she had been removed from the life she would have been expected to live, as the daughter of her parents. Not glad about the war;
never
that. She shuddered. But glad that she could actually
do
something: be useful, productive – not just a fancy adornment on a man’s arm. Even her darling Monty’s arm.
    Oh, what was she thinking? She shook her head at herself. This was her trouble: thinking too much. Her dear mother had always said so. And it was certainly this attribute that had caused her to be at loggerheads with her father, from as long ago as she could remember. They’d had a blazing row on her seventeenth birthday when she’d declared that, now she was old enough, she was joining the Women’s Land Army. She had read an article in the newspaper stating that two decades of rural depopulation, followed by an intensive army recruitment campaign in the spring of 1939 and then by conscription, had left a deficit of more than 50,000 farm workers. Once they were over twenty-one, farm workers were considered to be in a reserved occupation and were thus exempt from conscription, but the 20,000 who had joined the Territorial Army were nevertheless called up. The paper had also declared that the priority to increase the production of food crops by ploughing up permanent pasture meant that the number of farm workers required was increasing, rather than remaining the same, and that it was time for women to play their part in the war and get ‘breeched, booted and cropped’, as they had done in the First World War. She’d known immediately that’s what she wanted to do.
    Her father had been furious that a daughter of his could consider what he called ‘menial work’, rather than something in an office or the WAAF, or other occupations suitable for a refined young lady, and had been adamant that Esther would not join the WLA. She had been just as adamant that she would. After two weeks of bitter arguments, she had gone over his head and attended an interview, whereupon she had found that the WLA couldn’t get enough people and there was no training at all – there simply wasn’t time for it.
    ‘You’ll get all the experience you need on the job,’ a sturdy matron had told her. ‘Just remember the golden rule: don’t fraternize with