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warren, they would spread the net over the entrances, then Daisy would take a ferret from the sack in which it had been carried, muzzle it, and send it down a rabbit hole. Rabbits would shoot up the other tunnels into the waiting nets, where Daisy would grab them and, with one swift movement, break their necks. The ferret would be caught in the same manner—-its capture requiring more skill since it was wirier and had to be reincarcerated without damage to its person—and replaced in the sack. If everything went well.
    â€œWe got twelve, but we’re short a ferret. The small female got laid up in the wood at the end of the long pasture. We left the nets—I’ll go back later and see if she’s surfaced.”
    Occasionally a ferret, inside the burrow, would disembarrass itself of its muzzle and catch an unwary or slow rabbit. It would eat the rabbit, curl up, and sleep off the substantial and unexpected meal. Short of digging out the burrow—hard work that also risked the loss of the well-fed ferret—the only solution was to leave the nets over all the possible exits and return later to retrieve the missing animal. Daisy knew that although she was not responsible for the predatory animal going AWOL, she was accountable. “It wasn’t my fault” was not a wartime excuse. Nevertheless, she did not burden herself with a fruitless feeling of guilt. She had done nothing wrong. The ferret had been properly muzzled when it had been pushed down the rabbit hole into the warren.
    A little later, after they had listened to the six o’clock news, Daisy walked back up the hill. The summer evening was warm and after a little time she was able to push away the fear that she felt listening to the BBC’s increasingly grim news. She had for the first time been afraid when a Sunday in May—just before the evacuation of Dunkirk—had been designated a Day of Prayer. Every church in England had been full as an entire nation prayed. Prayed for victory. Prayed for peace. England stood alone and the German bombing raids had become more frequent and intense. The possibility of invasion was never far from anyone’s thoughts.

Chapter 4
    D AISY WORE HER uniform on the train. Uniforms were a great leveler. When she had been at school, Daisy had complained as energetically as the next girl about the navy blue gym slips, the gray kneesocks, and the mandatory lace-up brown walking shoes—and in truth the uniform was aesthetically unpleasing and not particularly comfortable—but she was, as were, she suspected, many other girls from the less affluent families, often grateful to be relieved of the competitive aspects of clothing.

    At school, the uniform had concealed from the critical eyes of her fellow pupils that in winter both her skirts had once been her mother’s and were cut down to fit Daisy. Clothes rationing had recently been imposed and already it was changing attitudes about clothing; few girls Daisy knew would now be ashamed to wear a hand-me-down skirt. The evening dress she packed to take to Westmoreland was Rosemary’s. Even if it were recognized as such by another guest, there was now little shame attached to it being borrowed.
    Daisy wore her uniform with some pleasure and pride. It was not by chance that Daisy had enlisted in the Land Army. Like many another girl, she understood at the outbreak of war that more than the future of Western Civilization was at stake. Daisy was not lacking patriotism, but her upbringing—as the younger daughter of a Church of England rector and his quietly desperate wife—had made her at once cynical about the civilization at stake, and utterly determined that she should never again be one of a group. A girlhood in which she had escaped neither the Girl Guides nor the choir and had watched her mother—a woman with a good degree in English Literature from Lady Margaret Hall—preside over the Women’s Institute and