The office of the Quartermaster Corps was filled with the clicking of machines, ringing phones, the murmur of serious voices, a sense of purpose. A secretary took my name and told me to sit and wait.

I must have smoothed my skirt fifty times before a young woman with a pageboy haircut approached and introduced herself. Her name was Dot and she was the daughter of my father’s workmate. She had a pointy chin and a wide smile and put her hand on my arm, and I hoped we would become friends. She took me to a row of typewriters where eight or nine women sat working, their backs pencil-straight and their eyes on their pages. There was the whir of fans and fingers flew. Dot introduced me to the oldest-looking woman, a Mrs Faber, who had a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles hanging around her neck on a thin gold chain. Mrs Faber said she would test my speed, and so we went into another room where there were not so many distractions. We walked past dozens of men in uniform, all wearing pinkish-beige tailored pants and jackets with epaulets. These, of course, were the American army officers, and even the way they spoke caught me by surprise. Their voices were loud, nasal; they pronounced their a’s and r’s but seemed to swallow their o’s and l’s. I was glad it was Mrs Faber rather than one of them testing me. Luckily she didn’t ask many questions about what I’d done or where I’d worked before, but she wanted to see my speed both taking dictation and typing directly from a handwritten page.

The typewriter she sat me in front of was large and well oiled, newer than Mrs Thompson’s, but as soon as I placed my fingers on the keyboard I found my rhythm. As I typed I thought about how our hands can be trusted to know the way, both with cows and with keys. These machines were not going to breathe their warm, grass-scented breath on me, but they still responded to my touch. After twenty minutes or so we were done. Mrs Faber took off her specs, folded them, and let them dangle against her flower-patterned bosom.

‘You’ll do just fine,’ she said. ‘And excellent spelling with the dictation. There aren’t many girls who make so few mistakes. Come with me and we’ll get you to sign some papers, put together a few training days and you’re set to begin.’

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