“Morag said you walked the last ten miles to Windyedge from the rail station!” Louisa said.

“I like walking.” It seemed a long time since I’d walked anywhere, really walked. “I like walking more than driving. It gives you time to think. My family walked all over Scotland when I was wee, following the work. It’s hard with the war on. The young people have all gone for soldiers or are in factories, and most of us hate it—so many flipping rules and regulations, and the same routines day after day, and having to kill. My brother hates it. I’m lucky at Windyedge… except when the planes go down. It’s like raising pet lambs, you give them daft names and watch them grow, and then when you send them to the butcher, you wish you hadn’t bothered.”

Louisa sighed. “Yes, it’s awful. It’s awful.”

“At the Limehouse I’ve been under one roof, the same roof, for longer than I’ve ever stayed in one place ever,” I confessed. “Ten times as long. Fifty. I don’t know.”

Louisa was quiet for a moment, and then launched one of her familiar well-aimed torpedoes at me. “That old man was quite rude to you when you were having your sandwich in the pub the other day, I thought.”

“They’re always like that to Traveller folk, unless we’re digging their garden or mending their pots,” I told her. “And of course Morag blethered about me to the whole village, so now everybody knows.”

“But her parents weren’t so rude,” Louisa said. “They were just… a bit like Nancy. They expected one thing, but they also knew you were the driver for RAF Windyedge and Phyllis’s friend, and they had to—open up their heads a bit to take it in. I suppose I do, too.”

I was surprised to realize I knew just what she meant.

“That is how I feel thinking about Jamaica!” I exclaimed. “It seems a fairy tale, not a place where ordinary people live and buy stamps and make whooping-cough mixture and burn the cooking when they’re weary. I wish I could see it.”

“Well, you say you are a Traveller—it’s a good long journey!”

She made me laugh.

“You are so brave to have told everyone about yourself,” Louisa murmured. “You knew the trouble it would make you.”

“I couldn’t hide forever,” I said. “But you can’t ever hide.”

“No, but in Scotland I’m just one. People are often more curious than horrid if there’s just one of you. The villagers stare at me, but they’re not nasty.”

I laughed again, more bitterly. “Would you listen to the pair of us—as if it’s easier or harder for one or the other! It’s different, but mostly it’s just hard.”