(‘The Land Girls in their Hostel, the Young Men at their Gate!’ chanted Mr Chorlton with a sigh.) The young men, however, were strongly discouraged and sometimes driven away, by the mournful and harassed-looking woman who was the land girls’ janitor and whose unsuitable name was Mrs Merrythought. She was a disillusioned creature with thin sandy hair and the faint beginnings of a 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 to calculate 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 mother, who had made a little fortune out of the refined and genteel business of ladies’ hairdressing and lived in a trim little house with its own garage in some trim little suburb where all the houses are like that, thought themselves a cut above the people who work with their hands and flatly refused to allow their daughter to marry a farmer’s boy. George, who was not exactly a Lochinvar, knew only too well the inadequacy of his ninety shillings a week and the discomforts of a labourer’s cottage; his gratuity, moreover, was quite insufficient to buy even a minimum of furniture. In these circumstances he could not bring himself to take the obvious course of marrying Susan against her parents’ wishes. He had been told that he was not good enough for her, and he was foolish enough to believe it. So although the couple walked out religiously every Sunday afternoon, and went to the village hop every Saturday night where they danced every dance together except the Paul Jones; although they took their lovers’ stroll down the twilight lanes in such close conjunction that they reminded one of Siamese twins or competitors in a three-legged race; and although the final hug with which they said goodnight in the shadow of the hostel wall went on so long that they seemed to take root there and to be a natural feature of the landscape – nevertheless a cloud hung over their love, and we in the village, hearing the sad story ad nauseam from Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive, grew almost as impatient as the unhappy couple and became partners in their frustration.

We all loved Susan, and we all liked George, who in his modest and unassuming way had quietly won a Military Medal at Arnhem. His gallantry on that occasion made a curious contrast with his behaviour when he first met Susan. On sick-leave from Normandy after receiving a flesh-wound, he had taken a walk up Brensham Hill on a very hot Sunday and by accident had stumbled upon the Frolick Virgins, all six of them, sunbathing in a woodland clearing, where they must have looked, I imagine, rather like the Dryads themselves. George, who had little fear of the German SS soldiers, nevertheless turned tail and fled from this classical spectacle; and in his headlong flight he knocked off his claret-coloured beret against a branch and, being taken with a kind of nympholepsy, failed to notice the mishap until it was too late, when he dared not go back to retrieve it. Susan returned it to him at the village dance on the following Saturday and, his leave ending, a long correspondence ensued, of which the village knew by hearsay because everybody was informed of it by Margie, Lisbeth, Betsy, Wistaria and Ive.

Letter from a Liberator

Goodness knows how George kept it up; because he did me the honour, soon after the invasion, of writing one longish letter to me, in which the smudged indelible and the frequent crossings-out bore witness to the pain he had in writing it. I imagine he must have sucked his pencil for a long time between the words. ‘The country,’ he began – he was writing from the bocage district before Caen – ‘is rather like ours.