BOOK I
One
IWarmsley Heath consists of a golf course, two hotels, some very expensive modern villas¹ givingon to the golf course, a row of what were, before the war, luxury shops, and a railway station.
Emerging from the railway station, a main road roars its way to London on your left—to yourright a small path across a field is signpostedFootpath to Warmsley Vale.
Warmsley Vale, tucked away amongst wooded hills, is as unlike Warmsley Heath as well canbe. It is in essence a microscopic² old-fashioned market town now degenerated³ into a village. It hasa main street of Georgian houses, several pubs, a few unfashionable shops and a general air ofbeing a hundred and fifty instead of twenty-eight miles from London.
Its occupants one and all unite in despising the mushroom growth of Warmsley Heath.
On the outskirts⁴ are some charming houses with pleasant old-world gardens. It was to one ofthese houses, the White House, that Lynn Marchmont returned in the early spring of 1946 whenshe was demobbed from the Wrens⁵.
On her third morning she looked out of her bedroom window, across the untidy lawn to theelms in the meadow beyond, and sniffed⁶ the air happily. It was a gentle grey morning with a smellof soft wet earth. The kind of smell that she had been missing for the past two years and a half.
Wonderful to be home again, wonderful to be here in her own little bedroom which she hadthought of so often and so nostalgically whilst she had been overseas. Wonderful to be out ofuniform, to be able to get into a tweed skirt and a jumper—even if the moths⁷ had been rather tooindustrious during the war years!
It was good to be out of the Wrens and a free woman again, although she had really enjoyed heroverseas service very much. The work had been reasonably interesting, there had been parties,plenty of fun, but there had also been the irksomeness of routine and the feeling of being herdedtogether with her companions which had sometimes made her feel

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