Mr Johnson took the paper back from Roz and read the advert again. ‘Says here you’ll get all the training you need, and that working on the land is the best job of all.’

‘I might meet a farmer,’ said Mabel wistfully, ‘with lots of land and money, and he might ask me to marry him and I can live in a beautiful country cottage and …’

‘Blimey,’ chuckled Mr Johnson, ‘someone’s certainly looking at the bigger picture.’

‘I’d love to be a farmer’s wife,’ said Mabel. ‘I’d ride my horse to town, and church, and the market.’

‘Are you marrying a farmer or a horse?’ said Mr Johnson.

‘Both!’ giggled Mabel.

‘How do we apply?’ Roz asked. ‘I bet there’ll be loads of applicants, so the quicker we get ours in the better.’

Mr Johnson gestured with his pipe at an address underneath the article. ‘Tells you all you need to know right there.’

Mrs Johnson took a pair of scissors and handed them to her husband. ‘Cut it out for them, Donald.’

Checking there was nothing worth reading on the other side of the page, he did as she asked then handed the clipping to Roz. ‘There you go!’

Roz looked at Mabel. ‘This could be just what the doctor ordered. I’ll be able to tell Bill and Alan where I’m going should Felix get in touch, and of course I’ll tell Mr Garmin in the Liver Building, just in case.’

‘We won’t have time to go before work, but we can nip over straight after,’ said Mabel. ‘Poor Mr Woo, it seems nobody wants to work in a laundry any more.’

When the two girls finished work, they hurried down to the recruitment office in the city centre. Fearing they may be too late, they were both relieved to find that they were just in the nick of time, although they were dumbfounded to hear that to be a land girl you had to be eighteen. When the lady in charge of recruitment told them this fact, both girls had nodded mutely when asked if they were of the appropriate age. They had expected to be called out, told to go home and wait until they were old enough, and were therefore surprised and delighted when the woman continued without hesitation. It seemed the only problem would come with Roz getting a certificate to confirm she was fit on medical grounds. Once she’d explained that she had come to Britain on the Kindertransport and had no assigned doctor, the recruiting officer said that it could be sorted easily and that they would make an appointment with one of the army doctors.

Mabel turned to Roz as they left the office. ‘I can’t believe what we’ve just done!’ she said in an excited whisper. ‘Do you really think she believed we were eighteen?’