Right now it’s harvest time, always a busy few weeks for Sarge and me. Still, despite the hard graft it’s my favourite part of the year. After months of living off oatmeal and boiled water with a bit of meat every now and then the thought of fresh vegetables makes my mouth water. For weeks I’ve been dreaming about the crunchy orange carrots with their parsley-like stems that I’ll pull from the earth, their sweet smell filling my nostrils as I shake the soil from them and place them in my basket. The green peas that I’ll pop out of their pods with the back of my thumb, and the sharp white onions that smell so good when Sarge roasts them round a saddle of rabbit. I feel hungry just thinking about it, though Sarge says only some of the produce will be for the pot. The rest will be sold and the money will see us through the winter.

Today was the start, and we spent hours digging up potatoes and carrots and picking green beans. Sarge put me on to scrubbing the potatoes and bagging them up. It was a dull job and I told him I’d rather dig up the rest of the vegetables but he told me that part of being a good soldier is learning to put up with boredom. ‘War’s not always about action,’ he told me. ‘It’s about standing in the scalding heat for hours on end, repeating the same task over and over again, scrubbing your boots until you can see your face in them. Once you can cope with boredom then you’re ready to fight.’

It’s annoying that Sarge has kept me away from soldiering these last few months. Instead of heading up the crag together or into the woods rabbiting, he’s declared that I need to be in the house more, to help with the cooking and cleaning and gardening, make sure the stove’s got enough wood and the bog’s slopped out. I don’t mind doing all that but I’d much prefer to be out hunting with Sarge. He goes into the woods alone now and he stays out much longer too. One time he came back with blood all over his face and I was freting fretting he was injured or something. But it wasn’t his blood, it was the blood of the rabbits he was carrying under his arm. It wasn’t like Sarge to make such a mess. He always makes a clean kill and he’s proud of that fact. I wanted to ask him how he got the blood on his face but he had that look, the one that comes over him when he hears the voices, so I just stayed quiet and set about skinning the rabbits.

Being stuck with the chores made me feel like I’d done something wrong, that I wasn’t cut out to be Soldier Number 1 after all, but when Sarge said that thing today, that boredom is part of being a soldier, I understood what he’d been doing all these months. I’ve still been in training, I just hadn’t realized it. So now I feel better. It doesn’t matter that I’m bagging spuds rather than doing target practice, Sarge still believes in me and he has a plan. And that, for me, can only be good news.