Prue, Stella, and Ag have come to the farm as land girls from very different segments of British society. Prue, an apprentice hairdresser from a working-class neighborhood in Manchester, is always experimenting with new makeup and trendy clothes, and she finds the wartime restrictions on the latter a heady challenge. The shortage of eligible males is another challenge, but Prue enjoys solving that problem; she is always on the lookout for potential short-term boyfriends. In fact her unfazed enjoyment of their physical charms, which she relates matter-of-factly to her friends, both shocks the other girls and forces them to reassess their own idealized fantasies of romantic love.

Ag is a shy, intellectual girl whose studies at Cambridge were interrupted by the war. Her first challenge is to avoid irritating the other girls with her "book knowledge," which may inadvertently come across as an air...