Mabel Esther Allan

[from inner flap dust jacket] It is 1939 and Prim, sixteen, is too young to join Britain's armed services. So she tacks a year to her age and volunteers for the Women's Land Army. She is sent to an agricultural college for training before going to work on a farm.

City-bred Prim has always thought of the country as a romantic place where cattle graze peacefully and new-born lambs frolic in the summer fields. In that first, bleak, cold winter of World War II, Prim and her new friends Jane and Hilary are given a foretaste of hardships to come. They tell themselves life on a farm can be no worse than life at the college, but they are in for some shocks as they struggle to bring in the all important harvest of 1940.

When Prim is eventually assigned to a farm in Shropshire, she is dismayed to find an instructor from the college living in the area, an instructor who had made Prim's life at school miserable because he thought her frivolous and totally without the makings of a Land Girl. But as they are thrown together, they begin to change their minds a little about each other.

In spite of the hard life and the dreary war outlook, Prim finds her heart lifting as she bottle feeds a tiny lamb, nestles her cheek against a cow's warm flank while she milks it, sees the comforting progression of the seasons over the English countryside...all this, for her, a strange enchantment.