"Dear old giddy London!"
"Bit of a change to Careg Camp, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is," I admitted, and in the breezy laughter my voice was drowned, also my heartfelt sigh.
For a sudden wave of regret swept over the whole of my tired being. I wondered what had possessed me to leave London. It was going to be awful! Why had I been so mad as to fill up those forms which that girl had given me in Trafalgar Square, and to make those inquiries, and to attend that Selection Committee and that Medical Board?
Why had I let Elizabeth—who was looking gloomy enough on her side of the table—persuade me to take this silly step? Why on earth did I join the Land Army for twelve months, agreeing to go wherever I was sent? Here they'd sent us into the wilds of the country—hundreds of miles away from every soul we knew, into this bare barn of a place and this mob of strange girls!
There! Now one of them who'd finished tea sprang up—sprang as if it were the beginning instead of the end of a working day—went to the piano at the other end of the hall, and began to rattle out gay music; and then two others were jumping up, too, taking each other by the hands in a clear space of the room and swinging into a two-step—dancing! After they'd been working on a farm-course all day!
They were all so bursting with "go" and chattering spirits that I felt I could never cope with them. Never should I make friends! Never should I attain to anything they could do! Never accustom myself to the strangeness of all this!
Here I was, a fish out of water. Even if I were miserable in London, it's better to be wretched in a place that you're used to, and where you're not expected to make any unwonted efforts, or to be bothered by fresh people. Yes! Would to goodness I'd stuck it in London, instead of rushing out of that frying-pan into this fire.
Absolutely "out of it all" and miserable, I expect my thoughts showed in my face as I sat there. For a bright-eyed girl opposite, with riotous red hair and a rounded throat starred with freckles, leaned across, smiled, and remarked in the deep, soft contralto of Southern Wales:
"Sure to feel strange at first! Longing for home. I was the first ten days. Oh, I would have bought myself out and packed up. I would, indeed——" she paused, and turned to the girl sitting beside me. "But they won't want to get back to town after they've been here a bit, will they, Vic?"