“Land Girls?”
“It’s what they call the women who’ve been drafted in to work on farms in place of the men who’ve gone off to fight. They’re not girls, not really—well, a few of them are quite young, I suppose, but some of them are old enough to be grandmothers.” He laid the dungarees down on my bed. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m still here, not in uniform?”
I shook my head. It should have occurred to me, but it hadn’t—that a man of his age would be required to fight.
“It’s because food production is so vital to our ability to defeat the enemy. They think I’m of more use here than chasing Hitler.”
“Well, I’m looking forward to helping you.” I was glad to think that what I’d be doing was something essential to the war effort. I smiled at the thought of wearing dungarees. I’d never worn trousers. I wondered what else was in the sack. It would be strange having different sets of clothes to choose from. I hadn’t had to make such choices for years.
“Oh—I brought this back, too.” He dug in the sack and produced my chemise, which had been washed and mended.
“Thank you.” I wondered who had sewn the fine, almost invisible stitches—and how he had explained who the chemise belonged to. But before I could ask, he said: “I’ve had to tell people there’s someone living here. One of the fishermen from the village round the bay saw the smoke from the stove last night. He came to find me—thought there might have been an intruder. I told him that you were my cousin Alice from Ireland.”
My eyes widened.
“People are terrible gossips around here,” he went on. “I thought it would be easier if I said you were a member of the family. I described you as my father’s cousin’s daughter, who was living and working in a London hospital that was destroyed in a bombing raid. I said you were wearing this—hospital issue—when the bomb fell.” He laid the chemise on my makeshift bed, next to the dungarees. “You’ll remember that, won’t you?”
“Er, yes. Your father’s cousin’s daughter . . .” I raked my tufty hair, filled with panic at the thought of putting on an act. And ashamed that the lies I was going to have to tell were the result of my own selfish decision to cast off the past. I ought to have realized that this cover story he’d come up with was unexpectedly elaborate, that he had gone to extraordinary lengths to help me—and that there had to be an ulterior motive. But I was so overwhelmed by the speed at which my life was changing I didn’t question it.
“If you get into conversation with anyone, you’d better refer to me as Cousin Jack.” He drew in a breath. “One other thing, I need to know your surname. You’ll need an identity card. Everyone has one. You have to carry it with you at all times.”
I hesitated, wondering fleetingly if I should make something up. Perhaps it would be easier to play the role he had cast me in if I went under a different name. But that felt dishonest. Jack had done so much for me. I felt I owed him the truth. “It’s McBride.”
He took a pencil and notebook from the pocket of his shirt and scribbled it down. “And your date of birth?”
“The twenty-third of January 1913.”
He glanced up from writing, eyebrows raised. “You’re thirty?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look a day over twenty-one.” He grunted a laugh. “They should patent the religious life as an elixir of youth. What age were you when you became a nun?”
“I was eighteen when I entered the convent. Twenty when I took my perpetual vows.”
“How long were you out in Africa?”
“Nine years. I went to Belgium first, to the order’s sister convent in Brussels. I studied for eight months at the Institute of Tropical Medicine there. That was my passport to Africa—to what I longed to do.”
An image flashed into my mind of my nine-year-old self in a classroom at St. Brigid’s school in Dublin. I was listening intently to a nun reading aloud from a book with a cover of red and gold. It was the story of Mary Moffat, whose nursing skills saved the life of the explorer David Livingstone when he was savaged by a lion. She married him and spent her life teaching native children and ministering to the sick. That was the beginning of my fascination with Africa.
Jack was writing in his notebook again. “Is that where you learnt French,” he said, “in Belgium?”
“I learnt it at school, but I wasn’t very good. It came more easily living among people who spoke it all the time.”