One Saturday evening one of our Group Leaders brought in two girls who wanted to join the Land Army that very night, saying that they could give no references as to their character. They were art students, and they looked very superior and refined. When I tried to find the reason for all this hurry and mystery, the Group Leader said:
‘May I tell Miss Olivier?’
They said that she might.
She then told me that one these girls had been going to be married on the following Monday, but that her engagement had suddenly been broken off. She had therefore fled from home, and she now wished to bury herself in the heart of the country.
I still maintained that I could not enrol her till Monday, and I told her to come to me alone that morning. When she came I said to her:
‘Tell me what happened about your engagement.’
She answered: ‘Well you see, I got mixed up with a gang of the greatest jewel thieves in Europe.’
Clutching at my few poor treasures I said:
‘Are you a jewel thief?’
She declared that she was not; and then she told me that she had made friends with the most charming young man whom she had introduced to her Amateur Dramatic Society at Blackheath. He had acted there in various plays, and she had taken him about with her to stay with several of her friends. After a time, it transpired that he was robbing them right and left, and, worst of all, he had made his largest scoop in the house of the parents of the young woman he was going to marry. They naturally suspected her of being an accomplice of the burglar, and insisted on the engagement being broken off at the last moment.
Of course I saw that this cock-and-bull story could not possibly be true. It was obvious that this pretty young art student had quite another reason for wishing to get out of London, though I could not guess what it was. As she refused to give the names of anyone to whom we could refer for her character, it was impossible to enrol her in the Land Army; but I passed on her story, as she had told it to me, to a farmer near Westbury, who had asked for a couple of girls for seasonal weeding. He said that he would take the risk of employing her and her friend, as he had no jewels worth stealing; so he engaged them both, and they worked for him quite satisfactorily for some months before they disappeared once more into the unknown from whence they had come.
Chapter Sixteen
REVENANTS OF THE PLAIN
In a paper game, we were once asked to write down what we thought to-day to be the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ and one of my selections was ‘Stonehenge with the twenty miles round it’ I still cannot think of anything more wondrous. Perhaps the word ‘miles’ is too feeble and inadequate, for Salisbury Plain is an Infinity lying in an Eternity. The earth possesses vaster distances; but none can be more utterly endless: and on that Plain the monuments of the past are so ancient that they seem to have become part of nature herself. They belong as truly to the landscape as do the molehills thrown up last night.
Speaking geographically, Salisbury Plain embraces all the high land between the Oxfordshire Downs and the Isles of Purbeck and of Portland on the Dorset coast; but, in common parlance, it generally signifies the twenty miles or so of undulating uplands which lie between Salisbury and Devizes. Stonehenge stands almost in the middle of this district; and when Pepys wrote his diary in the seventeenth century, it appears to have been divided from Salisbury by ‘ some great hills even to fright us’, though I know not where those hills can be to-day. Perhaps we are less easily frightened than the urban Pepys. This plain is now to a great extent a military training ground, and many a grumble is heard about the soldiers, and the way in which they are spoiling the countryside. Yet the plain is far greater than any army; and as one drives or rides over the seemingly level miles, passing, on the way, camps pitched on the turf, or regiments marching on the road, one looks back a minute later, to find that camp and regiment have vanished, leaving the Plain as serenely empty as before. For in those great spaces, the undulations are dwarfed into invisibility, although they are big enough to swallow an army on the march or a city of tents.
So Salisbury Plain remains the same great silent immensity, in spite of the many thousand men who train there every year. The plovers still turn and topple over it, their soft high-pitched voices blowing about in the sky; and the tiny larks still run swiftly up and down their
