I felt a bit like that now. Only the bus shelter, the telephone kiosk, and a small postbox sunk in a stone wall showed it was the twentieth century. All around were brown winter fields dotted with sheep, a brown hillside wreathed in low clouds, and unhappy blackthorns stooped by sea wind. There weren’t even any signposts. They’d all been taken down to confuse the Germans if they invaded. Smoke rose from the invisible village down the lane, almost a smell of tobacco, because they were burning peat, not coal—just as they’d done for thousands of years. Beyond the smoke stretched the sea, the cold North Sea.

But Mrs. Campbell had said there was an aerodrome nearby, for a Royal Air Force bomber squadron. The airmen came to her pub. Perhaps I’d see some of them there, young British men returning from combat over the North Sea.

The longing I felt when I watched an air battle swelled up in my throat again until it was drowning me. What in the world was I going to do here, or learn to do here, to help win the war? Looking after Jane Warner would keep me from starving, but it wasn’t going to lead to anything else, was it?

My chest grew tight with the same kind of panic I’d felt in the green strangeness of the Jamaica bush.

But I couldn’t turn around and run screeching home this time.

Neither one of us could.

Volunteer Ellen McEwen:

There’s always someone telling you to move on if you’re a Traveller. There’s always someone calling you dirty or sly, or slamming a door in your face. Filthy sleekit tinker. That’s what I live with, and not just me, but all my family too. Then the war came along and gave me a chance to be someone different.

It wasn’t that folk changed the way they felt about us, mind. It wasn’t some la-di-da virtuous “fighting a common enemy” rubbish. It was just that once I was in uniform, folk couldn’t tell where I’d come from.

The war began when I was eighteen, and my twin brother and I joined up at the same time early in 1940. Euan went for a soldier and was sent to France, but a lass like me wasn’t going to have to shoot at people. I became a driver for the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. I was proud to do it, and I had steady wages I could share with my mam and dad if they told me a post office to send it to.