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In Another Time
Caroline Leech
A captivating World War II romance from the author of WAIT FOR ME, perfect for fans of CODE NAME VERITY and SALT TO THE SEA.It’s 1942, and Maisie McCall is in the Scottish Highlands doing her bit for the war effort in the Women’s Timber Corps.As Maisie works felling trees alongside the enigmatic John Lindsay, Maisie can’t help but feel like their friendship has the spark of something more to it. And yet every time she gets close to him, John pulls away. It’s not until Maisie rescues John from a terrible logging accident that he begins to open up to her about the truth of his past, and the pain he’s been hiding.Suddenly everything is more complicated than Maisie expected. And as she helps John to untangle his shattered history, she must decide if she’s willing to risk her heart to help heal his. But in a world devastated by war, love might be the only thing left that can begin to heal what’s broken.
First published in the USA by HarperTeen,
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. in 2018
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018
Published in this ebook edition in 2018
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
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London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright © Caroline Leech 2018
Cover © Harper Collins Children’s Books 2018
Cover design by Aurora Parlagreco
Cover art by RekhaArcangel/Arcangel (girl) and Rixipix/Getty Images (background)
Typography by Aurora Parlagreco
Caroline Leech asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008249151
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008249168
Version: 2018-07-24
To the lumberjills who served in the Women’s Timber Corps in the forests of Scotland 1942–1946
To Perryn, Jemma, Kirsty, and Rory
You are my everything
Epigraph (#uf4c16416-af20-5352-bd4f-fc18d5686157)
John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither,
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve had wi ane anither;
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.
from “John Anderson, My Jo”
ROBERT BURNS, 1759–1796
Contents
Cover (#u8a8b2637-57c4-589a-9d0a-f488962ba1c3)
Title Page (#udb36f93f-6591-545a-95ae-addb58824d6d)
Copyright (#u4454a963-298b-51b0-bc14-a64014871f23)
Dedication (#u9e0c2e18-807b-5b61-8699-f1dbe2113cf1)
Epigraph
Chapter One (#u17e2d82e-2212-5286-880a-931a97cf2015)
Chapter Two (#u9058635b-4554-5fda-961c-93d8c01e937a)
Chapter Three (#ud2aad6e9-65ef-59d0-bafd-9c8f8bac7b4f)
Chapter Four (#u720d456f-7349-5a40-8e36-131a93b2a325)
Chapter Five (#u30e25234-459f-5685-acb4-cc483f9ed118)
Chapter Six (#u4aefaec8-6c62-5c10-b5b0-8072d5769d4d)
Chapter Seven (#uabe7b686-ae77-5518-ab98-316c01b82655)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Books by Caroline Leech
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
(#ulink_5f0fab60-98d0-5ef1-8e43-4e443a6bc597)
WOMEN’S TIMBER CORPS TRAINING CENTER,
SHANDFORD LODGE, BRECHIN, ANGUS
FRIDAY, AUGUST 14
, 1942
Maisie’s shoulders burned, her palms were torn, and her ax handle was smeared with blister pus and blood. Again.
The woods were airless today, and it made the work even harder than usual. As a bead of sweat ran down from Maisie’s hair toward her eye, she stopped to wipe her forehead with the sleeve of her blouse, knowing she’d probably just added yet another muddy streak to those already across her face. Maisie wondered how on earth she’d be able to get herself looking presentable enough to go to a dance by seven o’clock. She’d only be dancing with her friends, but still, she didn’t want it to look like she’d spent the week up to her knees in dirt and wood chippings. Which, of course, she had.
Perhaps it was just as well there was no chance that some handsome chap would ask her to dance. She would bet a week’s wages—all thirty-seven shillings of it—that there were none of them left in Brechin these days, not since every man aged between eighteen and forty had been called up to the war.
Maisie stood and stretched out her back, pretending to study the tree she was attempting to chop down. When would this constant ache disappear? Even after two weeks of learning how to fell, split, saw, and sned, she still woke up each morning feeling like she’d gone ten rounds in the ring with a heavyweight champion. She had blisters on her hands from the tools—four-and-a-half-pound axes, six-pound axes, crosscut saws, hauling chains, and cant hooks—and blisters on her feet from her work boots. There were even blisters between her thighs where the rough material of her uniform chafed as she worked.
“I bet the WAAF and ATS recruits don’t hurt this badly all through their training,” she moaned to her friend Dot, who was working two trees over. “I still think the recruitment officer lied to me. She made it sound like the Women’s Timber Corps would be a walk in the park.”
“Or perhaps a walk”—Dot flailed her ax again toward the foot of her own tree—“in the forest.”
“Very funny,” Maisie replied, then blew gingerly onto her stinging fingers. “Bloody hell, that hurts!” She pulled out her once-white handkerchief and dabbed at her hands, hoping to feel some comfort from the soft, cool cotton, and watched Dot swing the ax a couple more times. Again and again Dot’s blade seemed to bounce off the wood as if it were made of India rubber, exposing no more of the creamy flesh under the brown bark than had been visible five minutes before.
Maisie glanced behind her to see if their instructor, Mr. McRobbie, was watching, but he was talking to another recruit farther up the line of trees, so she let her ax-head rest on the ground. She had been issued this six-pound ax when training began, but right now, it felt like a forty-pound sledgehammer. She reached into her pocket and withdrew her whetstone, the smooth flat stone she used to set her blade. Mr. McRobbie had drummed into them the importance of having a whetstone with them at all times, to keep the cutting edge sharp and clean, but Maisie had discovered another use for it. She laid the stone, warm from her body heat, onto the blisters of her hands one by one, sighing as the discomfort was eased, if only for a few seconds.
Still Dot was hacking away at the tree.
Maisie sighed. “Do you want me to finish that off for you? We’ve got a dance to go to tonight, remember, and the way you’re going, you’ll still be slapping at it at midnight.”
“Uggghhh,” grunted Dot with one more swipe. “What am I doing wrong? I feel like I’m doing it the way he showed us, and I’ve got blisters a mile deep to prove it, but I don’t ever make any difference at all! Bloody thing!”
Dot kicked the toe of her boot at the trunk and there was an ominous creaking sound, as if the tree were about to topple. Dot recoiled and jumped clear, but the tree stayed where it was.
Maisie burst out laughing. “Perhaps you should kick the tree into submission.”
“Oh, get lost!” Dot retorted, but then she began to laugh too. “I only want to find one thing on this training course that I can actually do properly, because cutting down trees certainly isn’t it.”
Maisie felt sorry for Dot. She was shorter and slighter than Maisie, though certainly not the smallest of the women in their group, yet Dot couldn’t seem to get the hang of any of the techniques Mr. McRobbie had shown them. After only two weeks, Maisie already felt quite competent at using the tools they had been given so far, but Dot was not progressing at all. That fact was not only making Dot anxious, it was starting to worry Maisie too. They were only two weeks into their six-week training course, but it had been made clear that anyone could be sent home at any time for failing to make the grade. She couldn’t bear it if her new friend were thrown off the course. Who would Maisie have to talk with and work beside then?
The other women doing the Timber Corps training were all very nice, but that was the problem—they were all women, in their twenties and thirties. Only Dot was close to Maisie in age, and even then, Dot was already nineteen, almost two years older than Maisie. But it was comforting to have a friend of roughly her own age, someone who treated her like a teammate rather than a child.
Maisie had certainly felt like an adult last month when she’d walked into the recruiting office in Glasgow and told the sergeant behind the desk that she wanted to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, or even the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She was all ready to argue with him that since she was a grown woman taking control of her life, she didn’t need to finish her final year at school because it was about time she did her bit for the war effort.
