First published in the USA by HarperTeen,

an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. in 2018

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018

Published in this ebook edition in 2018

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

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Text copyright © Caroline Leech 2018

Cover © Harper Collins Children’s Books 2018

Cover design by Aurora Parlagreco

Cover art by RekhaArcangel/Arcangel (girl) and Rixipix/Getty Images (background)

Typography by Aurora Parlagreco

Caroline Leech asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008249151

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008249168

Version: 2018-07-24

To the lumberjills who served in the Women’s Timber Corps in the forests of Scotland 1942–1946

To Perryn, Jemma, Kirsty, and Rory

You are my everything

Epigraph

John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither,

And mony a canty day, John,

We’ve had wi ane anither;

Now we maun totter down, John,

But hand in hand we’ll go,

And sleep thegither at the foot,

John Anderson, my jo.

from “John Anderson, My Jo”

ROBERT BURNS, 1759–1796

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Books by Caroline Leech

About the Publisher

WOMEN’S TIMBER CORPS TRAINING CENTER,

SHANDFORD LODGE, BRECHIN, ANGUS

FRIDAY, AUGUST 14TH, 1942

Maisie’s shoulders burned, her palms were torn, and her ax handle was smeared with blister pus and blood. Again.

The woods were airless today, and it made the work even harder than usual. As a bead of sweat ran down from Maisie’s hair toward her eye, she stopped to wipe her forehead with the sleeve of her blouse, knowing she’d probably just added yet another muddy streak to those already across her face. Maisie wondered how on earth she’d be able to get herself looking presentable enough to go to a dance by seven o’clock. She’d only be dancing with her friends, but still, she didn’t want it to look like she’d spent the week up to her knees in dirt and wood chippings. Which, of course, she had.

Perhaps it was just as well there was no chance that some handsome chap would ask her to dance. She would bet a week’s wages—all thirty-seven shillings of it—that there were none of them left in Brechin these days, not since every man aged between eighteen and forty had been called up to the war.

Maisie stood and stretched out her back, pretending to study the tree she was attempting to chop down. When would this constant ache disappear? Even after two weeks of learning how to fell, split, saw, and sned, she still woke up each morning feeling like she’d gone ten rounds in the ring with a heavyweight champion. She had blisters on her hands from the tools—four-and-a-half-pound axes, six-pound axes, crosscut saws, hauling chains, and cant hooks—and blisters on her feet from her work boots. There were even blisters between her thighs where the rough material of her uniform chafed as she worked.

“I bet the WAAF and ATS recruits don’t hurt this badly all through their training,” she moaned to her friend Dot, who was working two trees over. “I still think the recruitment officer lied to me. She made it sound like the Women’s Timber Corps would be a walk in the park.”

“Or perhaps a walk”—Dot flailed her ax again toward the foot of her own tree—“in the forest.”

“Very funny,” Maisie replied, then blew gingerly onto her stinging fingers. “Bloody hell, that hurts!” She pulled out her once-white handkerchief and dabbed at her hands, hoping to feel some comfort from the soft, cool cotton, and watched Dot swing the ax a couple more times. Again and again Dot’s blade seemed to bounce off the wood as if it were made of India rubber, exposing no more of the creamy flesh under the brown bark than had been visible five minutes before.

Maisie glanced behind her to see if their instructor, Mr. McRobbie, was watching, but he was talking to another recruit farther up the line of trees, so she let her ax-head rest on the ground. She had been issued this six-pound ax when training began, but right now, it felt like a forty-pound sledgehammer. She reached into her pocket and withdrew her whetstone, the smooth flat stone she used to set her blade. Mr. McRobbie had drummed into them the importance of having a whetstone with them at all times, to keep the cutting edge sharp and clean, but Maisie had discovered another use for it. She laid the stone, warm from her body heat, onto the blisters of her hands one by one, sighing as the discomfort was eased, if only for a few seconds.

Still Dot was hacking away at the tree.

Maisie sighed. “Do you want me to finish that off for you? We’ve got a dance to go to tonight, remember, and the way you’re going, you’ll still be slapping at it at midnight.”

“Uggghhh,” grunted Dot with one more swipe. “What am I doing wrong? I feel like I’m doing it the way he showed us, and I’ve got blisters a mile deep to prove it, but I don’t ever make any difference at all! Bloody thing!”

Dot kicked the toe of her boot at the trunk and there was an ominous creaking sound, as if the tree were about to topple. Dot recoiled and jumped clear, but the tree stayed where it was.

Maisie burst out laughing. “Perhaps you should kick the tree into submission.”

“Oh, get lost!” Dot retorted, but then she began to laugh too. “I only want to find one thing on this training course that I can actually do properly, because cutting down trees certainly isn’t it.”

Maisie felt sorry for Dot. She was shorter and slighter than Maisie, though certainly not the smallest of the women in their group, yet Dot couldn’t seem to get the hang of any of the techniques Mr. McRobbie had shown them. After only two weeks, Maisie already felt quite competent at using the tools they had been given so far, but Dot was not progressing at all. That fact was not only making Dot anxious, it was starting to worry Maisie too. They were only two weeks into their six-week training course, but it had been made clear that anyone could be sent home at any time for failing to make the grade. She couldn’t bear it if her new friend were thrown off the course. Who would Maisie have to talk with and work beside then?

The other women doing the Timber Corps training were all very nice, but that was the problem—they were all women, in their twenties and thirties. Only Dot was close to Maisie in age, and even then, Dot was already nineteen, almost two years older than Maisie. But it was comforting to have a friend of roughly her own age, someone who treated her like a teammate rather than a child.

Maisie had certainly felt like an adult last month when she’d walked into the recruiting office in Glasgow and told the sergeant behind the desk that she wanted to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, or even the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She was all ready to argue with him that since she was a grown woman taking control of her life, she didn’t need to finish her final year at school because it was about time she did her bit for the war effort.

But the sergeant hadn’t argued with her. He’d instead pointed her to the next office, where a friendly woman told her with a smile that, at seventeen, she was still too young to become a WAAF or a Navy Wren, or even to join the ATS.

Imagining the smug expression on her father’s face as she returned home with her mature and independent tail firmly between her legs, Maisie tried not to whine. “So is there nothing I can do instead?”

“There’s the Women’s Land Army,” the woman replied. “They take Land Girls from seventeen, if you’d fancy working on a farm. It’s hard work, but if you like the outdoor life …”

Maisie could rather see herself walking through fields of golden corn swaying gently in the summer breeze, chewing lazily on a stalk of barley as the sun warmed her skin.

“… you’d be working with crops and with the animals. You know, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, and the like …”

Cows? Horses? Pigs?

A shudder ran down Maisie’s aching back even now, remembering that conversation. She might enjoy working with chickens or maybe sheep, but not big animals like cows and horses. She especially hated—no, she feared—horses, ever since the rag-and-bone man’s Charlie, a brutish Clydesdale, had taken a swing at Maisie with his huge head and left a nasty dark-red graze and a blooming bruise on her arm with his enormous teeth. How old would she have been? Eight perhaps? It still made her feel queasy.

“No, not animals. I can’t do animals.”

The woman had frowned at her.

“Well, I’m not sure there’s much else other than munitions, dear,” she’d said, “and a bright and healthy girl like you doesn’t want to be stuck in a factory all day, surely. Oh, wait now, here’s something …”

She’d rummaged around in a drawer and pulled out a single sheet of paper. “This is quite a new setup, but according to this, they’re taking girls from seventeen into the new Women’s Timber Corps. It says here that because of the German sea blockade, supply ships can’t get through to bring timber to Britain. Therefore, we need to get the wood from our own forests. Of course, all our foresters are soldiers now, so they’ve created this, the WTC. How does that sound?”

When Maisie didn’t immediately respond, the recruiter had continued. “Would trees be more your thing, dear?”

Trees? Trees certainly didn’t have teeth. “Yes, thank you,” Maisie had said, “that sounds spot on. I think trees might be much more my thing.”

From somewhere nearby, a whistle blew three times, long and loud. Miss Cradditch, the WTC training officer at Shandford Lodge—known as Old Crabby to all the recruits—had a particularly piercing and insistent whistle, but right now no one cared since it signaled the end of the workday. Next stop, the Brechin dance.

As Maisie walked with Dot and the others down to the Hut C dormitory to gather her towel and soap, she knew she’d made the right decision at the recruiting office. After only two weeks on the course, Maisie was already proud to be training as a lumberjill.

Maisie stared down into the brown-speckled bathwater with distaste. The luxury of the long, deep baths she’d enjoyed at home before the war seemed so long ago now, since all she was allowed to bathe in these days were her strictly rationed five inches of water. And with so many women in the camp, and only three proper bathrooms upstairs in Shandford Lodge, the old manor house that had been converted into the WTC training center, there had to be a roster for who bathed when. It had been four days since Maisie’s last turn to have a bath, and since those days had all been hard physical work, half of the Shandford woods appeared to have made its way into the bath with her.

The water, which barely covered her legs, wasn’t even warm, but it was wet and soothing, and she felt herself relax immediately. After all, she was one of the lucky ones, having her bath on the same day as they went dancing, so she slid as much of her body down into the water as she could, while also trying to keep her hair dry. She considered her hands, not sure if she should risk putting open sores into such filthy water, but how else was she going to soap the rest of her body? Throwing hygienic caution to the wind, she picked up her small, pink WTC-issued bar of carbolic soap, just as someone banged on the bathroom door.

“Come on, Maisie, don’t take all night.” Dot’s voice was muffled by the thick wood. “The truck’s leaving in less than an hour. You need to hurry! Do you even know what you’re wearing yet?”

So much for that long luxurious bath!

“All right,” Maisie shouted back, quickly rubbing the soap up to a stinging lather between her hands. “I’ll be down in a few minutes, and maybe you can help me decide.”

Once she finished her bath, Maisie ran down to Hut C to get ready. She had only brought two dresses from home, so it wouldn’t be hard to decide on an outfit. Many of the other women had worked the whole day with curlers under their decidedly nonregulation head scarves, but thankfully, Maisie only needed to brush out her shoulder-length blond hair and pin it up at each side. Dot’s short dark hair was even quicker, just combed and tucked behind her ears, so the two of them were ready with time to spare.

As they waited for the truck to arrive, Maisie and Dot watched the older women fuss with whatever face powder, mascara, and lipstick they had saved from before the war—it was almost impossible to get hold of any makeup these days, especially in the wilds of Scotland. All Maisie had done was smear a little Vaseline on her lips to give them a shine. She’d only be dancing with the other lumberjills, so what was the point?

Even so, Maisie was excited to be going out. Two weeks after leaving home for her new adventure, tonight felt almost like a rite of passage.

Brechin Town Hall, where the dance was being held, was a dour place, with dark marble columns and heavily ornate carvings on the walls and ceiling. To make things worse, the blackout blinds were already in place over the tall windows, meaning that none of the summer evening light would filter into the hall. The dance organizers had done their best to cheer things up by bringing in some spotlights and hanging some brightly colored banners from the gallery above the dance floor, so Maisie wasn’t complaining. They were lucky to be allowed out from camp for any dance at all.

When the WTC girls had arrived, the band was already playing on a raised platform at the far end of the hall, and after a couple of numbers, Maisie had decided that the musicians were rather good. Brechin was a small town in the middle of nowhere, after all, not a metropolis like Glasgow. She was soon having fun, dancing either with Dot or with Mary, a red-haired girl from Aberdeen, and before long, Maisie noticed that her aches and pains had eased significantly.

Maisie couldn’t help but notice that some of the other lumberjills were moaning about the lack of men to dance with. But what had they expected? With the war on, there were only a few locals left to go dancing, and they were only old men and young boys. Some of the boys were near Maisie’s age, strutting around with gangly arrogance, even though it was clear they were not yet old enough to be called up, but Maisie studiously avoided making eye contact with any of them. She was quite happy to dance with her new girl friends. No pressure, no need to explain, they could just have fun.

However, not long before the end of the dance, the atmosphere suddenly changed, and heads began turning to look toward the front doors. Maisie was dancing again with Mary, and the two of them were forced to stand on tiptoe to see what was happening. Who had arrived, and why was it causing such a fuss?

Maisie strained to see over the other girls to the front, where more than a dozen men were standing inside the main door, nicely dressed, in suits and ties, each in turn handing his hat to the elderly cloakroom attendant, who was suddenly standing straighter and smiling wider than before, now that there were some handsome men in the room.

All right, not many of them were handsome, but even so …

A ripple of whispered excitement washed around the room as the first of the men reached the edge of the dance floor. “Americans, Americans, Americans …”

Maisie tugged at Mary’s arm. “Come on—let’s keep going. I like this tune too much not to dance to it.”

All through the rest of that number, however, Mary kept glancing over her shoulder.

“They’re Americans, though, Maisie!” she hissed, and then giggled. “Look, look! That one’s asked Lillian to dance. And that tall blond girl from Hut B has nabbed one too. Oh my goodness, they’re not wasting any time, are they?”

Mary was now so distracted that they were virtually at a standstill again, and Maisie found herself getting quite annoyed, though she wasn’t sure if it was with Mary or the men.

“It’s quite rude, really, turning up so late, don’t you think?” Maisie grumbled. “There’s only a dance or two left.”

Clearly Mary didn’t agree. She grabbed Maisie’s hand and pulled her over to a table at the edge of the dance floor. “Then there’s only a chance or two left to land a dance with one of them!” she declared, and leaned casually against a chair, pushing her chest out and pouting more than a little.

Maisie could feel the blush rising in her own cheeks at this blatant show of … of what, she didn’t know, but she didn’t much like it. She grabbed her handbag from the nearby table where she’d left it and headed for the ladies’ to comb her hair, cool her face, and sulk a little. Her whole evening had been spoiled, thanks to those men.

Once she’d collected herself, Maisie realized she was actually feeling quite anxious. But that was ridiculous—it was only a bunch of men, for goodness’ sake, even if they were Americans.

Back at the table, there was no sign of Mary. Maisie’s neck was aching again, so she bent her head forward, pulling her shoulders down and back, to stretch out the muscles. As she did, she became aware of someone hovering nearby and, without lifting her head, she glanced sideways along the floor until she found a pair of polished black leather shoes sticking out from dark tweed trousers with wide cuffs.

“Go on!” she heard an American man say. “She won’t bite, you know.”

A woman giggled at his comment.

The shoes suddenly moved toward Maisie, a hopping, stumbling approach, as if their wearer had been shoved from behind. Maisie jumped back in alarm, whipping her head up to see who was about to crash into her.

The man attached to the shoes managed to catch his balance by grabbing onto the chair beside Maisie just before he bumped into her. Beyond him was a blond man, grinning widely, with one of the other WTC girls—Maisie didn’t know her name—hanging on his arm.

The shoe man looked mortified, a frown furrowing deep lines across his tanned forehead.

“My apologies,” he said, his voice deeper than Maisie had expected, “I didn’t mean to scare you. But some people seem incapable of minding their own business.”

He glared over his shoulder, but the blond man only laughed and pulled the woman toward the dance floor. When Maisie didn’t immediately reply, the shoe man coughed to clear his throat.

“My friend thinks that I should ask you to dance, since there can’t be many more numbers left before it ends.”

Maisie said nothing. What could she say? Certainly, it would be nice to dance for once with someone who was taller that she was, someone who didn’t expect her to lead the whole time as Dot and Mary did. But she’d prefer him to ask her to dance because he wanted to, not because his friend told him to.

“I mean …” He looked embarrassed now. “It’s not that I don’t want to ask you to dance, it’s just … oh hell! Pardon me! What I mean is … well, I don’t dance.”

Maisie’s humiliation grew with each word.

“Well, why did you come then?” she asked, sounding snippier than she’d meant to. “It’s a dance. What else did you think you would be doing?”

As she turned away, wishing the ground would swallow her up, fingers closed around the top of her arm, not tightly, but with enough pressure to stop her.

“Look, I’m sorry.” He sounded like he meant it, so she turned to face him again. “We got ourselves off on the … er, wrong foot, so to speak, which is a shame.”

He dropped his grip on her arm and shrugged apologetically. There was an earnest expression in his dark-brown eyes, now that she really looked at him, and the skin around them was like soft leather, tanned and supple, but with tiny wrinkles, as if he squinted into the sun too often. Or as if he were always smiling. Except he wasn’t smiling now, he was grimacing. At her.

“And while I don’t usually ask women to dance,” he began again, “we’ve found ourselves into this rather embarrassing situation now, so perhaps I should make the effort. If you’d like me to, that is.”

Though Maisie heard the words, she was wondering how an American like him could have ended up on a Friday evening in August in Brechin, of all places, and why he …

“Miss?” He was frowning again. “Would you like me to?”

Maisie startled. “Sorry. Pardon me? Yes! Erm, no, erm, sorry?”

His expression shifted into wry amusement at her embarrassment.

“I asked whether you would mind if I were to ask you to dance?”

In her blushing confusion, Maisie took a moment or two to work her way through the question.

“I think so?” she said. Was that the right answer? “Or …”

Then he smiled, and sure enough, the soft skin around his eyes wrinkled up in tiny folds. It was unnervingly infectious and Maisie couldn’t help but smile back.

“You think you would mind?” He was clearly teasing her now. “Or you think I should ask you to dance?”

Maisie gave him an exaggerated sigh. “Is every question you ask this complicated, or is this how all Americans talk?”

“Not every question, no. But sometimes, it can be more fun this way.” He held out his hand toward her.

Maisie hesitated. It might not have been the most romantic invitation, but it seemed like a genuine one after all that. And maybe this might be fun.

“Thank you,” she said, laying her hand onto his. “I’d very much like to dance.”

Her heart sped up as they walked the few steps to the dance floor and waited for a space to allow them to enter the dance. But then she noticed that his fingers were moving strangely against her own, and Maisie’s delight quickly evaporated. She’d forgotten about her blisters, and could only imagine how unpleasant they must feel against his palm. Before she could pull her hand back out of his, however, he lifted it up and studied it, frowning again, as if trying to work out a puzzle. Maisie realized with a sinking feeling that he was trying to work out why a young woman would have the callused hands of an old crone, disgustingly rough, with hard-crusted blisters and sharp-edged cuts and cracks. Embarrassment again flooded through her and she snatched her hand from his grasp, tucking both her hands around her waist to hide them from his scrutiny.

“They’re awful, I know,” she burst out. “But it’s the work, the tools. They rip up our hands, and there’s nothing we can do to protect them. It’s vile, I know.”

“Tools?” he asked.

“Axes and saws, in the woods. I’m with the Women’s Timber Corps.” Despite her embarrassment, Maisie lifted her chin defiantly, already anticipating the same derision she had received from her father. “I’m training to be a lumberjill.”

“A lumberjill, eh? Hmmm.” He seemed to be suppressing a smile, and Maisie felt her hackles rise. Why did men find that so ridiculous?

But instead of sneering, he took one of her hands back, resting it flat on his, and let his thumb rub gently across her palm and up her index finger, hesitating briefly by each blister, just disconcertingly long enough for her to feel the warmth from his touch.

“I mean, they issued us with gloves,” she blurted out, “but they’re all too big, so when you’re using an ax, it feels like your hands are slipping on the—”

“Pig fat,” he said.

What had he said? It sounded like pig fat to Maisie, but that was too bizarre, even for an American.

“Pardon?”

“You need pig fat and Vaseline,” he said again, smiling now.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Rub your hands with a mixture of pig fat and Vaseline morning and night, and this shouldn’t happen anymore.”

“But …” Maisie wasn’t sure what to say. “But how would you know …?”

Slowly he turned over his free hand and held it out flat next to hers. Even in the low light, Maisie could see that he had once had blisters in almost all the same places as she had on her own hands—on all three pads of each finger, the two on the thumb, as well as across the bridge and the heel of the palm. His weren’t fresh and crisp and sore as hers were, but there was a distinct whitening of hard skin in each place, the pale shadows of blisters where calluses lay as a permanent reminder of pain in his past. His scars matched hers.

He turned his hand over so it again lay palm to palm on Maisie’s. A sudden wave of relief caught her by surprise. He understood and he wasn’t repulsed.

“But how did your hands get like that?” she asked.

“You’re not the only one who knows how to swing an ax,” he replied with a wink.

The band had begun a new song. Maisie recognized the tune, but in the confusion of having her hand held by a stranger, she couldn’t place it right then. He seemed to know it, though, because he glanced up at the band and grinned, squeezing her hand between his.

“Perhaps we can talk about my magic blister potion later, but while the band is still playing this lovely song, maybe we ought to dance?”

“Thank you. I’d like that”—Maisie let herself smile a little too—“and I’m Maisie, by the way.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Maisie. My name’s John Lindsay.”

It became very clear, very quickly, that John Lindsay was a dreadful dancer.

When he had first guided Maisie into the crowd of slowly spinning couples, she’d enjoyed the reassurance of having his warm hand on her back. And once she had swallowed down the embarrassment of having this tall and rather handsome man holding her so close, Maisie almost relaxed. But then they’d stumbled, bumping into two other couples, and Maisie had had to fight to keep herself from falling. Whether it was because she’d lost her balance when she lifted her eyes to look up into his for a moment, or whether he’d simply tripped over his own feet, she wasn’t sure, but either way, this was not how she had hoped her first dance as an independent woman would go.

As John tried again to swoop Maisie around the dance floor, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she was risking life and limb, his larger frame and extra weight always pulling her off-balance. This was fast becoming a nightmare. How could a young and obviously fit man be so completely incapable of dancing?

She risked another glance up at his face, expecting him to be smiling apologetically, but there was no smile. In fact, it was as if the earlier sunshine had been smothered by the darkest of storm clouds. He was frowning, as if concentrating hard, and his breath came heavily now. Then she noticed that he seemed to be swallowing again and again. Was he unwell or in pain? Or was he drunk? She hadn’t smelled any beer or whisky on him, but even so …

Suddenly, John took Maisie by the elbow and walked her to the side of the dance floor, where he let her go and staggered against the nearest chair, appearing to have difficulty catching his breath. Then, barely glancing up, he held out his hand, palm toward Maisie, as if trying to keep her away.

“I can’t do this. I’m sorry, Maisie. I really can’t.”

“What’s wrong?” Maisie wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or annoyed. “Can I get you some water maybe?”

John didn’t reply but turned and walked unsteadily toward the front entrance. Hesitating only long enough to proffer his cloakroom ticket and grab his hat from the attendant, John disappeared out of the door.

What the hell had that been about? He might not have been much of a dancer, and he certainly wasn’t much of a gentleman either, but even so.

Maisie glanced around to see if anyone else had noticed her untimely abandonment, but everyone seemed to be paying attention only to their dance partners or to the friends they were gossiping with.

Luckily for Maisie, that had been the final number, and as soon as it ended, everyone clapped and the band began to pack up for the night. All the dancers made their way back to their tables, with much laughing and promises of more dances next time, and gradually they all crowded out the stained-glass front doors and into the mild evening.

Out on the street, however, it was clear that what had happened hadn’t gone unnoticed by the other lumberjills after all, and Maisie found herself subjected to an inquisition from Dot and Mary. All the way back to the waiting truck, they demanded details.

“What did he do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Then, what did you do to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he step on your foot?”

“No.”

“Did you tread on his foot?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was he really as bad a dancer as it looked?”

“I don’t know! Actually, yes. Yes, he really was. Simply terrible,” Maisie said sadly, which caused much merriment for her friends.

“Talk about having two left feet!” chuckled Dot.

“You certainly pulled the short straw,” added Mary. “Such a shame—he was good-looking too.”

Even as they teased her, simply knowing that her friends were as indignant as she was that her partner had walked away like that made Maisie feel a little better.

On the drive home to the lodge, Dot and Mary delightedly shared with the other recruits the story of Maisie, the American, and their disastrous dance. At first, it was quite funny, even to Maisie, but as more and more of the women joined in, offering ever more hilarious comments at John Lindsay’s expense, Maisie found herself becoming defensive. He didn’t deserve this treatment. He’d been nice enough before they’d started dancing, even funny, and he was handsome, and until he had walked out on her, he’d been scrupulously polite and had shown such concern about her hands. It was only when they started dancing that he became … odd. Even so, he didn’t deserve ridicule from people who hadn’t even seen what had happened.

“Stop it!” she burst out. “Stop saying things like that.”

After a moment’s silence, somebody started a teasing “woo-hoo,” and soon everyone was joining in, making jokes about Maisie having found herself an eligible bachelor at last, Maisie being in love, Maisie and John sitting in a tree.

Maisie put her head down and tried to ignore them. She knew they were only having fun, still riding their own wave of excitement from the dance, but still, she could do without a second, no, a third bout of humiliation in one night.

Only Dot, sitting next to Maisie, was not joining in the ribaldry and teasing. She nudged Maisie and laid her head on Maisie’s shoulder, as the other women’s conversation moved on to discuss their own dance partners instead of Maisie’s.

“It’s all right,” Dot said so only Maisie could hear. “If he was thoughtless enough to walk away from a lovely girl like you, then it was his loss, not yours.”

Maisie nodded, but couldn’t force any words in reply past the knot that was tightening in her throat. Why had she let herself start to think that perhaps he might like her? And she might like him back?

But Dot was right. Walking away from her had been his loss.

Maisie awoke with a start. A drum! Some blighter was beating a bloody drum inside their hut, and on the morning after a late night too!

The usual routine of being woken up at dawn by Old Crabby’s incessant whistle blowing from outside the dormitory was bad enough, but being dragged from deep sleep after a dance by an apparent crash of drums from inside the hut was a hundred times worse.

And now there was shouting too.

“Come on, ladies of Hut C, up you get! Sooner you’re up, the sooner it’s over.”

Maisie was still trying to cling to the last threads of a dream about dancing in the strong arms of a dark-haired man.

“What time is it, for goodness’ sake?” Dot croaked from the next bed over, and Maisie’s dream dancing was done.

“No idea,” replied Maisie, lifting her head blearily from the pillow and squinting toward the far end of the hut, where she saw Phyllis Cartwright, the tallest, strongest, and most athletic of all the WTC recruits, striding along, banging on the end of each bedstead with a stick. So, no drums, after all, just Phyllis with a bloody thunderstorm on a stick. “But whatever time it is, Phyllis has clearly taken leave of her senses.”

“We’ve all had enough of these aches and pains,” Phyllis bellowed, “so from now on, we’ll start each day with some calisthenic exercises to warm up the muscles and get us all ready to work.”

Maisie dropped back onto her pillow with a loud groan.

“But why today? We didn’t get to bed until after midnight.”

“None of that now, Maisie.” Phyllis was standing over her now. “This was your idea, after all.”

The groaning spread quickly around the room.

“My idea?” Maisie protested. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“Yes, you did, Maisie. Yesterday, you said to me how everyone was still aching, and how hard Dorothy here was finding the physical work each day because of her weak muscle tone.”

“You said I was weak?” Dot glared at Maisie. “I’m not weak.”

“No, of course I didn’t say you were weak,” Maisie said quickly, “I only said that you’d never done this kind of intensive physical activity before, you know, because you didn’t play sports at school. That’s what you told me the other day, that your school didn’t even have hockey or tennis or anything.”

“No, I didn’t have much tennis during my childhood,” replied Dot, and Maisie caught a very un-Dot-like bitterness in her voice. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m—”

“Dot! Honestly, I didn’t tell anyone that you’re weak. This is just Phyllis—”

“This is just Phyllis doing her job,” Phyllis interrupted, striding off around the room again, banging on any bed with an occupant still buried under the blankets. “I’m making sure you are all given the chance to develop your strength now, so that you won’t struggle with the heavier stuff later, once you are out in a real camp, taking down real trees. I’m a fully trained physical fitness instructor, remember—five years teaching at Morrison’s Academy in Crieff, then another six at the Edinburgh Ladies’ College—so don’t go thinking I’m only a pretty face.”

Phyllis gave one of her wide rumbling belly laughs, and most of the women in the hut joined in. Phyllis’s face would never be described as pretty—handsome, yes, even striking, but not pretty—but that was something she seemed quite proud of.

Phyllis’s enthusiasm was infectious, because despite the early hour, soon everyone from Hut C was standing in uneven ranks on the wide expanse of driveway outside Shandford Lodge, stretching and jumping, bending and running on the spot.

Women from some of the other huts must have been disturbed by the rumpus, because they appeared up the hill in ones and twos to see what was going on, and some even joined in.

Finally, after half an hour that felt to Maisie like a week, Phyllis took pity on them and released them to get breakfast.

To Phyllis’s credit, the atmosphere in the dining hall was far livelier and more engaged than it had been any morning so far. The women were chatting and laughing, and some were singing along to music from the wireless in the corner. Again, Maisie realized that the exercise, like the dancing, had warmed her muscles to the point where she wasn’t even feeling the aches and strains that had been her constant companion since training began. Now, if she could just work out where to find some pig fat for her hands …

Just then Old Crabby appeared at the door, interrupting the merriment, her very presence demanding silence. She held up a wide, flat basket, tipping it forward for everyone to see.

“Postcards!” she shouted in a voice more suited to an army drill square than a dining hall. “If any of you want to do your family duty, may I remind you that recruits’ mail will be picked up and taken to the post promptly every Saturday morning at nine o’clock. So if you want to write a postcard home, do it now, ladies. They’re already stamped, which will cost you tuppence.”

She slammed the box down onto the nearest table and picked up an old tobacco tin with a slot cut in the lid. “Honesty box is here for the tuppences. Of course, if you are literate enough to write a proper letter home, you can come now to my office. Letter stamps are tuppence ha’penny.”

As Miss Cradditch turned smartly and left the room, there was a scramble of hands trying to grab one of the postcards and a stubby little pencil from the basket, and a tinkle of coins dropping into the tin. Several women got up and followed Old Crabby out of the door, each holding at least two or three thick envelopes.

Maisie stared at the basket, wondering if today was the day she should write a postcard home to her parents. She’d sent no word back since she’d walked out of the front door of the home she’d lived in for all seventeen years of her life, her father’s hurtful words still ringing around the tiled hallway. She wasn’t even sure they would know which part of Scotland she was doing her training in. All the letters from the WTC had been addressed to her by name, and since her parents had been so furious with her for signing up, they’d refused even to look at the information she had been sent. It was only at the last minute, as Maisie was standing in the front hall with her suitcase, that her mother had softened, if only marginally. She’d come out of the kitchen holding a brown paper bag, which she held out to Maisie.

“Here’s a sandwich for the journey. It’s only fish paste, but that’s all there is. And I’ve given you an apple and your ration of cheese for this week. You can get a cup of tea at the station.”

Maisie had taken the bag with a tight-throated thank-you and had stepped forward in the hope that her mother might embrace her, but her mother stayed where she was.

“Will you at least walk me to the bus stop?” Maisie had asked.

“The fact that you’ve chosen to leave home before you’ve even finished your schooling”—her mother hit the well-worn track without hesitation—“suggests you have no desire to spend any more time with us than you must.”

“Mother, please let’s not do this again.” Maisie had tried not to sigh. “I’d like it very much if you’d all walk with me to the bus stop. Thank you.”

Maisie’s sister, Beth, had been the only one who had seemed in the slightest bit excited for Maisie. Perhaps she was already envisaging her own escape from their parents—she was almost sixteen, after all. As if to prove her support, Beth had already had her shoes on and had been grabbing her coat from the hall stand.

“Shall I get your coat too, Mother?” Beth had asked.

Father’s voice from the dining room had not been loud, but it had been crystal clear. “Your mother will not be needing her coat. And neither will you, Elizabeth.”

“But, Dad,” Beth had begun, “what if there’s rain?”

“Put. The coats. Away.” Maisie’s father’s tone had been unmistakable, a command that was to be followed without question. But as she always did, Beth had pushed back.

“But surely—”

“Elizabeth! Your sister has decided she is mature enough to ignore the wishes of her parents and sign herself up for some ridiculous venture with women who clearly have no more sense than she does. She must therefore be mature enough to get herself there alone, so put the coats away, and go help your mother in the kitchen.”

Suddenly he had been at the dining room door, and without even glancing in Maisie’s direction, he’d stalked past his daughters and his wife to his study door. There he’d stopped, his fingers on the brass knob.

“I will not repeat myself again, Elizabeth. Your sister can see herself out. You have breakfast dishes to wash.”

So Maisie had walked to the bus stop alone, and she had not written home since.

Maisie sighed as she looked at the basket of cards. She knew she ought to send something, at least to Beth. It hadn’t been Beth’s fault their parents had reacted so badly, but even so, that morning might have been the first time in years that quarrelsome and complaining Beth had ever supported Maisie in an argument. With two and a half years separating the girls, arguments had been routine, and it was usually Beth who started them.

No, Maisie did not even want to write to Beth.

Now feeling grumpy, Maisie picked up the plates and cups in front of her and Dot, and cleared them onto the pile of dirty dishes stacked on the serving counter. Dot’s nose was still buried in a book, as it was most mornings over breakfast, and all the other women around her were scribbling on their cards. Dot didn’t ever send mail home either, Maisie had noticed, though the one time she’d mentioned it, Dot had evaded her question and quickly changed the subject. Since Maisie had no desire to share details of the misery of her own home life either, she’d let the matter drop.

A sharp stab of pain and a spurt of warm pus across her palm made Maisie realize that she’d been distractedly digging her thumbnail into one of the large blisters on her left hand. Hoping no one else had noticed, she dabbed at her palm with the corner of her handkerchief. She ought to wash her hands, but she was sure that the harsh carbolic soap was partly to blame for her blisters since it dried out her skin, which was already in trouble from its first exposure to an outdoor life. So if she wanted to avoid washing her hands so much, what she needed was …

Maisie changed course and sidled a little nervously toward the kitchen. Old Crabby had made it clear on the first day that Mrs. McRobbie’s culinary domain was not to be entered without invitation. Mrs. McRobbie was the cook for Shandford Lodge, and was married to the old woodsman, Mr. McRobbie, who had been their primary instructor for all the ax and saw cuts, and also for tool care. He also had an encyclopedic mind when it came to all things flora and fauna in the woods around the lodge, something that Maisie had already found useful when faced with a patch of stinging nettles or if one needed to know, as Helen had the week before, whether the snake wrapping itself around one’s boot was a venomous adder or a benign grass snake. Although Mr. McRobbie tried to be gruff and miserable with them, no one was convinced by the act. His wife’s reputation, however, was truly fearsome, and so Maisie knocked gingerly on the doorframe before her toes had even crossed the kitchen threshold.

“Mrs. McRobbie?” she called tentatively.

There was a rustling and shuffling from beyond the pantry door, and the cook appeared, her tiny frame dwarfed by the enormous sack of flour she was carrying.

“Oh, here, let me help,” said Maisie as she dashed forward and wrestled the sack out of Mrs. McRobbie’s arms. “Where shall I put it for you?”

The cook pointed over to the far counter and Maisie laid the flour down. Hoping this favor might make Mrs. McRobbie more open to a request of help, Maisie quickly asked her question. “Do you have any spare pig fat I could have?”

The older woman gazed at her for a moment. “Pig fat?” she replied. “You mean lard?”

“Oh, well, if lard is pig fat, then yes, lard. Please, if you have some to spare. I have money.”

“Show me,” said Mrs. McRobbie, putting out her hand.

Maisie dug her sore hand gingerly into her pocket to find some coins, uncertain of how much pig fat might cost.

“Not your money, girl! Show me your hands.”

Maisie could see now that the cook wasn’t asking for payment but was holding out her hand, palm up, as John Lindsay had done. Self-consciously, Maisie laid her own hand on top as Mrs. McRobbie leaned forward, clicking her tongue and shaking her head.

“You’re in a wee bit of a mess there, aren’t you? But I’m sure I can find you some lard, if that’s what you think’ll work.”

“That’s what I was told would work,” Maisie said, following the cook into the pantry, “by one of the American chaps we met at the dance last night. He said I should mix it with some Vaseline and smear it on the blisters.”

“An American, was it?” said the cook, as she drew back a white muslin cloth and cut into the large oblong of white fat it covered. “I didn’t know that there were any Americans around here. Were they not the Canadians?”

“Canadians?”

Mrs. McRobbie had retrieved a crumpled sheet of brown paper and was folding it around the white block. “Aye, there’s a whole bunch of Canadian lumberjacks up the road a piece, working on the old laird’s estate, clearing it for another army camp, from what I heard.”

“Oh, I’m not sure,” Maisie said, “maybe.”

She remembered that Mary had said that they were Americans, but had John said that himself? Perhaps not. And then it occurred to Maisie that she hadn’t even bothered to press him further on what he’d been doing to get blisters that matched hers, or about where he was from. In fact, she hadn’t asked him anything about himself at all. Her mother would not be pleased if she knew that, because according to her, a lady should always use the eighty–twenty rule when talking to a gentleman.

“Men like to talk only about themselves,” Mother had said. “Therefore, a lady must ensure that eighty percent of the conversation should be by him or about him, and she should only ever talk about herself as an answer to his direct question, making sure to turn the conversation back the other way as quickly as possible.”

Maisie had snickered with Beth through this lecture, but now, remembering that all that she and John had talked about was her wish to dance and her hands, she was left to wonder if that was why John had abandoned her.

Damn! She hated to think her mother might be right.

Mrs. McRobbie was watching her, and Maisie realized she was waiting for an answer to some question that Maisie hadn’t even heard.

“Sorry?”

“I asked if the chap holding your hands at the dance was handsome.” The old woman’s eyes were sparkling with amusement. “You know, the Canadian.”

“He wasn’t Canadian, I don’t think. And he wasn’t at all handsome.” Maisie tried hard not to blush under the cook’s scrutiny. “Well, yes, he was quite handsome, but he wasn’t holding my hands, other than to dance, obviously, since you have to hold hands to dance, but he wasn’t holding them, not like that.”

“Like what, dear?”

“Like that, like you mean, I mean,” Maisie could feel herself getting flustered.

Mrs. McRobbie’s smile spread wider. “Oh well, there’s time yet.”

As if realizing that Maisie was becoming anxious, the cook suddenly shoved the block of lard into Maisie’s hand. “Off you go now—the others will be waiting for you, I’m sure.”

“Oh, right. Yes. Thank you.” Maisie waved the lard in the air, and as she turned back toward the dining room, Mrs. McRobbie chuckled again.

“And best not put that on your hands just before you pick up an ax, dear. I don’t want Mr. McRobbie being decapitated. He’s to fix the tiles on our roof before the end of the summer, and he’ll need a head for that.”

Maisie smiled as she went back to the dining room. So much for the fearsome Mrs. McRobbie.

Dot, Phyllis, Mary, and Anna had already left the dining room by the time Maisie caught up with them.

“We wondered where you’d gone,” said Dot. “Come on, back to the axes. According to Phyllis, Mr. McRobbie thinks we can move on to snedding tomorrow if we conquer chopping today.”

“Lucky us!” said Mary.

As they passed the office, several girls were still waiting to get stamps for their letters. Beside them, on the table by the office door, was the basket of postcards, enticingly blank, other than the scarlet stamp bearing King George’s head in the top right corner.

Maisie hesitated. Even if she put her money into the honesty box and took a postcard, it didn’t mean she had to send it. Not today, anyway. She could keep it to send for Beth’s birthday perhaps. Or even for Christmas. She didn’t have to send it right now.

But then, why waste tuppence on it now if she wasn’t going to send it till later? That made no sense.

Then it came to her. She would make a deal with herself. If she had exactly the coins to pay for the stamp, she’d get the postcard. If she didn’t, she’d walk away.

Digging her hand into her trouser pocket, Maisie pulled out the small collection of coins and counted them off with one finger. Two shillings, five ha’pennies, and three farthings.

“Damn!”

She did have the right change to make two pennies exactly. With a resigned sigh, she slid four ha’pennies into the honesty box and picked up one of the cards, waggling it in her fingers for a minute or two before stuffing it into her back pocket.

No, she would not send the postcard today, but at least she knew she had it, just in case.

Later that morning, Maisie and the others followed Mr. McRobbie for their final chopping lesson through the paths of the estate to where the old woods butted up to a wide stretch of pine plantation. Here the trees stood like soldiers on a parade ground, set at regular intervals, in rows and columns, each about five yards away from its neighbor. Maisie was pleased to see that here there was almost no underbrush or scrubby grass below the trees to get in the way of her ax, only a carpet of fragrant brown needles.

On Mr. McRobbie’s order, the lumberjills all lined up along the first row of sturdy trees, one girl to each trunk, and set to work to chop it down. Although she was gradually figuring it out, chopping hadn’t turned out to be as easy as Maisie had expected. But it was early days, she kept telling herself, because by the end of the course, she would know how to chop and saw, how to fell a tree, how to clear all the small branches off it—that was snedding—and also how to roll the logs using their cant hooks, and then haul the timber away with hooks and chains. They were also learning the uses for the different woods, and how to cut to a specific measurement. The trees the girls were chopping today were Scots pine, so they would probably end up sawn to short lengths as pit props for coal mines, or perhaps as fence posts, with the wastage going for charcoal. But for any of that to happen, the lumberjills had to get the trees down first.

“Don’t swing so wildly, lassie!” Maisie heard Mr. McRobbie shout at someone farther down the line. “You’ve to let it sing. Hear the music in your head, and let it flow through your arm and into your blade. I told you that yesterday. Have you still not found yourself a chopping song yet?”

Maisie was relieved Mr. McRobbie had started at the other end of the line, because she hadn’t found her chopping song yet either. Mr. McRobbie had been telling the girls for days now to find a song with good rhythm that helped them to time their ax swings. But Maisie was struggling to come up with a tune that worked. Nearby, Lillian had clearly found hers. She was humming a short musical phrase over and over as she lifted her ax away from the tree, one, raised it high on two, rounded it over above her shoulder on three, and brought it slicing down into the wood on four. Perfection, exactly like Mr. McRobbie had shown them last week. The motion was smooth and controlled, and Lillian’s tree trunk was growing narrower at the waist with every cut.

“That’s it, lass, you’re doing a grand job,” said Mr. McRobbie as he spotted Lillian’s easy action. “Now get those cuts down as close to the ground as you can, so we don’t waste that bottom foot of wood, not while there’s a war on.”

He stepped back a little and raised his voice to address the whole group.

“So, there’s a bunch of Canadians”—Maisie stopped to listen, ax above her head—“working up the road right now, and do you know how they’ve been cutting down the trees over there?” Mr. McRobbie glared around him. “At knee height! And even, some of them I saw, at waist height. I couldn’t believe how much they were wasting, so I went to have a wee word with them and I put a stop to it.”

Canadians. Up the road. Not Americans then.

Lillian began to hum and swing again, and Maisie groaned in frustration. When he’d demonstrated what he meant by a chopping song, Mr. McRobbie had sung an off-tune “Auld Lang Syne” as he’d swung again and again in rhythm to the music, but when Maisie had tried the same tune, it didn’t fit her action at all.

“Find some music that means something to you,” he’d exclaimed passionately to the assembled recruits, “a song that flows from your breath to your ax, to your blade, to the tree.” The old man had looked like he could have started to dance with his ax, right there, and a few of the girls had mocked him quietly from behind.

And yet, his strange method seemed to work. Each day more and more recruits were swinging and chopping like professionals, and now the clearing was a cacophony of harmony and counterpoint, half-hummed dance tunes from Anna and Mary, and a medley of fully sung operatic arias from Phyllis. Everyone seemed to be singing except for Dot and Maisie.

As Maisie wondered about borrowing a tune from Phyllis, a thought popped into her head.

What song would John Lindsay hum as he was swinging his ax? Suddenly a tune came into her mind. It was the one she and John had danced to, albeit briefly and disastrously, last night, and it had been playing on the wireless in the dining room this morning too. What was it called? She could hear the tune quite clearly now, though she couldn’t recall all the words.

Keep smiling through, just like you always do,

Something blue skies something something far away.

It was one of Vera Lynn’s songs, she was sure … “We’ll Meet Again,” that was it!

Before the music escaped her mind, Maisie lifted her ax and weighed it in her hands for a second or two. Then, as she began to sing the opening words of the song under her breath—“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when”—she hefted the ax away, curved it up and around behind her head, and brought it down sharp into the bark of the log.

Amazingly, it did the trick, and the blade cut cleanly through the bark. She kept singing quietly to herself, and although her movements were not exactly effortless, they were certainly more synchronized, as if she and the ax were suddenly one effective machine, not two engines pulling against each other.

Maisie let out a cry of delight as the ax bit sliced cleanly again into the flesh of the tree.

“You’ve found it at last, have you?” Mr. McRobbie laughed as he approached, though he stayed a safe distance from Maisie’s swing arc. “I knew you’d get it soon enough. And what about you, Miss Thompson?”

A grunt of effort, a thick slap of metal hitting wood, and a groan of frustration came from behind Maisie, as Dot failed yet again to make even so much as a dent in her tree.

“Well, lass, you maybe haven’t found quite the right song yet,” said Mr. McRobbie as he walked away. “But keep on trying.”

“Grrrrrrr!”

Dot was holding her ax handle as if she wanted to throttle the life out of it.

“Did you just growl at your ax?” Maisie snorted.

“It’s so bloody frustrating!” Dot cried. “How am I the only one who can’t do this?”

“Oh, come on, you’re not that bad.”

Dot pointed at Maisie’s log, and then held out her hand to her own, the surface of which could best be described as a little scuffed.

Dot suddenly lifted her ax up high over her head—not the way they’d been taught at all—and brought it down hard on the tree in fury. The impact ripped the handle from Dot’s grasp, spinning it straight at Maisie, who hopped to the side just in time. The ax buried itself in the ground close to where Maisie had been standing.

“Be careful!” she cried, but seeing Dot’s torn face, she felt more sympathy than anger. “Remember to treat your ax ‘as if it were your first-born bairnie, with love and with care.’” Maisie was mimicking their instructor’s strong Angus accent so well that Dot eventually gave a wry smile.

“Sorry, Maisie. But I’m serious. I’m so rubbish at this, they’re going to send me home.”

“Oh, nonsense. They will not. We’ve got plenty of training yet before we get posted to a camp to do this for real, which is more than enough time to sort you out.” Maisie put an arm around Dot’s shoulders. “Anyway, you and I have our first lesson this afternoon, and I’m sure you’ll be much better at that than me.”

“Well, I’ll have to be,” replied Dot, “or you’ll be looking for another friend by the end of the month.”

Driving, however, proved just as elusive to Dot as swinging an ax. That afternoon, Maisie found herself pitched violently around in the back of an old Morris car as Dot did her best to coax it along. But just as Dot got it going, the engine’s roar spluttered and died into judgmental silence. Dot smacked her hand onto the steering wheel and muttered “damn it” under her breath over and over.

Mr. Taylor had come up from his garage in Brechin to teach the recruits, two by two. He sat next to Dot with his hands on his knees, arms braced, as if he expected the car to take off again. Then he slowly exhaled, making his bushy black mustache flutter.

“Perhaps your pal should do the drive back, eh?”

Dot slumped forward in despair. “Why can’t I get anything right?”

“It’s fine, Dot, really.” Maisie reached forward to lay her hand onto Dot’s back. “Driving’s a complicated thing to learn. I’m sure Mr. Taylor took ages to learn to drive too, didn’t you, Mr. Taylor?”

The instructor turned to stare at Maisie with indignation, but eventually said, “Aye, well, maybe not quite as many problems, but I suppose it took a wee while.”

Maisie flashed him a grateful smile. “See? So don’t be down. It’s really not easy, you know.”

“But you took to it like the proverbial duck!” exclaimed Dot. “You only stalled the engine twice, and you certainly didn’t almost put us in a ditch like I did.”

“You didn’t put us in a ditch, Dot—”

“Almost in a ditch, I said,”

“No, not even almost in a ditch.” Maisie was trying not to smile. “We were still a good three feet from the actual ditch. Well, perhaps two feet. All right, we were six inches away …”

There was a peculiar snuffling noise and Maisie realized that Mr. Taylor was chuckling, and though she didn’t want to hurt Dot’s feelings, it was hard not to join in. But then Dot began to giggle as she clambered out and opened the back door for Maisie.

“Get in the front then, Flash,” Dot said, as she and Maisie swapped places, “and show me how it’s done.”

Maisie settled herself into the driver’s seat and grasped the steering wheel again, careful not to bump her blisters. Thinking hard about everything Mr. Taylor had told her, about the steering and gear changes, she started the engine and moved the car forward. Thankfully it didn’t stall, but after twenty yards, the engine began to whine and Mr. Taylor tapped his knuckle against the gear stick. “Come on, lassie, you can’t stay in first gear all the way.”

“Oh, right, yes, sorry,” said Maisie, pushing down on the clutch and wrestling the gear stick into second as the car continued up the lane toward the lodge, and then into third.

“That’s it, lassie, you’ve got it now,” said Mr. Taylor, “which makes one of you anyway.”

“I’m not sure I’ve really ‘got it,’” said Maisie with a proud smile, “but with a little more practice, I might. Will we see you again tomorrow?”

“No, that’s your instruction finished,” said Mr. Taylor. “Miss Cradditch says you’ve got a lot to learn in a short time, so this is all you’ll get from me.”

Maisie braked a little too hard and the car slammed to a halt in front of the lodge. “But we’ve only had one afternoon’s instruction. And on a car, not a truck.”

“If you can drive a car, you can drive a truck,” he said. “It’s all just a matter of scale, after all.”

“Scale?” Maisie could not believe what she was hearing. “A three-ton Bedford truck is not the same size as this car.”

Mr. Taylor gave another mustache-ruffling sigh. “As I said, it’s just a matter of scale. Now, don’t you fret, lass. It’s clear that you’re smart and strong, and if you concentrate, you’ll do just fine.”

Smart and strong? Those were two words she’d seldom ever heard used about her. Quite the opposite. For years, her father had been telling her she was weak willed, lazy, and stupid. And her mother always said that while Maisie was handsome enough—“handsome” was Mother’s word for Maisie; “pretty” was reserved for Beth—she’d have to shed some weight before she got too much older, if she wanted to marry. That was Maisie in her parents’ eyes, lazy and fat, certainly not smart or strong.

Maisie turned and offered Mr. Taylor her hand.

“Thank you,” she said, “I mean, for today’s lesson. I enjoyed it, though I’m not sure if I could ever do it—”

“I told you, you’ll do fine,” he replied, taking her hand in his meaty fist. Then he leaned closer and whispered, “But perhaps your friend ought to take the train or the bus instead.”

He gave Maisie a conspiratorial nudge and pulled a watch from his pocket. “I’d best be off. Mrs. Taylor will have my tea on the table at five o’clock sharp, and if I’m late, she’ll feed it to the dog.”

“If we get no more driving lessons,” moaned Maisie as she and Dot walked back to the hut, “I won’t have a clue how to do that again in a week’s time, let alone four weeks, when we get sent out to our new postings.”

“Well, as long as you remember enough by this Friday, you’ll be able to drive me to the station when they send me home,” Dot replied, misery clouding her usually bright voice.

Maisie nudged Dot’s elbow. “Come on, mopey. We’ve got first aid training on Monday, which’ll be interesting, won’t it?”

Dot looked unconvinced. “I fainted when we dissected a frog in school,” she groaned. “First sight of the blood, and I—” She mimed toppling over in a dead faint.

Maisie laughed.

“I’m serious,” Dot said. “I might as well pack my bags right now.”

“But first aid’s not all about mopping up blood,” countered Maisie, “or even bandages and slings. It’s helping people, and that’s what you’re best at, after all.”

Which was true. On their first day at Shandford Lodge, Dot had offered to help Maisie make up her bed with the stiff white sheets and thin gray blankets issued to them. By the time they had folded the corners in tight and smooth, and had helped some of the others too, Maisie already liked Dot very much. Dot had a genuine desire to get along with other people, though Maisie couldn’t quite work out why such a shy and slight girl would have volunteered for this very physical lumberjill life.

“I suppose,” replied Dot. “Just don’t send me any injured frogs!”

The following week, even before the end of their first aid training, Maisie could see that Dot was a gifted first-aider. The visiting tutor, a retired nurse from Dundee, recommended that Dot do additional training so she’d be fully certified. Since every camp was required to have someone with a first aid certificate, Dot was thrilled. It meant that not only would she stay a lumberjill, she’d also earn an extra shilling a week in her pay packet once she was out in the field.

Maisie was delighted for her friend too, and had to smile when she overheard Dot reassuring one of the other more squeamish recruits over breakfast the next day.

“Oh, don’t worry. First aid is more about helping people than it is about mopping up blood. I’m sure you’ll be absolutely fine.”

And suddenly it was the sixth and final week of training. This time next week, Maisie wouldn’t be a recruit, and she wouldn’t be at Shandford Lodge. She’d be a real lumberjill, working in a real camp, at last. The one thing, however, that dulled her excitement was knowing that she might be there alone. There was no guarantee that anyone from this group would be sent to the same place as Maisie, let alone a close friend like Dot, and they wouldn’t find out where they were all going until the postings were announced on Friday, the day before they all departed.

Maisie tried not to think about it, and hoped that the coming week’s sawmill training would distract her from the uncertainty of what was coming next.

On Monday morning as they trekked to Mitchell’s Sawmill in Tannadice, there had been nice breeze, but once they’d arrived it was clear that the cool air was certainly not finding its way inside the mill shed, even when the huge shed doors were propped open. It was hot, and it was loud.

Maisie stood with the others around an enormous bench saw and strained to hear the barked instructions from Betty Harp, who said proudly that she had been one of the very first WTC recruits, and would now teach them all her six months’ worth of sawmill wisdom.

“There are four rules you must follow in any sawmill,” Betty shouted. “One. No smoking. Cigarettes and sawdust are a bad combination.”

Everyone nodded.

“Two. No hair. Your hair must be tied back at all times. You do not want this little beauty”—she slapped her hand down inches away from the vicious whirling vertical blade of the saw—“to be your next hairdresser.

“Three. Gloves. Please wear your leather gloves at all times. But be careful—gloves can give you a false sense of security around these blades, and even thick leather is no competition for spinning steel, so you still need to be careful. And remember, you’ll never get to enjoy a manicure again if you have no fingers.”

Maisie winced and immediately pulled her work gloves out of her pockets.

“And four. Communication. By that, I don’t mean chatter and gossiping. In this mill, you are responsible not only for your own safety, but for the safety of all your team. If you tell them exactly what you are about to do before you do it, you’ll all stay safe. Got it?”

The girls all nodded their agreement and followed Betty to the first machine.

Over the next two hours, Maisie watched Betty closely as she taught the group to adjust and feed big tree trunks into the big table and routing saws, and showed them how to use the edger, the jointer, and the plane. After a tea break, they were split into pairs, and Maisie worked alongside Helen at one station, then another, until they reached the routing saw. They both stood baffled for several minutes, until Betty came and gave them instructions again.

Just as Helen finally managed to get the engine turning over, though, a sharp scream rose above the din, and then another. Maisie shouted to Helen to shut off the saw again, waiting only until the blade started slowing before she ran to see what had happened. The others were already grouped around the big headsaw, and even from the back, Maisie could hear Dot’s voice above all the others.

“Catherine! Press down hard on this, would you? Harder! Someone give me a belt. I need a tourniquet on her arm. And a cloth, I need another cloth. No, something cleaner than that. Your shirt’ll do. Come on, give me your shirt, we need to get it wrapped quickly.”

Maisie peered over the crowd. Lillian was lying flat on her back on the sawdust-covered floor, groaning and panting, her face ashen, her eyes squeezed tight shut. Dot crouched at her side, wrapping a bundle of green cloth around Lillian’s hand—Catherine’s blouse by the look of it—and as Maisie watched, the fabric slowly darkened as blood seeped through.

Betty shoved through the crowd, carrying a metal box painted with a red cross. Throwing open the lid, she grabbed a large paper packet and thrust it at Dot.

“Thanks, Betty,” said Dot, her voice strong and decisive, “but I can’t let up the pressure yet. Can you tighten the tourniquet around her upper arm to limit the blood flow first? And then carefully open that packet, but try not to touch the gauze as you hand it to me. I need to get the cut wrapped so it’s kept clean. I’m sure they’ll be able to stitch it up, but if the gash gets infected, then … well, let’s just keep it clean, all right?”

Lillian whimpered at Dot’s words, and Maisie tried to push past the people in front so she could give her some comfort. But Anna had already dropped to her knees and was laying her hand gently onto Lillian’s forehead while she whispered soft words of reassurance.

Maisie glanced up at the saw table behind Dot, where the circular saw sat innocently still. Its guilt was clear, however, from its red-smeared teeth. A few inches away, a tan leather work glove lay abandoned, empty fingers curled as if in supplication. It was just like the ones Maisie had on, except that this glove’s palm had been torn wide open—no, not torn, sliced. The cut across the smooth brown leather ran very neatly in a straight line from the bottom of the index finger to the heel. Its gaping edges were sharp, and were marred by dark-red staining of the pale leather all along their length. Someone beside her gagged, and Maisie realized that Lillian’s glove had been no match for the cold steel of the headsaw, exactly as Betty had warned.

Within thirty seconds, the tourniquet belt was tight and Dot was wrapping the injured hand in its fourth layer of bandage. And then the truck was there by the open door of the mill shed, and Phyllis, Mairi, Helen, and Maisie were lifting Lillian onto the flatbed at the back while Dot kept applying pressure on both the well-wrapped hand and the pulse point on Lillian’s wrist. As they laid her down, Maisie tried to reassure Lillian that everything would be fine, but the words felt hollow. After all, what did Maisie know about these things?

Once Lillian was settled, with her head lying in Anna’s lap and with Dot still at her side, the truck pulled away. As she watched it go, Maisie heard someone say, “Well, still waters run deep, don’t they? Who’d have thought mousy little Dorothy would step up and take over like that?”

“Just as well she did,” another voice replied. “I was close to fainting at all that blood.”

Maisie felt a rush of pride knowing she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the transformation in Dot. She’d looked so confident and in charge, and Maisie knew that Dot had finally found her place as a lumberjill. But what about poor sweet Lillian? If the cut was as bad as it looked to Maisie, perhaps Lillian’s days in the Timber Corps had just come to a sudden and sorry end.

The next morning, Betty Harp brought them news of Lillian, who was apparently doing well. She had been transferred from the cottage hospital in Brechin to the much larger Dundee Royal Infirmary, where surgeons had operated on her hand overnight. Betty praised Dot’s quick thinking and determination, and told the group that because Dot had kept pressure on Lillian’s hand all through the journey to the hospital, the doctors were hopeful that Lillian would not lose the use of her fingers, though only time would tell.

Once the lumberjills had applauded this good news, Betty repeated her lecture about safety in the mill, about wearing their gloves at all times—“Lillian might have cut her hand, but she’s kept her fingers because she was wearing her gloves”—and about doing exactly what they were damn well told.

Once the lecture was over, all the girls gathered around Dot, patting her on the back and congratulating her. Dot tried to say it was nothing, that anyone else would have done the same, but Maisie could see that under the pink flush, Dot was thrilled.

And all through the rest of the week Dot was like a new person; rescuing Lillian had provided her the confidence to take on any number of tasks. And there were so many new things still to learn in the sawmill that even Maisie felt rather overwhelmed.

By Friday afternoon—the end not only of their sawmill training but of their Timber Corps training too—everyone was sick and tired of the work, as well as the stifling heat in the shed.

The unusually high temperature rather spoiled what should have been an exciting day. They had come to the end of their training at last, even if they were now looking at unknown futures. In fact, the weather was so unbelievably hot for September that at knocking-off time there were no cheers at all. Everyone just drifted wearily toward the track up to Shandford Lodge, wiping the dust and sweat off their faces and necks with scarves and handkerchiefs, not even bothering to congratulate each other for finishing the grueling training.

“Ladies!” Phyllis shouted from behind them, bringing them all to a stop. She was standing by the same Bedford truck that had carried Lillian to the hospital days before. “To mark this auspicious day, the end of our lumberjill training, we will be taking a little detour to do something we should have done days ago. Come on, up you get, and we’ll be on our way.”

With that, Phyllis pulled herself up into the driver’s seat and beeped the horn twice as the ignition roared.

Maisie looked around for the truck’s usual driver, a man named Eddie, but there was no sign of him. She clambered aboard the flatbed anyway, sitting down just as the truck lurched off toward the main road.

For the first time in hours—days even—Maisie felt cool, fresh air ruffle her sweaty hair and blouse. Was this what Phyllis had planned? A refreshing breeze for the trip home? But then Phyllis drove past their usual turnoff, and they were almost to Forfar before she suddenly swung the truck off the road and down a rutted dirt track. Maisie grunted involuntarily as she was thrown around with the other girls, bouncing on the hard truck floor every time Phyllis hit a bump. Fortunately, Phyllis soon slammed on the brakes, cut the engine, and jumped down from the cab.

“Follow me!” she cried, and was over a gate and off down a footpath beside a recently harvested field before anyone could ask her where they were going. Soon, Maisie was picking her way with Dot and the other lumberjills along the side of the barley stubble toward a wooded area at the far side of the field.

Maisie had long since given up trying to guess where they were being led when she heard excited cries followed by a splash. As she and Dot came through the thick curtain of young larches, an expanse of dark-blue water extended away from them. The sun dappled silver onto the surface, and ripples extended out across the long and slender loch. Suddenly, a naked Phyllis rose up from the surface, spraying water around her, and Maisie found herself clapping and laughing with delight.

“Come on in, everyone!” Phyllis cried through the sheet of water pouring over her face. “It’s glorious!” Then she turned away and, bending double, gave a neat surface dive back into the water, a move that brought her bare buttocks up to the surface for a split second before they vanished again, followed by her legs, with a neat scissors kick of her feet.

Catherine, Mairi, and Mary clearly needed no second invitation, because they were already tearing off their sweat-soaked uniforms and charging over the soft grass into the water. The older women, Cynthia, Anna, and Helen, were a little more genteel, folding their uniforms neatly on top of their boots before tiptoeing down to the edge and easing themselves into the water with gasps and giggles.

“This is fantastic!” Maisie cried to Dot, as she tried to undo both bootlaces at the same time. “Why did no one think of doing this before?”

One boot came off, then the other, and Maisie was undoing the buttons on her blouse when she realized that Dot was still standing, fully dressed, staring at the women in the water, who were all splashing each other and laughing like children.

“Come on, Dot,” said Maisie, “let’s get in there quick. We’re all so hot, I reckon we’ll set the loch to boil like a kettle.” Maisie was down to her underwear when Dot turned away from her, gazing instead into the trees behind them.

“Don’t be embarrassed.” Maisie lowered her voice a little. “It’s only us girls.”

Still Dot didn’t move.

“Can’t you swim?” Maisie asked gently.

“No, it’s not that.”

“If you can’t swim, don’t worry, it doesn’t look deep. At least come in as far as your waist, so you’ll get cool. I’ll stay beside you, in case.”

“It’s not that I can’t swim.” Dot was now fingering the top button of her blouse. “It’s … well, I don’t have a swimsuit.”

Maisie almost laughed, but stopped herself in time when she saw Dot wasn’t joking, and it struck Maisie that she had never seen Dot get dressed or undressed in front of anyone else. Maisie, like all the others, got her uniform or her pajamas on beside her bed, without really thinking who else was around, but Dot never did. In fact, Maisie couldn’t work out where Dot did dress—under the blankets, or in the ablutions block behind the dormitory huts? Wherever, she was always dressed ahead of everyone else.

“Well, neither do they,” she said kindly, indicating the girls already swimming. “And neither do I.”

“I know, but …”

Maisie was torn. She desperately wanted to swim, but Dot looked so upset. Either way, she was standing on a loch shore in nothing but her underwear, so she really ought to decide—

That was it!

“We can swim in our bra and knickers then.” Maisie suggested. “It’s so warm today, they’ll dry out again in no time.”

Dot glanced back at the cool water of the loch, and a faint smile began to break through the worry.

“I know I’m being ridiculous, but—”

“You’re not being ridiculous, but you are wasting valuable swimming time. So come on, get those boots off!”

A minute later, Maisie grabbed Dot’s hand and led her to where the soft mud at the water’s edge cooled their feet even before the chilly water could make them gasp as it wrapped around their ankles, then their knees. There was a chorus of catcalls from the other women as Maisie took a deep breath and plunged into the water.

It felt wonderful, as if the water was sloughing off every bit of dirt and sweat that had caked her skin over the last few weeks, cleansing her in a way that no five inches of tepid bathwater ever could.

From somewhere a bar of soap had appeared—a very ladylike pale lilac soap that smelled wonderfully of lavender—and eventually, it was passed to Catherine, who then passed it to Maisie. For months now, the only soap they’d been able to get with their ration books was carbolic, harsh, bright pink, and sold in utilitarian blocks. So being able to rub this soft and silky, sweet-smelling lather over her skin and into her hair was sheer luxury, even if there was mud oozing between her toes, and pond weed—at least she hoped it was pond weed—grabbing at her ankles.

Tempting though it was to linger with the soap, Maisie offered the bar to Mary, who was chatting nearby to Dot and Mairi. Dot, Maisie noticed, was looking relaxed now, but was also making sure everything below her shoulders stayed under the water.

Mary took the soap, sniffed it, and pulled a comically disgusted face. “What a choice to make,” she said. “I can stay stinking like a sweaty cesspit, or I can use this soap and smell like my granny instead.”

“Well, I thought it smelled lovely,” said Maisie as she eased herself back under the water again, moving her head from side to side to clear the soap from her hair.

As Maisie surfaced again, she saw that Phyllis and Helen were now standing on the grass beside their clothes. Helen was squeezing the water from her long brown braid as Phyllis rubbed her short hair into a messy crown with her undershirt. Although Maisie wouldn’t have hesitated to strip off to swim if it hadn’t been for Dot, she was still struck by Phyllis’s and Helen’s complete lack of embarrassment. Neither seemed to find it the slightest bit unusual to be standing naked in the open air, whereas Maisie knew that she would soon be rushing to get her clothes on as quickly as possible. Even though her belt was these days pulled two notches tighter than when she’d first arrived at Shandford Lodge, proving how much flatter her belly had become from all the physical work, Maisie was still self-conscious about her size. Hadn’t her parents been telling her she was fat—or “hefty,” to use her father’s expression—all her life? Perhaps Phyllis and Helen were lucky enough to have kinder, more sensitive parents.

Just then, something caught Maisie’s eye from the trees beyond where Phyllis and Helen stood. A face peeked out, then another, and then a third. Maisie distinctly heard giggling and realized that they were being watched by three young boys of perhaps eleven or twelve.

Instinctively, Maisie ducked down into the water until her shoulders were covered, and called to Mary and Mairi, who were already wading out of the loch. “Girls, wait!” She pointed her finger toward the peeping toms in the trees.

There was a squeak from behind her, as Dot saw too, and within a second, Mary and Mairi were back under the water.

“Phyllis!” Mary called, her hand cupping her mouth, “Phyllis! We have visitors!”

Phyllis looked at Mary, and then at the boys Mary was pointing to. Helen grabbed her uniform and held it up in front of herself, apparently discovering her embarrassment at last. But Phyllis simply glanced back toward the women in the water with a wide grin.

The boys didn’t seem to notice they’d been spotted until Phyllis was already heading toward them. One of them let out a shriek and ducked behind his tree. The others followed suit, but none of them reappeared from the other side to run away.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” called Phyllis in a singsong voice, and Maisie had to laugh. She’d bet these boys had never played a game of hide-and-seek quite like this one. “If you’re so interested in female anatomy, lads, you might as well come and have a really good look while you have the chance.”

There was the sound of a skirmish, and suddenly a boy was shoved out from behind the tree and held there by his friends as he tried desperately to fight his way back into cover. This boy was older than Maisie’d first thought, more like thirteen, though she guessed he had yet to hit the true growth spurt that came with puberty. Right now, however, he looked like a young deer caught in the beam of a ghillie’s flashlight, quivering yet hypnotized.

“So, what’s your name then, young man?” Phyllis asked in her best schoolmistress voice, as if she weren’t standing stark naked in front of a boy young enough to be one of her pupils.

He swallowed before he croaked, “Davey,” but when Phyllis placed her hands on her hips in what would have been a stern gesture in other circumstances, he corrected himself. “I mean, David Matheson, Miss … erm … Mrs …”

Phyllis nodded at him, the motion of which sent her breasts swinging, something that Davey seemed to find quite hypnotic. “You may call me Miss Cartwright. And now, young David, will you introduce me to your friends too?”

Davey continued to stare at Phyllis’s chest but vaguely beckoned to his friends with one hand, in the manner of someone half-asleep. Five seconds of noisy shuffling later, the two other lads appeared. This pair, however, had no courage to look at the naked woman; they kept their eyes studiously on their boots. Glancing at them, Davey followed their example and dropped his gaze too.

“Poor little sods,” chuckled Mary from where she was mostly submerged next to Maisie.

“This experience could scar them for life,” replied Mairi.

“I think it’s scarring me for life,” joined in Dot, and they all laughed, sending out ripples around them. The movement of the water against Maisie’s shoulders made her shiver, the delicious relief of cool water on her skin now turning into shivering cold, as goose bumps broke out on any skin that was still exposed to the afternoon breeze. She really wanted to get out of the water now, but there was no way she would stand up with those boys there.

“So, is it polite to spy on other people?” Phyllis was saying in a clear voice.

All three boys shook their heads solemnly without lifting their eyes.

“Then perhaps it’s about time you got off home. I’m sure your mothers will be very keen to hear what you’ve been up to this afternoon.”

Davey nudged his elbow against his friend, who did the same to the third boy, and all three of them shuffled sideways toward the tree.

“I’m sorry, boys, I didn’t quite hear what you said there,” Phyllis sounded very stern.

“Thank you, miss. Sorry, miss. Good-bye, miss,” mumbled the boys as they moved.

“That’s better,” said Phyllis, as she shooed them away with one hand. “And good-bye to you too.”

Sensing that they had been released, all three boys suddenly pelted behind the trees, reappearing three seconds later as they dashed toward the thicker bushes beyond. Maisie heard one of them let out a triumphant whoop, which was followed by a succession of cheers and yells, the boys clearly delighting in their narrow escape from the spitting venom of a naked Medusa.

Hearing the exultant cries, Phyllis put her head back and guffawed. “I don’t think they’ll be back anytime soon, do you?” she crowed.

“No, but their big brothers will be,” called Mary.

“And their dads,” added Mairi.

With relief, Maisie and the other girls left the water and pulled their clothes over their soaking bodies. Maisie wasn’t about to let the presence of the boys disrupt her pleasant afternoon.

Walking back to where the truck was parked, Maisie tugged at the back of her trouser leg, pulling the fabric off her damp skin. With soaking underwear under dry clothes, it wasn’t going to be the most comfortable ride home, but the swim had been worth it.

“Thank you for not laughing at me,” Dot said suddenly.

“Why would I have laughed at you?” Maisie replied.

“You know, with the swimsuit thing. It’s only that, well, I’m not used to being so open and uninhibited. I’m not very good around other women, I suppose.”

“But that’s nonsense—you’ve made loads of friends here.”

“No, Maisie, you’ve made loads of friends, and they all let me tag along because they like you so much.”

“That’s not true, and you know—”

Dot put her hand on Maisie’s arm. “I’m serious. I’ve got four big brothers, and their favorite sport is to make my life miserable. My whole life they’ve been shoving me, and stealing my things, and tearing my clothes, and so I spent my time at home trying to be invisible. But then they started picking on anyone I tried to be friends with. It took a while, but in the end, no one at school or in our street dared talk to me because of what my brothers would do to them.”

Maisie felt heartsick for her friend. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

Dot shrugged. “It’s not something I’m all that proud of.”

“But didn’t your mother—”

“She died when I was little. I don’t remember her much.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Maisie felt a sudden wave of shame, never having considered herself lucky to have her mother and sister. They had always just been there.

Maisie and Dot were almost at the truck now, and everyone else was already clambering on board.

“I always wanted to be one of those pretty girls,” Dot continued, “like Anna and Lillian. Or outgoing, like Phyllis, or someone who makes friends so easily, like you. But that was impossible. My brothers saw to that.”

“But didn’t your dad stop them?”

Dot slowed her steps. “My dad,” she said quietly, “well, my dad’s not a very nice man.”

Maisie almost replied that her dad wasn’t a very nice man either, but Dot’s lowered eyes and stillness told her that her own family problems could not compare, so she said nothing.

“I’ve never really had a best friend before I met you, Maisie, or any friend actually. And before coming here, I’d never really been around any women either, so I was terrified on the journey here.”

“But if the idea of being with a large group of women scared you so much,” Maisie asked, “then why would you join what is basically a large group of women?”

Dot looked at Maisie for several seconds, seeming to consider her answer very carefully.

“Because,” she said eventually, “the idea of staying at home with a large group of men was worse.”

Maisie reached for her friend’s hand and squeezed it tight. “You’re the best friend I could have hoped to find, Dot. I couldn’t have survived the last few weeks without you.”

Maisie was about to add how much she was dreading the postings being announced later that evening, in case she got separated from Dot, but why make it even worse? Even the thought of it made her nervous, so instead, she reached to put her arms around Dot.

Dot immediately shied away. “Best friend or not,” she cried with a sudden grin, “you are not hugging me while you smell as bad as Mary’s granny!”

WOMEN’S TIMBER CORPS CAMP

AUCHTERBLAIR, CARRBRIDGE, INVERNESS-SHIRE

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH, 1942

And then, training was over. The morning of the final day, the huts had been cleared, cleaned, and inspected before breakfast. Chores finished, Maisie stood with her suitcase, alongside all the other lumberjills, in front of the lodge waiting for the trucks to arrive to take them to their new camps. Maisie was looking forward to her next adventure, but was sorry to be losing so many new friends almost as soon as she’d found them.

When the postings had been announced last night, there had been squeals of delight as some close friends learned that they would move on together, but there had been tears too.

Miss Cradditch had read down the list of recruits alphabetically, each name immediately followed by one of the WTC camps around Scotland. Helen and Phyllis had learned almost immediately that they had been posted together somewhere in Perthshire, then Mary, Mairi, and Cynthia had found out that they would all be at the Advie camp, near Grantown-on-Spey. Maisie had grown anxious as Old Crabby reached the names beginning with M.

“McCall, Margaret,” Old Crabby had shouted, and Maisie’s stomach had lurched. “Auchterblair, Speyside.”

Maisie had been sure she hadn’t yet heard Auchterblair called out after anyone else’s name, but if the camp was in Speyside, she would be close to Mary, Mairi, and Cynthia, even though they wouldn’t all be at the same camp. But then, as Old Crabby had continued down the list, and no one else was assigned to Auchterblair, Maisie had grown uneasy. She didn’t want to go somewhere by herself.

Finally, Old Crabby had reached the last name on the list.

“Thompson, Dorothy.”

Dot had raised her hand. Maisie hadn’t been able to breathe.

“Auchterblair, Speyside,” Old Crabby had shouted, and a huge weight had lifted from Maisie’s heart. She and Dot were moving together to Auchterblair, wherever that was. Scary though it was to leave Shandford Lodge, at least she’d have Dot at her side. Then she and Dot had hugged each other, and all the other girls had joined in too, everyone laughing and crying at the same time.

How ironic, Maisie thought as the first Bedford rolled up the drive, that she had shed more tears last night about leaving her new friends from Shandford Lodge than she had when she’d left her family in Glasgow.

The trucks, it turned out, were not only arriving to pick up, they were also dropping off. Down clambered a new set of fresh-faced lumberjills-to-be, all soft, silent, and clearly terrified. Watching the new arrivals, Maisie could see how much she had changed from the new recruit of six weeks ago. Not only was she slimmer and fitter now, more tanned and muscular, Maisie knew she was different inside too. She wasn’t scared anymore to handle an ax or saw, or to drive a car—actually, she was still a little scared of the car—and she’d swum almost naked in a loch and had had her first dance with a man. She felt older, and wiser, and best of all, she had friends now, good friends, and these women loved and respected her. They treated her not as a child, but as an equal.

And that felt right. Maisie was not the spoiled child who had walked down Sutherland Avenue without a backward glance six weeks earlier. She was Maisie McCall of the Women’s Timber Corps. She was a fully trained lumberjill, ready to go out into the forests to work—and to work bloody hard—to help her country win the war.

But suddenly, Maisie wished that her parents could see her now, and Beth too. They would be proud of her. Surely.

Maisie felt a surprisingly strong twinge of … something. Homesickness, or guilt? What if something happened to her? Or to her parents, or Beth?

Old Crabby interrupted her thoughts by calling for everyone going to Speyside, the camps at Ballater, Grantown-on-Spey, and Auchterblair, to board the truck on the far side, which was leaving shortly. Everyone else was to board the two nearer trucks to be taken down to the train station.

But as the other girls began picking up their luggage, Maisie quickly crouched down and clicked open her suitcase. Rummaging, she found the postcard she’d bought a month earlier. Even though it had been tucked inside a book, it was still crumpled and torn at one corner. But it would have to do.

Her only pencil was the thick-leaded one that she used to mark measurements on the cut timber, but that too would have to do. On one side of the bent card, Maisie wrote her mother’s name and their home address, and then on the other side:

Completed WTC training. From today, Sat Sept 12, will be stationed at WTC Auchterblair Camp, Carrbridge, Inverness-shire.

Maisie

Entrusting her suitcase to Dot, Maisie ran over to where Old Crabby stood on the lodge steps and held out the postcard.

“Would you mind posting this for me, Miss Cradditch?”

Old Crabby grunted something as she took the card. Then she grunted again when Maisie grabbed it back and scrawled additional words.

Sending love to you and Li—

She had started to write “Lilibet,” the sweet nickname for Beth that they’d borrowed from Princess Elizabeth, but writing that felt too … well, Maisie wasn’t in the mood to be quite so nice to her family yet.

She wrote instead, “Sending love to you and Beth,” handed over the card, and sprinted for the truck.

It wasn’t comfortable, bouncing around on the hard seats in the back of the Bedford, listening to the engine whine and the gears grind as the driver urged the vehicle higher and higher into the Cairngorm Mountains, and Shandford Lodge was soon far behind them. They passed through pretty villages like Laurencekirk and Aboyne, and eventually reached Ballater, where they dropped off half of the lumberjill load, including Catherine and Anna, who tumbled out with hugs and promises to write.

It was certainly beautiful countryside, the road looping over steep and majestic hills, and through wide swathes of treeless wilderness. Soon, though, a thick fog rolled over the road, blocking the view.

They stopped for the driver to have a smoke, and so they could disappear behind a gorse bush to have a pee. As they climbed aboard again, the driver told them that it wasn’t so much fog as a low cloud on a high road, which crested hill after hill as it rose and fell. Either way, they spent the next part of the journey peering into a thick curtain of mist. The air grew colder, and Maisie was glad to have her heavy WTC-issue coat. She’d been sitting on it to cushion the bumps, but since a bruised bum was preferable to frostbite, she now wrapped the coat tightly around herself, and Dot did the same with hers, as they huddled together on the bench. Had they really swum in a loch only yesterday? Maisie shivered at the thought.

The truck gradually wove down from the mountains, to where the countryside was flatter, warmer, and sunnier, with the road passing through dense woodland shade at times, and at others giving them glances of the sparkling River Spey. They dropped Mairi, Mary, and Cynthia at Advie, near Grantown-on-Spey, which left only Maisie and Dot in the back, and at last, they reached Carrbridge and Maisie felt a rush of excitement. In a matter of minutes, she would be a real lumberjill in a real forest camp, and her real life would begin.

Beyond the last stone house in the village, there was a hand-painted sign pointing to a track going off to the right, which said simply NOFU. Maisie would have thought no more about it but for the appearance of two men walking out from that track and onto the main road, talking animatedly and paying no attention to the three-ton truck hurtling toward them.

The quick-thinking driver threw the wheel, and the Bedford lurched, missing the men, but slamming Dot and Maisie hard against each other. The driver swore loudly, and Maisie heard shouts from behind. She looked back, expecting to see raised fists and angry faces, but instead, the two men were waving enthusiastically and shouting something at the truck. Before Maisie could stop her, Dot was waving back.

“Dot, don’t!” Maisie grabbed her friend’s hand.

“Why not? They were only being friendly.” Dot retrieved her hand from under Maisie’s and started waving again. “See?”

Maisie looked back as one of the men—the darker-haired of the two—lifted one hand in the air, flourishing a lit cigarette, and bent low in a deep, if slightly unsteady, Jacobean bow.

Neither girl could suppress their laughter at this ridiculous gesture, even as they were again bumped together when the driver negotiated a tight turn up another track between high hedges. Back on the road, the blond man shoved against his still-bowing friend, knocking him off-balance, though somehow the dark-haired man managed not to fall. As they disappeared from view behind a hedge, the two of them were wrestling like little boys after school, apparently having already forgotten about the girls in the truck.

Something dawned on Maisie then. She knew the dark-haired man with the broad smile and the deep bow. She’d seen him before, she was sure. After the swerve, the men were already some distance away, so she hadn’t gotten a close look at his face. But his dark hair and his lopsided gait as he walked were triggering something in her mind. And that smile was somehow so familiar.

As they pulled up in front of two large log huts, set at right angles to each other with other smaller huts beyond, the puzzle piece slipped into place. The man looked exactly like the American chap—or had he been Canadian?—who had danced with her a few weeks ago in Brechin, the awful dancer, the one who had left her in the lurch. But what were the chances of it being him? And if it was, what the hell was he doing here?

The driver killed the engine, and Maisie and Dot clambered down, stretching their aching muscles and looking around for any sign of life.

Maisie dismissed the idea that she knew the man. It couldn’t be the same chap—that would be ridiculous. They were hours away from where she’d met him and the coincidence would be too great.

But what had that chap’s name been again? James, or Jack? Maisie tried to tell herself she couldn’t quite remember, all the while knowing that was a lie.

She knew his name. It had been John. John Lindsay.

Just then, a girl appeared, coming at a trot around the corner of the farthest hut. She looked to be only a year or two older than Dot, and she was tall, with a wide smile and a healthy tan, her brown hair loosely plaited into two thick braids. She was wearing WTC overalls, but also a brown leather jerkin, sleeveless and with wide pockets, out of which were hanging several leather straps.

Pulling the straps out of her pocket, she smiled and waved at them as she approached.

“Hello, everyone!” she called as if to a crowd, instead of only three people, and Maisie could now see that what she held was a horse’s bridle. “Come on, let’s find you somewhere to dump your things. You all look exhausted, and I bet none of you would refuse a cup of tea. No sugar, I’m afraid. We haven’t had any for a couple of weeks now.”

She picked up Dot’s suitcase and made for the hut on the left. “But we did get some honey on the sly from Mr. Macallan at the farm this morning, and that’s almost as good, isn’t it?”

She turned and grinned over her shoulder, clearly delighted to have found a way around the strict sugar-rationing rules. Dot followed along, apparently so mesmerized by the girl, she didn’t even object to the girl carrying her bag.

At the door of the hut, the girl turned, seeing only then that the driver had followed too.

“Sorry, love!” she said to him cheerfully. “You can’t come in here, since it’s our dormitory hut, but if you go into the mess hut through that door there, I’ll get this pair settled and come over to get a brew on. Is that all right?”

The driver nodded, and as he walked in the direction she had pointed, he pulled cigarettes and matches from his pocket and lit up.

Turning back, the girl said, “As I said, this hut is where we sleep, that one there is the mess hut and kitchen, and then at the back is the lavatory and shower block, or the Blue Lagoon, as we like to call it around here.”

Maisie and Dot laughed at that and the girl looked delighted.

“Oh, almost forgot! My name’s Nancy, and today, I’m your Auchterblair welcoming committee. On any normal day, though, I look after the horses.” She waggled the bridle at them. “Actually, only one horse now, since we lost Elsie.”

“Lost her?” cried Dot. “Oh no! How did she die?”

“Oh, no, she didn’t die. No, we lost her to the camp at Grantown. But we’ve still got Clyde. You’ll meet him in the morning, sweet old chap.” Nancy pulled open the door. “Clyde’s a big handsome Clydesdale—he’ll pull anything that’s too big to haul by hand, especially useful up on the hills, when the trucks can’t always get close.”

Maisie felt her mouth dry and her throat tighten. Why did it have to be a Clydesdale and not a donkey? The memory of her encounter with the rag-and-bone man’s massive beast, Charlie, was making her pulse race.

But no, she was not a child anymore. She was a lumberjill now, and she could handle being beside a horse without bursting into tears.

At least, she hoped she could.

“Do you two like horses then?” Nancy said as she waved them inside.

“Actually,” Maisie said as she passed Nancy, “I’m not much of a horsewoman. I’d rather stick to my ax and saw.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re scared of an old horse?” A strident voice came from the far end of the hut. “How silly!”

Looking around the gloomy room, Maisie saw a dozen or so neatly made beds lined up on either side, iron headboards against the walls. Two small windows let in only a little of the bright sunshine from outside. In the far corner, in the low light from a paraffin lamp, a woman was sitting in an upright chair at a table, shuffling several pieces of paper into a pile in front of her. As Maisie watched, the woman brought a rubber stamp down with two emphatic thumps—once on an inkpad and once on the top sheet of paper—and thrust the papers into a large envelope, winding the little string around the button with perfectly manicured fingernails to close it up. She was exquisitely made up, with perfect lipstick and primped blond hair neatly rolled, suggesting that she might not spend as much time with an ax and saw as Maisie and Dot had been. Maisie tucked her own cracked and crusty hands into her pockets and wondered what she should say in response.

Before she could decide, the woman stood up and consulted a typewritten sheet on a green metal clipboard before approaching Maisie and Dot.

“So, you’re my new recruits, are you?” she drawled, reaching out a hand, giving Maisie no option but to shake it, blisters or not. Closer up, Maisie could see that the woman was probably only in her midtwenties. “My name is Violet Dunlavy, and I’m the WTC officer in charge around here. So as long as you girls do exactly what is expected of you, we’ll all get along nicely. Isn’t that right, Nancy?”

Nancy was now leaning against the doorjamb, and Maisie got the distinct impression that she was trying not to roll her eyes.

“That’s right, Violet,” Nancy replied, her friendly tone sounding only a little forced, “we’re all one happy family here.” She walked up to the other end of the dormitory and set Dot’s suitcase next to a pile of linen at the foot of a bare bed.

After a moment, Violet continued, her cut-glass accent betraying barely a hint of Scots. “And you must be, um …” She ran a long nail down her paper.

“That’s Maisie McCall,” said Dot, peering at the list on the clipboard. “And I’m Dot, I mean, Dorothy Thompson.”

“Yes, here you are. Margaret and Dorothy.” Violet noticed what Dot was looking at and snapped the clipboard tight to her chest. “Well, your timing is perfect, because I’m filling out the work schedule for the coming week. Generally, we all pitch in together at Auchterblair. Some of us are specialists, like me as the team leader; then we have Agnes in the kitchen, and you’ve met Nancy, who sleeps in the stables,” Violet chuckled as she waved her pencil vaguely in Nancy’s direction. “I’m only joking about that, obviously, though sometimes I think she would, if I let her. You rather enjoy spending your life ankle-deep in muck, don’t you, Nancy?”

“At least it’s honest muck,” Nancy replied tartly as she disappeared through the door.

“Each to his own, I suppose,” muttered Violet as she began to scribble on her paper. After a moment, she looked up again, giving them a beatific, but not quite believable, smile. “Get acquainted with everyone this evening, and you’ll start work at dawn tomorrow. I’ll post the schedule shortly, but bear in mind that it’s for this week only, since next Monday, we’ll be joining the noh-foo chaps for something big.”

“Noh-foo?” asked Maisie. “What’s that?”

“Noh-foo. N. O. F. U.” Violet spelled it out with a sigh, and Maisie recalled the painted sign she had seen down on the road. “Canadian lumberjacks. They’ve a camp toward Carrbridge, and they call themselves the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit. But that’s such a bloody mouthful. Noh-Foo’s so much easier.”

“And do they—” began Maisie.

“Please!” snapped Violet. “You must stop interrupting me so I can inform you of your duties.”

Maisie did as she was told, though not willingly, as Violet pulled her fallen smile back onto her face and turned to Dot. “This week, Dorothy—”

“You can call me Dot if you—”

“This week, Dorothy,” Violet said, clearly determined to ignore Dot, “you will be helping Agnes, our cook. Breakfast preparation begins at four a.m., so don’t be late. And you, Margaret—”

“It’s Maisie, actually.”

“You, Margaret, will be—”

This woman’s manner was already riling Maisie, and seeing Dot shrink back from her sharp tone was more than Maisie would put up with.

“Violet,” Maisie said, being overly polite, “I think you might have misunderstood. Please call me Maisie, and please call her Dot.” Maisie couldn’t remember ever being so assertive before, but she knew she could not let this snooty woman win even such a petty argument. “Thank you so much.”

Violet stared at Maisie for a moment, her nose lifted as if to avoid a bad smell. “As you wish,” she said eventually, then cleared her throat as if what she was about to say would choke her. “Dot, you’ll be in the kitchen, as I said, and Maisie, you will be with Nancy in the stables. You’ll only stay with them this week, just until you can follow the camp routine. Then you’ll be out working with all the other girls in the woods. And Maisie, I do not want to see you wearing anything but your WTC uniform. Nancy is already on a daily warning about that hideous leather ensemble of hers, so please do not think you can copy her.”

Maisie cringed. She certainly did not like Violet. Not only was Violet being rude to them, she had assigned Maisie to work in the stables even after Maisie had said she was uncomfortable around horses. Well, she could always ask for a change.

“Violet, about the stable duty, would it be possible for me to switch—”

Maisie’s earlier assertiveness dried up under Violet’s glare, as if she were trying to decide if Maisie was daring to be insolent yet again.

“Stables first, trees later. That’s what it says on my schedule,” Violet trilled, her voice tight and brittle. “And at Auchterblair, we never argue with the official schedule.”

“But you only just wrote the—”

Violet dismissed Maisie’s comment with a wave of her hand, and then pointed her clipboard toward the bed where Dot’s case lay. “Pick any of the empty beds down there, and get yourselves unpacked. The rest of the girls will be back in about an hour or so, and dinner will be served at six on the dot.”

She immediately looked at Dot and let out a loud, horsey laugh. “On the dot! And you’re Dot! How funny! Oh, you know, I can be quite hilarious sometimes.”

Violet tucked her clipboard and the fat envelope under her arm and looked at them, her face stern again. “By the way, HQ would not be happy to know that there was any fraternizing going on between a lumberjill and a NOFU chap. And neither would I.” She frowned for a second longer, then her face brightened and she let out another horsey bray. “Especially if you were trying to fraternize with the particularly handsome chap with the dreamy brown eyes. Consider yourselves warned, ladies—he’s mine!”

With a strangely tinkling giggle at her own hilarity, Violet disappeared out of the door, leaving Maisie and Dot to stare at each other before bursting out laughing.

“Well, she’s not quite what I was expecting to find in a shabby wooden hut on the side of a hill.” Maisie said. “Perhaps all the Swiss finishing schools are closed for the duration. I’m sure she’s very efficient, but does she really have to be such a cow?”

“She’s as bossy as Phyllis,” replied Dot, “but without any of the charm.”

“And if we’re lucky, without the calisthenics too.”

Maisie followed Dot down the room to the black metal bedstead with the bare blue-ticking mattress where Nancy had dropped Dot’s suitcase. Beside it stood a wooden nightstand and small metal locker, also bare. Maisie glanced around, looking for another empty bed, but the nearest one was on the other side of the hut, two beds down. For a moment, Maisie was tempted to find Nancy or Violet to ask if there was any way that someone would swap, so that she and Dot could have beds side by side, as they had done from their first night in Hut C. But realizing that sounded childish, as if she were afraid of the dark, she carried her own case over to the other bed and lifted the pile of linen—two off-white sheets, one rather flat pillow, and the thinnest blanket that she had yet seen—onto the rough wooden nightstand.

Around the room, all the other pieces of furniture sported random selections of photographs of family and of movie stars, as well as fashion pages cut from magazines. Some colorful quilts and blankets hung over the ends of beds, and for a second, Maisie wished that she had brought from home the lovely patchwork quilt that Mother had made for her shortly before Beth was born. But carrying a quilt on the train to Brechin in midsummer would have been ridiculous, so it was still on her bed at home, or at least it should have been, assuming Beth hadn’t stolen it the second Maisie walked out of the door. Beth loved the quilt as much as Maisie did. They’d cuddled under it for years, telling each other stories on cold nights. At least, they had until Beth had turned into a whiny pain in the neck when Maisie was about thirteen.

Suddenly the yearning for Mother’s quilt, and for Beth’s silly stories, overwhelmed Maisie. She had felt so strong and so grown-up this morning, but now, the thought of the soft padded quilt, with shiny silk ribbons around its edge, made her want to crawl into bed—even this rickety bed—and pull her quilt up over her head.

But Nancy appeared through the door, and Maisie’s fleeting homesickness vanished.

“Has she finished with you then? And you’ve both found a bed? Good. Your driver’s already guzzling down his second cup of tea, so you’d best come quick or he’ll have drunk the whole pot.”

It turned out that despite Violet’s haughty demeanor, Nancy and the other women of Auchterblair were great fun to be with, and Maisie soon wondered why she’d been so worried about arriving at a new camp knowing no one. Of course, she was thankful to have Dot there with her, but it felt good to know that if she ever had to move camp again, she’d probably fit right into life there, too, without much worry.

However, she still didn’t like Violet, and had also decided to avoid Violet’s two cronies, Evelyn and Claire. That wasn’t difficult, though, since the three of them would rather have dyed their hair purple than spent time in the stables, and Violet had clearly arranged the schedule to make sure they never had to.

Maisie, on the other hand, had found that she was happy to help Nancy in the stables, mucking out, changing straw, mending and polishing the tack, and even brushing down the huge Clydesdale’s hide.

And Clyde the Clydesdale was vast.

“He’s bloody enormous!” she’d declared nervously when she’d entered the stables on her first Monday at camp.

“Gosh, I’d never noticed that,” Nancy had laughed, clapping Clyde’s shoulder. “But you don’t need to worry—he’s a big baby really. By the weekend, he’ll be eating out of your hand. Literally.”

Remembering her awful horse bite of years before, Maisie was not convinced, but sure enough, with Nancy’s guidance, she soon felt confident enough to let Clyde nibble carrots and apples from her palm. Nancy also showed Maisie how to lead Clyde by the reins—though he mostly led Maisie—up the hill to where the other girls were working on an area of larch forest. Since larch trees were so tall and straight, and the wood so durable, they were mostly used for telegraph poles, so once the lumberjills had cut a trunk to the right length with the cross-saw, they used Clyde to drag the eighteen-foot log to the collection point for the large trucks to pick up. As Maisie became confident in attaching Clyde’s harness and chain to each trunk, she was sure that she and the huge horse were already developing an understanding, or even a friendship.

It had been nice to get to know Nancy this week too. She loved pointing out interesting things about the trees, plants, and animals around them as they worked, all things that would have passed Maisie by otherwise.

Sitting under the stable lean-to on Saturday afternoon, polishing the mud off the harnesses, Maisie asked Nancy to tell her more about her life growing up on the Floors Castle estate, where her grandfather was head groom for the Duke of Roxburghe.

“But why on earth would you want to leave a real-life fairy-tale castle?” asked Maisie, only half joking.

“Fairy-tale castle? Hardly!” Nancy replied, “I’d always loved helping Grandpa with the horses, but as I grew older, the estate became quite … claustrophobic. So, when I heard the Timber Corps needed girls who could handle workhorses like Clyde, I signed up straightaway.”

“And will you tell me about your leather jerkin?” Maisie reached forward and rubbed the soft, supple leather between her fingers. “Not exactly standard issue.”

Nancy seemed quite pleased that Maisie had asked about it.

“It was my grandpa’s, actually. He wore this jacket most of his adult life. But when I told him I was leaving, he gave it to me. It’s far too big, of course, but he said that if I was going to work with horses like he did, I should wear his jerkin. He’s such an amazing horseman, I suppose it’s become a talisman for me. If I’m wearing it, Grandpa’s looking after me.”

“That’s lovely,” Maisie replied, just as a whistle blew. Three short bursts, the camp signal to call everyone to the yard in front of the huts. As Nancy and Maisie hurried to clear away the harnesses, Violet could be clearly heard shouting for people to “come along quickly, please. The post is here!”

Maisie heard Nancy muttering something under her breath. Maisie didn’t understand quite what Nancy had against Violet, nor what Violet had against Nancy, for that matter. Of course, Violet hadn’t been very kind to Maisie or Dot, either. While not being outwardly nasty, Violet had spent their first week making very certain that the newcomers knew their place in the group, and that was clearly, in Violet’s opinion, on the lowest rung. And she also made it clear that she believed Nancy sat barely any higher.

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