Millie and Sam, out for a delightful Sunday afternoon hike, when disaster struck. Or rather, what struck was Terrance the bull, hyped up on the indignity of having to watch some of his charges being serviced by a specially hired in stud bull. Millie was rhapsodising about an off-pink peony and thus she did not notice for at least five seconds that her brave and noble one day fiancé to be was legging it sharpish down the track.

As Terrance drew breath for a mighty bellow he instead gagged on the mixed haze of Sam’s eau de cologne and Millie’s fourteen different perfumes. Millie was an eighteen-inch heel girl and this had built up an impressive lower body strength that allowed her to soar like a hot air balloon shedding its ballast and find safety in the lower limbs of a chestnut tree. There was no sign of Sam.

The dickhead had left her.

After six hours or so, Terrence was no longer such a hyper bullock, and he bull slunk away, surely sending that Millie’s rage had her on the verge of dropping from the tree and snapping his neck with a squeeze of her muscular thighs. The same fate was destined for Ben the farmer, but he was one of those ridiculous sorts of chap who is so open and charming. Through profuse apologies he explained that he had been busy, setting the bones in both of Sam’s broken legs, and then single handedly carrying the poor fellow across his broad back up the stairs to nestle him in Ben’s own feather bed.

Guilt assailed Millie. Her brave soldier, injured as he fled to her rescue. She ran to him. She soothed him till he slipped into a gentle slumber. She tucked the covers around his gently heaving chest then crept from the room.

Guilt had also assailed Ben the farmer. Those bloody tanks, his father’s obsession, a mix of British and American second world war era field tanks.

Millie’s train of thought derailed on the cold hard buffers of reality. From Sam’s coat she took his tank spotting diary and leafed through it to the most recent pages. Sam was a die-hard Tankie. He made meticulous notes of every tank he ever saw, right down to the exact date and time of the sighting.

He had been looking at bloody tanks for three hours while she had been stuck in the tree. He hadn’t broken his leg rushing to save her. He had slipped from a sodding tank.

Millie ended things properly with Sam. She also took the time to explain to him that Ben the Farmer was a single chap, no wife or girlfriend, and the farm was a quiet place. That low sound he could hear from downstairs? This place was so peaceful what he was hearing was Ben the Farmer humming as he waited for the toaster. There would be nary a sound to disturb Sam’s bedridden convalescence.

Millie was a little irked that Ben the farmer had given up his biggest and softest bed to Sam, but actually, in hindsight, the tiny little bed in the room next door with its creaky frame and loose headboard, they were a winner.