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among themselves, ignoring me completely. Only Doris pays any attention to my presence, keeps shooting me little looks of panic.
    Jane has pushed away her full plate of food. She watches me eat my supper. “Interesting tactic,” she says, in a voice meant only for me to hear. “Separating the potatoes from the potatoes.”

6
     
    After supper has been cleared and several of the girls have gone to do the washing-up, I head downstairs with Jane to collect my Land Army uniform from the cupboard by the laundry room.
    She hands out items of clothing. There are many more pieces of apparel involved in being a Land Girl than I had anticipated.
    “Two green jerseys. Two pairs of breeches. Two pairs of dungarees.” Jane hurls these at me in rapid succession. “The size might not be right, but there are extras in here to sort through, and someone else might swap with you. Look at this.” She waves something in front of my nose. It’s the hat, a limp fold of felt. Jane tosses it on top of the pile in my arms. “Not even fit to be a tea cosy,” she says.
    I watch Jane in the cupboard, shirts and trousers swirling around her like weather. I want to ask her about the other girls, about what’s been happening here in my absence, but her energy leaves me speechless. A mackintosh flies out of the cupboard and drapes itself over one of my shoulders. There seems to be no end to these clothes. “Why are there so many things?” I say.
    Jane kicks a pair of wellingtons towards me. “It’s hard to stay clean and look smart,” she says. “In such a healthy, happy job.”
    I recognize this line from a Women’s Land Army recruitment poster. It’s almost as bad as the song about the hoe.
    “Why are you here?” I ask.
    Jane removes the rain hat she’s jammed on her head and looks straight at me. “Why do you ask?”
    “You don’t seem like the others.”
    “Thank God.” She throws the rain hat onto the peak of my clothing mountain and fishes a package of Gold Flakes out from a jersey pocket. “Cadged them off a soldier,” she says. She offers the package to me and I shake my head no. “You’re right.” She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, exhales a stream of smoke at the stacks of carefully folded bed linens. “I’m not here for a big adventure. Or to ‘do my bit.’”
    “Then, why are you here?”
    “I grew up on a farm. My parents thought it would be a good environment for me to return to. Especially now.”
    The cupboard is getting very smoky. I back out into the hallway and Jane follows me. “Why now?” I say. We lean against the hall wall, facing each other. I rest my chin on the heap of clothing in my arms.
    “Because I’m in distress. That’s what the doctors call it. The ones they took me to see. Distress.” Jane leans her head against the wall. There’s a blue vein pulsing in her left temple. The fingernails on her hand lifting the cigarette to her mouth are bitten down to the bleeding point. “And it’s true, I suppose,” she says. “I have a fiancé who’s missing. Andrew. ‘Missing in action,’ they call it. Since March fifth.”
    This makes me think of Virginia Woolf. Missing in action. That’s exactly what’s happened to her. She seems definitely to be a casualty of war at the moment. Like any other.
    When I used to work more actively in private gardens I was always criticized for how slowly I developed a new one. I was a very slow planter. I liked to plant one kind of flower at a time, giving it a season or two to expand into whatever space it required. Living things know what they need. I have always thought this. Why crowd something from the start, when it has had no chance yet to even become itself? Gardening, which needs patience, is often the domain of the impatient. I was sometimes not kept on in those private gardens, where the desire was for instant beauty.
    I could ask Jane all the questions of curiosity and concern. But I don’t. I lean against the wall and watch her smoke