War Classics (6 page)

Then there were the study circles – quite a bit worse than the talks as nobody knew what to say, and so we gradually drifted on to social problems, where most of us had views. The Rescue Lady and the VAD were, of course, poles apart. For myself, the one time I spoke was when I suggested, as became me, that Education was the one remedy for the housing problem in the slums. It came like a thunderclap in the assembly and produced an amazed silence. Presently, however, the Irish naval lady gave out that it was the key to the situation, and thereafter the debate languished.

In the afternoons we went by bus or train to inspect canteens and camps. In the terrific scramble to get on buses, I remember with gratitude an ex-joiner of Herculean frame who always shot me aboard first of the throng in the midst of the astonished bus. And my arm being rather bad in those days, I remember too the busy waitresses who yet spared a minute to cut up my food, and the fellow travellers – particularly fat charwomen and rather grimy men – who took such scrupulous care not to jog my sling.

There were lighter moments of course, as when I had a heated skirmish with my tailor, who summoned two of his assistants to aid him, over the length of my uniform skirt. I won, and it remained one ninth of an inch shorter than regulation. Then there was the Department which suddenly discovered I was urgently asked for in France and that my French military permit was forthcoming in record time. Unfortunately, however, it had counted without the Voluntary Ladies’ Department. Great war-workers these! Hours of eleven until twelve and two until four, Saturdays eleven until one. It was their duty to get our passports – gradually, of course. They had already taken three months considering the situation and were quite grieved that I wanted it now, or sooner, if possible. ‘Ah, yes,’ said the French Consul, as he added his visé, ‘Zat is ze office where zey do nozzing right nevaire! Zeze ladies!’ Being a woman myself I quite agreed with him that women never work as well as men. I’ve always known they were not half so pleasant to work for.

Still, the last day did come. My uniform was delivered, and with its tabs and cuffs and VAD cap it looked smart beyond words when I put it on. My fourteen photographs arrived to placate the French Government. I had been vaccinated and inoculated (twice). I was armed with the English passport and with the French military
permis rouge
. My ticket was in my hand and by the kindness of the Clerk at Waterloo Station to a somewhat lone, lorn female, with her heart in her mouth, I actually had a berth on the steamer for France.

We were a noisy crowd at the Station when the iron gates of the platform swung to between us and England. Americans with mountains of luggage, just like peacetime, were crossing to Paris. It was my first taste of Americans and I had yet to learn that it is their natural habit to shove and push. Some Scottish women next door were going to Servia, some English wives to Paris.
2
But in the long train I seemed to be the only British girl in uniform.

The crowds were worse at Southampton – much. We were penned into a little fold for four solid hours, while every document we possessed was examined by sleuth dogs. It was sheer luck I had my Food Card with me. I reflected I had not my Birth Certificate, if it occurred to them to ask for that. My luggage had long since been wrested from me. ‘No return to the United Kingdom for four months,’ snapped the very last official.

‘A nice thing that,’ I thought, ‘to take away as a farewell when one goes to serve one’s King and Country in France.’ What price for education here.

To my surprise, they didn’t search me. There was nothing else they missed. You couldn’t have caught them out in any other detail, relevant or irrelevant, about me, from the shape of my nose down to my inmost motives for going to France. They had it all down in their books.

‘Name and address of next of kin,’ demanded the last official but one, ‘in case the ship goes down.’

I gasped. Don’t they just think of everything!

Southampton Water was blacker than the blackest of pitch when at last I was flung out on to the boat. At least, they said it was Southampton Water, though how anyone could tell beat me. My berth was the very lowest on the ship and she was the veteran boat of the line. The only ray of comfort was the news that a good dinner was then being served in the dining room. ‘Now I’m in for it,’ I reflected, after the cheering remarks of the Inquisitors. ‘I’ll have my dinner and be damned to them.’

When I came on deck again it was blacker than ever and we were off. An officer of the Silent Service, seeing me alone and I suppose looking frightened, came up. ‘Put on your lifebelt and go and lie down. I’ll come for you if we’re torpedoed.’

So England said, ‘Goodbye’ nicely after all.

1
.  Christina’s fellow residents at the hostel reflect some of the range of opportunities there were for women to be involved in war work. Actress and theatre producer Lena Ashwell organised small companies or ‘parties’ of singers and actors who went out to France to entertain the troops. The Canadian VAD, meanwhile, was part of a vast organisation of voluntary nursing assistants who served in military hospitals, often coming from upper- and middle-class backgrounds and with minimal training.

2
.  These women were probably going to Serbia with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, an organisation remembered for its outstanding work on the Balkan Front under the leadership of Dr Elsie Inglis.

I
t was a bright, crisp November morning and we were in port. Neck to neck with us lay one of His Majesty's own destroyers – grey and clean and bright. They said she had been with us all the time, but nobody could be sure of that. At any rate she was worth looking at until the French Authorities made up their minds whether they wanted us ashore or not. Apparently the Inquisition was massing again, ready to go one better than its brother in England. After all, in this time of war, how could it rely on its brother in England? How could it tell what we had been doing on the way across? We might have taken any amount of doubtful characters on board en route. So cross-examined again we were.

Set free at last, I discovered that all my French had deserted me. ‘There's nobody here like me,' I said forlornly to a beautiful RTO [Railway Transport Officer] behind a red wicket window.

‘Oh yes,' he replied briskly – taking me for a motor driver, ‘there's one.'

A remarkably capable khaki damsel advanced upon me. ‘Sorry I can't take you in my car,' she remarked. ‘I'm full up. Where's your luggage?'

‘In the boat,' I said hopefully.

‘Pierre,' she called, and a fat blue-bloused person dived foremost into the hold. If they'd stowed my luggage as far down as they'd stowed me, he might be hours I felt. ‘There's a tram here will take you to the station,' she went on, ‘and you'll just catch the Paris express. Oh! That's right Pierre.' The tram lady grabbed me by the shoulder, my luggage landed after me with a resounding thump, and alone of the
Vera
's passengers, I was off. So much for looking helpless and solitary.

‘
J'ignore tout
,' I said in distress to the conductress – it was all the French I could muster.

‘
Mais oui
,' came the sympathetic reply, ‘
C'est comme tous les anglais; c'est toujours comme ça
.'

[‘I don't know anything' … ‘Well, yes' … ‘Like all the English; it's always like that.']

It was well meant, of course, but not, I felt, complimentary to the country I was leaving. However, it made her all the more attentive to me. ‘My three brothers I have lost,' her voice came placidly, ‘My husband he fight. I work, you work – it is like that.' She seemed like the spirit of France as she stood there stoically tinkling her bell and carrying on and viewing with compassionate amusement such amateurs as me. I left her with a kind smile in her eyes, as an army of small boys surrounded me and my luggage at the station. Providentially I knew where I was going and they managed the rest. Except for proffering my bread card to the ticket collector, I made no more mistakes and found myself aboard the Paris express with orders to change at Rouen. It was like France to have the white lace still on the carriages and how comfortable and roomy the carriages were! No crowding and strap-hanging as we had in England! Normandy looked fair and peaceful – the farms well-tilled, the orchards rosy in the crisp, clear air.

All too soon we were at Rouen and in some trepidation, I descended.

My own countrymen, in masses, banked up the platform, and in smiling, welcoming masses too. I spoke to an air corporal near me. ‘Your train will be that one over there, miss,' pointing to an engine steaming and puffing on one of the side lines outside the station. ‘Better jump in before it comes to the platform.'

I stared at it aghast. A whole vista of railway lines lay between me and it. Trains were entering and leaving everywhere. ‘But I can't cross these lines,' I stammered, thinking of our orthodox English Railways and their views on the matter.

‘You'd better,' he returned inflexibly.

I had an inspiration. ‘You come with me,' I suggested, though how that would make the proceeding safer, I did not reason out. It certainly took him by surprise, but in a moment he was down on the rails and I was with him. I thought of nothing but him as we crossed miles of rails. ‘You get in here,' he commanded. It was impossibly high, but he was not to be baffled now. With one hand he opened the door and with the other he swung me up and in – head foremost – amidst a group of respectable English ladies en route for Dieppe. Collecting myself, I waved a farewell to him from the window, and turned to survey my companions. They had levelled a frozen stare at me of some moments' duration, but the stare, I found, was not caused by the manner of my entrance – which apparently was quite an ordinary one in France – but was due rather to my now dishevelled appearance. I was left to think mournfully of the Sergeant's parting advice always to appear neat and tidily dressed, as the train gradually approached Dieppe. I was very excited at the arrival. Beyond the stare, the English ladies had betrayed no sort of interest in me. Who would meet me? Nobody did, but the passport official took charge of me. He commandeered the English ladies to their surprise and told them where to set me down. The sea was breaking in clear, green waves – the clearest green you ever saw – as we drew up facing it, at the door of the Headquarters. I turned to look at it – the only thing I knew – before I went in to my work.

M
y first thought was – how pretty the Base is! – my second, how far away from the line, where I longed to be. Headquarters made me feel as if I had plunged into the ocean itself off the deep end, as the Army brother would say. A babel of tongues went on all around me – Australian loudest of all, and most of the speakers greeted one another by their Christian names – across the whole distance of the room. ‘Nobody expected you by this train,' my guide said in a temporary lull. ‘I don't know how you could have caught the connection at Rouen. Nobody has ever done it before.' They had not met my Corporal then, I reflected. ‘You don't really belong here,' she confided again presently. ‘This,' – with an air of dramatic importance – ‘is the Headquarters for France. You go to the local Headquarters. Somebody will take you there directly after lunch.'

I felt remarkably cheered. College-bred as I was, I did not quite see how I could ever fit in with this menagerie. However, it's a habit one easily acquired in the Army.

‘I'm going to Paris this afternoon,' said my other neighbour, helping himself loudly to coffee, ‘looks like peace in the
Daily Mail
. I'm for Place de la Concorde on Peace night.'

‘Take me! Me too!' came in chorus from all quarters of the room.

‘I should love to go to Paris,' I said quickly.

My guide looked coldly at me. ‘You can't get there without a special military permit – you can't get anywhere in fact.'

‘How do you get, old boy?' queried one more quietly than the rest.

‘White pass – on business,' came the curt reply, with a wink to help it out.

‘He is one of the chiefs,' concluded my guide. ‘His car can go anywhere.' I made a mental note that it was desirable to cultivate chiefs with white passes, if I wanted to see life. This one paid not the slightest attention to me – next-door neighbour and newcomer though I was – so I gave him up.

In a few minutes I was on my way along the sea front to the lesser glory of the local headquarters, my new home. In happier days an artist from Paris had built it for himself, with its wide windows looking far across the English Channel and its red roof snugly sheltered by warm wooden gables. He had left his tapestries and his old Norman china for us, plus the minimum of furniture and that of a highly artistic and rather uncomfortable kind.
1
We called it ‘The School' out of compliment to the work we did in it and our motto was ‘We live and learn.' Never was a truer device for the next – all too short – six months we had the luck to stay in it. What a merry life it was and what a gay one, and what strange wisdom we learned in the ‘best school of all'.

The Chief, tall, dark with twinkling brown eyes, awaited me in his study.
2
‘So glad you have come,' he remarked to me over a litter of papers on his desk. ‘You are the star turn allotted to this area. I understand you are capable of teaching up to the Greats standard in Oxford. I shall put it in Base Routine Orders straight away. English and French I suppose, up to any standard you like.'

By this time the 24-hours' journey, the cross-questionings and the lunch were beginning to take effect on me, and I wanted nothing but sleep, and up to now nobody had ever mentioned where I was going to do that. Perhaps it was like London, I reflected, and it hadn't occurred to anyone I would need to. Anyway, the recital of my qualifications now ‘put the lid on!' I conjured up a vision of rows and rows of troops, all athirst for knowledge and finding out what a fraud I was. But the Chief was finishing. ‘Miss Mordaunt will take you now to the Coq d'Or. I have engaged a room for you there.'