Whisper on the Wind. Elizabeth Elgin

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      ‘Don’t agree with them trousers. You’re a married woman, and married women shouldn’t wear trousers.’

      ‘Breeches, Aunt Min, and there is a war on.’

      Slowly, ponderously, Kathleen Allen gazed around the room as if looking at it for the very last time; a room she would rather not remember, truth known. An over-furnished, over-decorated, overcrowded little room.

      Her eyes trailed the back of the sofa to the piano top and the photographs of her husband’s parents and Barney – Barnaby, her husband as a little boy, scowling into the camera. Barney with his bronze medal for ice-skating and Barney in khaki, grown fatter now, his toothbrush moustache tilting rakishly with the crooked, Clark Gable smile.

      He wouldn’t smile when he got her letter, she frowned, wondering why she should feel so guilty about what she had done. But it wasn’t so much what she had done, she supposed, but the way in which she had done it. Sneakily, really, it had had to be, because her husband condemned out of hand any woman who joined the armed forces. He always had.

      But surely Barney couldn’t object to the Land Army? Army. In that word the trouble lay. The Land Volunteers or the Farming Corps would have pacified him, but to call it the Land Army at once suggested a group of liberated women in breeches and bright green pullovers, swinging along in ranks of four, pitchforks at the ready.

      ‘And you’re still set on going, girl?’

      ‘Doesn’t seem I’ve left myself a lot of choice. I did volunteer.’

      ‘Yes, you did. And Barnaby won’t be pleased, but you know that, don’t you? I suppose you’ve told him?’

      ‘He knows.’ Well, he would when he got her letter, she amended silently. The trouble would start when she received his reply. Because trouble it would contain.

      It was unfair, really, that her husband should object to her doing her bit for the war effort, but Barney could, and what was more, he would. He would object loud and long in every letter he wrote, not caring at all that the Censor would read every word.

      She had written to her husband immediately the OHMS letter came; the letter that told her she had passed her medical examination and been accepted into the Women’s Land Army for the duration of hostilities. That official letter had also told her to report for service on Thursday 18 December, using the enclosed railway travel warrant, and that her uniform, which had already been posted to her in two parcels, would arrive within the course of the

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