Vic grinned.
"This little 'un is going to shape fine, only for breaking her back nearly," she told me. "How've you been getting on, young Joan? Let's have a look at your shed. Yes, that's the style. This 'ere job will be part of your cowman's test, you know. Cleaning out shed, maximum 10 marks. Seventy-five per cent. marks you've got to get in the tests before you pass out of here and get a swanky post somewhere, and be a credit to your instructress, don't you forget it!"
I couldn't help laughing as we followed her up to the farmhouse.
"Instructress, indeed!" I exclaimed. "I was expecting some 'instruction,' and you never came! You never even showed me how to hold the spade."
Vic flashed upon me her most teasing grin.
"I did come," she said with a nod. "Only you weren't wanting any 'instruction,' I noticed, from little Me. Went away again, I did—hooked it. You were all right. Never even saw me. You and your landowner!"
Before I could ask what Vic meant by "my landowner" we were all in the big front kitchen, with its dresser, its tridarn (or three-decker oaken chest), its grandfather clock, and its long table set for seven.
This was the first time Elizabeth or I had sat down to dinner in a kitchen. Much we should have cared had it been in the scullery, the barn, or the hen-house! There is no appetite like that which comes from physical toil!
Glorious greed was a delicious sauce—if any sauce had been needed—to the plentiful and savoury farm-house meal that was provided for us of boiled bacon, potatoes, greens, butter, bread, buttermilk, fruit tart, and cheese.
At the risk of writing myself down a glutton—or of reading like an advertisement for somebody's cocoa—I must dwell on the taste of that loaf, that butter, those other wholesome and delicious things with their suggestion of building healthy bodies and reddening rosy cheeks—the food with which England should be fed.