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anyone; and remember that noisy or flirtatious behaviour brings discredit on the uniform and the whole Women’s Land Army.’ Esther had been issued with a pair of jodhpurs, two green jerseys, five beige T-shirts, a green tie, four pairs of dungarees of the bib-and-brace type, two pairs of heavy shoes that she could hardly walk in at first, a pair of wellington boots and several pairs of Boy-Scout style, knee-length socks, and dispatched to a farm in Yorkshire within the week.
    Her father hadn’t talked to her during the days before she left, which had actually been bliss, Esther thought now, deciding that she could do nothing with her hands and would have to try to keep them hidden under her bouquet for the walk up the aisle. Of course, once he had heard that Lady Rosaleen Hammond’s daughter (the Hammonds were connected to her mother’s family in some way) had joined the WLA, along with other socialites of the first order, his attitude had changed; and when Monty had proposed to her last year she had become the favoured daughter again. The Grants were
very
well connected.
    Esther raised her chin, her large liquid-brown eyes with their thick fringe of long lashes narrowing as her full mouth curled in contempt. She had long since stopped feeling guilty that she didn’t like her own father – probably about the time she was ten or eleven years old and was able to perceive that her mother didn’t like him, either. He was a hateful man: belligerent and arrogant and so, so superior, when really he had nothing to be snobbish about. She remembered that in one of their more fiery arguments before she had left home, when he had criticized one of her friends, saying that the girl was beneath Esther because the family wasn’t in their own social circle, she had flung at him that all the breeding in
their
family was on her mother’s side, and not his. He had gone berserk, so much so that she had run to her bedroom and locked the door, which he had then proceeded to try and batter down with his bare fists.
    But from this day forth she would be a married woman and no longer living under her father’s roof. She wouldn’t be living under her husband’s, either, come to that, she acknowledged with a rueful smile. But at least they would have a little time together before they had to part. Monty had taken care of the arrangements for a short honeymoon at a hotel in Hartlepool overlooking the bay, promising that they’d have a few weeks travelling around Europe once the war was over. She didn’t care about Europe; she just wanted the war over, and Monty to be safe. She was constantly tormented by reports of the carnage in the skies and of all the young men who would never see another dawn.
    She continued to sit and muse until, an hour later, Rose tapped on the door and entered with Esther’s morning cup of tea. She adored Rose. That her mother did too had become evident when Esther had grown too old to warrant a nanny, whereupon Harriet had decided that, as her personal maid was in the process of leaving to get married, Rose would take that position and also be available to act as a personal maid for Esther, if the circumstances required it.
    The three of them – her mother, Rose and herself – were very close, but she and her mother were careful to give no inkling of this to her father. He would have been furious that a ‘mere servant’ could be considered in any other light than as a paid menial, and would have been quite capable of dismissing Rose to teach them a lesson.
    Now Esther sprang off the bed and, after taking the tea and putting it on the bedside cabinet, twirled Rose around the room, just as she’d danced earlier herself. ‘I’m going to be married, Rose! I’m going to be Mrs Grant and live happily ever after,’ she sang as she jigged.
    Laughing, Rose extricated herself from the embrace of the girl she loved as a daughter, and sank down on a chair. ‘Enough, Miss Esther. I’m not as young as I used to be