LITMIR.BIZ

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He was glowering—maybe—the undamaged side of his forehead creased into a frown, but really, what expression could she ever hope to read there?

      The rumble of the truck faded into the morning chill, and Lorna’s father rubbed his hand over his face. For all his gruffness and bad temper with Nellie, he suddenly looked very weary. Had he been as shocked as Lorna?

      Her father walked to where the German waited. “I’m John Anderson and this is my farm,” he said, slower and louder than necessary. “I have two boys of my own away at the war, so you’ll work in their place.”

      The prisoner appeared to be listening politely, even if he couldn’t understand the words. He did, however, give Lorna’s father a curt nod.

      “You don’t need to bow to me, son, just do your work. Oh, and this is my daughter,” Lorna’s father said as he saw she was still standing behind him, “who should be in an exam room right now.”

      But Lorna barely heard what he said. The German was looking at her, and Lorna shivered. His eyes were steel gray, glinting silver, hard and cold and angry.

      Then his gaze fell to her school uniform and woolen stockings, her milk-and-muck-spattered shoes. The right, undamaged side of his face rose in a sneer.

      Or was it a smile?

      No, definitely a sneer.

      He looked up again at Lorna and gave her one of those curt nods. Then, without another look in her direction, he followed her father, leaving Lorna alone in the yard.

      The rooster crowed again, as if it were already time for—

      School! The bloody exam! Lorna was late and Mrs. Murray would kill her. As she grabbed her coat and schoolbag from beside the gate, she scraped her knuckles on the wall and had to suck at the graze to stop it bleeding as she took off running toward the shortcut past the church. The path would be muddy, but her shoes couldn’t get much filthier than they were already.

      As she ran, Lorna resolved to forget about the German for now, to forget that her dad had invited the enemy onto their farm, into their home. But still, there was the way the German had looked at the mess on her shoes, his burned face, his angry eyes, and his distorted smile—no, his sneer—and somehow that made her run all the faster.

       Two

       BIG NEWS! Need to talk later.

      Lorna waited while the ink dried on the scrap torn from the back of her exercise book, then slid it across the desk and under the page her best friend, Iris Robertson, was doodling her latest dress design on. The calculus paper hadn’t been anywhere near as hard as Lorna had expected, and she and Iris had both finished it with plenty of time to spare. Now she was bored.

      Iris glanced at the note and moved to slip it into her cardigan sleeve. Before it was hidden, however, long fingers reached out and took it from her hand, making Lorna and Iris both jump. Mrs. Murray stood over them, fanning herself with the note, then gave her head a quick shake of disapproval and returned to the front of the classroom.

      Lorna had another twenty minutes of staring out at the heavy cloud that seemed to smother the high classroom windows before Mrs. Murray called an end to the examination. The teacher squeezed between the tightly packed desks to collect the exam papers into two piles—calculus from the older students like Lorna, and algebra from the younger ones. It had been close to chaos when the two classes had merged after Mrs. Duffy had run off to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force the year before, but Mrs. Murray’s rod of iron had soon brought an almost military discipline to the room.

      As Mrs. Murray passed by Lorna’s desk, picking up the papers, she paused.

      “Would you join me in the hallway please, Lorna?” she said. “I need a quiet word with you.”

      Damn! It was only a note. It wasn’t like she’d been cheating.

      Lorna exchanged glances with Iris before reluctantly pushing back her chair and walking slowly to the front of the classroom. Esther Bell snorted loudly as Lorna passed her, but Lorna paid no attention. Esther got told off more than Lorna ever did, anyway, and it was because of people like Esther that Lorna was counting down the days until she graduated from school. Only then would she be spared the trial of seeing Esther each day.

      “Class! Get out your English notebooks and start on the assignment on the blackboard,” Mrs. Murray ordered as she opened her desk drawer and took out some papers. “We’ll break for lunch at noon, as usual. In the meantime, I do not, I repeat, do not want to hear one peep from in here.”

      She walked into the hallway, holding the door open for Lorna to follow.

      Lorna glanced back at Iris, but she was gazing at William Urquhart with that ridiculous look on her face.

      Lorna pulled the door closed behind her and faced her teacher. “Look, Mrs. Murray, I’m sorry about the note, but it’s not like I was—”

      “Oh, shush,” said Mrs. Murray, waving away Lorna’s defense with her hand. “This isn’t about the note, this is about you. Now, I’ve been thinking again about you applying to the university for next year.”

      Lorna wanted to groan. It would have been better for Mrs. Murray to scold her for the note passing than this torture. “Mrs. Murray, you know that my father—”

      “Yes, I know you’ve told me before that he’s not keen on you continuing your education after you get your school certificate in June, so perhaps I need to go and talk to him—”

      “No! Really, you don’t have to do that.” Lorna tried to calm her voice. “He needs me at Craigielaw, that’s all.”

      Mrs. Murray studied her for a moment.

      “Well, I’m not so sure,” replied Mrs. Murray. “You have too bright a mind to rot on a farm your whole life, and I’m sure he knows that. Remind me of your birthday, dear. April, isn’t it? That’s when you’ll legally become an adult. So you’ll have to find a way to make him understand that you’ll be responsible for your own choices after that. And who knows, perhaps your dad might just surprise you.

      “Now, as I’ve said before, I’d love to see you at the university, but if you won’t, I mean, if your father won’t agree to that, what about Mr. Dugdale’s Secretarial College?”

      She held out the papers in her hand to Lorna.

      “They offer all sorts of classes, like shorthand and typewriting, and I hear that Dugdale graduates are very highly regarded. You’d be able to go up to Edinburgh on the train each day, and the college is just a short walk from Waverley station.”

      The top sheet, with a fancy crest, was a letter thanking Mrs. Murray for her recent inquiry, and a printed brochure lay underneath.

      “It’s amazing what girls these days can do with good secretarial skills,” Mrs. Murray continued. “And secretaries have all sorts of travel opportunities, you know. Glasgow, Aberdeen, or even Birmingham.”

      Lorna tried not to sigh. Mrs. Murray made it sound like Birmingham was the most exotic place on earth, but Lorna knew it wasn’t even as far away as London, where Sandy, her other brother, worked in the War Office. And it certainly wasn’t anything like Paris or New York, or Cairo or Bombay, or any of the other places Lorna and Sandy had talked about traveling to. But right now, Lorna couldn’t think of going anywhere.

      She knew she was virtually an adult now, and she would have to make some decisions soon about what to do with her life, but she couldn’t even think about leaving her father alone at Craigielaw, at least not until the war was over and the boys came back. Then she might think about secretarial college. Maybe. But who could guess when the end might come? When the war was declared in September 1939, everyone had said it would all be over by Christmas. It was now 1945; six Christmases had come and gone

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