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in half an hour. Our most desperate need is coin,” she said urgently, “to get the Home up and running and show what wonders we can achieve. If we can do this, I’m sure that in time, the new government will support us. I’m sending out begging letters to everyone I can think of. Can you help?”
    â€œOf course, of course!” I felt shamefully relieved to hear that was all she wanted. “I can type one hundred and twenty words a minute,” I boasted. My mother had insisted on it at the Balmoral typing school in Oxford Street. “When do we start?”
    â€œToday.” She moved a pile of files from the empty desk. “Let’s start by making a list of supplies. Nothing too taxing.”

- CHAPTER 2 -
    A nd so it began. For the next month, every morning after breakfast, wearing three pairs of socks, every sweater we could lay our hands on, sleeveless gloves, and long johns, Daisy and I dashed off to the barn as quickly as we could. We read textbooks, wrote to student midwives, went methodically through the telephone directory for possible donors, and typed begging letters. We wrapped parcels that, when the lane cleared, the postman would take on the first leg of their trip to India.
    We kept replies to our begging letters in two old Bath Oliver biscuit tins on Daisy’s desk, one labeled YES! and the other NO. After three weeks the yes letters didn’t even reach the ten-biscuit mark, but Daisy looked joyful as she showed them to me. A ten-bob note and a “Well done, Daisy,” from an aunt. A hard-earned fiver from an ex–India nurse, now retired with stomach problems to Brighton. The promise of twenty packets of swabs from a local chemist, and some aspirin. That sort of thing.
    The letters in the no tin, on my desk, all but burst with rage at our stupidity at continuing to help an ungrateful India.
    â€œHere’s a beauty,” I said to Daisy.
    â€œDear Miss Barker,”wrote Col. Dewsbury (retired) from Guildford. “(Am assuming you’re a Miss.)
    â€œIn receipt of yrs 20/10/47, am frankly flabbergasted that you still consider India has the right to bleed us dry anymore. I don’t know if you read the newspapers, but after enjoying the railways webuilt for them, the schools we set up, and a thousand and one other advantages we fought and died for, THEY HAVE KICKED US OUT .” The colonel had underlined this so emphatically, he’d gone clean through a sheet of Basildon Bond. “Two generations of my own family have given their lives to the country (Father in Innis­killins), Great-Grandfather caught in the riots up North, where Indians holed us up for two days without water and food. So sorry. NO, from now on, charity begins at home.”
    His stabbing signature left another bullet hole in the paper.
    â€œSo, I think we can safely assume the colonel won’t be putting us in his will.” I shut him firmly in the no tin. “Colonel, I can hear you shouting,”—I put my ear to the lid—“but you can’t come out.”
    â€œOh, Kit,” Daisy said, after series of schoolgirlish snorts, “don’t leave too soon.”
    I didn’t want to. I loved working with Daisy, and cocooned by the snow and immersed in this exciting project, I was secretly dreading that the roads would be cleared soon and I’d have no excuse for not going back to Saint Andrew’s, the nursing home where I’d gone to study midwifery after my general nursing training at Thomas’. I wasn’t frightened of the study, which I enjoyed, or the exams; I was resigned to the temporary claustrophobia of being back in an all-female dorm. The particular horse I had to get back on was the idea of delivering another child on my own, which made me feel sick and light-headed, not a good feeling for a pupil midwife.
    â€œYou can stay forever as far as I’m concerned.” Daisy patted my arm. “Your mother’s