Chapter 8 VIGNETTES

The interesting thing about the various places where Waacs are housed, which I saw, is that no two of them were alike in atmosphere. I had rather dreaded much seeing of camps, but, as a matter of fact, though I saw two, they were totally unlike each other, while the other three places that I saw each had an aspect, a character, unlike the others.

One was a convalescent home for Waacs, set amidst pine-trees, a house of deep wide stairs, airy rooms, long cushioned chairs, and flowers, where one might well be content to be just-not-well for a long time; the others were houses where those Waacs lived who were not in camps.

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Four jaunty chalets, chalk-white in the sun, hung with painted galleries, face the rolling sand-dunes, behind them the sea, a darker blue than any of the shadows of land on such a high-keyed day. They are little pleasure-villas, these chalets, fancy erections for summer visitors, built in the days when this little Plage was a resort for Parisians playing at rusticity. Delicious artificial useless-looking creations, bearing apparently about as much relation to a normal house as a boudoir-cap does to a bowler. Yet they are charming as only little French pleasure-villas can be, and to the receptive mind it is their artificiality that makes such a delightful note of-well, not decadence, but dilettantism-in this rolling sandy place, where only the hand of Nature is to be seen all around, no town, no village even, impinging on the curving skylines, the very road up to their doors but a track in the sand.

In these villas live incongruous Waacs, their khaki-clad forms swing up the wooden stairs to the galleries, and lean from the windows, always open their widest, night and day. Less incongruous the stout boots and khaki inside, as, though the chintzes are bright and gay, there is an aspect of stern utility, combined with an austerity that somehow suits the blank sandiness of the surroundings. In each little scrubbed room are two beds, each-for the Waacs live in true Army fashion-with its dark grey blankets folded up at the head of the bare mattress; in the sick bay alone the beds are covered with bright blue counterpanes. In the recreation room and the Forewomen's Mess are easy chairs of wicker and flowers and pictures. It is all done as charmingly as it can be with a strict eye to suitability; it is community life, of course, but brought as nearly as possible to that feeling of individuality which makes a home with a small "h" instead of with the dreaded capital.

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This other house was as great a contrast to the bare little chalets as it well could be. It also was at a Plage, it too had been built for pleasure, but for pleasure de luxe, not of simple bourgeois families. The wide hall with its polished floor, its great carved mantels, its dining-room with gleaming woods and glossy table and sparkling glass, its big lounge with tall windows, where the girls dance and play the piano-all was as different from the bleached scrubbed wood of the chalets as it well could be. Yet the spirit informing the whole was the same, the bedrooms as austere in essence even if they boasted carved marble-topped chests, and even here the Army had found things to improve, such as the making of paths at the back of the house of round tins sunk in the earth, and steps of tin biscuit boxes, ingenious arrangements to save getting your feet wet on a muddy day as you go in and out on the endless errands of domesticity. And, as I sat at lunch in the gleaming dining-room, where the wood fire burned on the wide stone hearth, I heard the girls practising for a musical play they were shortly to produce.

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A camp is, of course, a camp, but there is a certain satisfaction in seeing how well even a necessary evil can be done. Where all was excellent, the chief thing that really thrilled me was the bath-rooms. The Waacs' bath-rooms are the envy and despair of the Army, who rage vainly in small canvas tubs. The Engineers are by way of spoiling the Waacs whenever possible, and bath-rooms, electric bells, electric light and fancy paths of tin, spring up before them. There are in every Waac camp rows of bath-rooms containing each its full-length bath, and besides that, each girl has her own private wash-place, in a cubicle for the purpose. For, as the Chief Controller said to me, "After all, it does not matter the girls having to sleep together in dormitories if each has absolute privacy for washing, that is so much more important." To which it is quite possible to retort that there are those of us who would not mind bathing in front of the whole world if only we are allowed to sleep by ourselves. But that is just a different point of view, and as a matter of fact, for the class from which the greater part of the Waacs are drawn, privacy in ablutions ranks as a greater thing than privacy in slumber, so the psychological instinct which planned the camps is justified.

Besides the bath-rooms and the ablution cubicles, there is in every camp one or more drying-rooms, which are always heated, and where the wet clothes of the girls, who of course have to be out in all weathers, are hung to dry. Laundry, kitchens, recreation rooms, mess-rooms, long Nissen huts for sleeping, I went the round of them all, and, while genuinely admiring them, admired still more those who lived in them.

Personally, I don't like a Nissen hut nearly as much as the ordinary straight-walled sort. I know they are wonderfully easy to erect and to move, but when it comes to trying to tack a picture on those curved walls.... And the girls depend so on their little bits of things, such as pictures and photographs from home. You will always see in every cubicle, above every bed in a long hut, the girl's own private gallery, the lares and penates which make of her, in her bed at least, an individual. In a Nissen hut you have to turn your head upside down to get a view of the picture gallery at all, though it has its advantages to the girl herself as she lies in bed and can look at the faces of her parents, absolutely concave, curving over her nose.

As I was leaving this camp I heard sounds of music and the stamping of feet, and going to the Y.W.C.A. hut the Unit Administrator and I looked in. There, to a vigorously pounded piano, an instructress from the Y.M.C.A. was teaching a dozen or so girls Morris dancing. They beamed at us from hot glowing faces, these mighty daughters of the plough, and continued to foot it as merrily, if as heavily, as any Elizabethan villagers dancing in their Sunday smocks around a Maypole.

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One more camp I saw, on a later day, and though it was a camp, yet it had that about it which distinguished it from all others. For it was built round about a hoary castle, grey with years and lichen, from whose walls they say Anne Boleyn looked down, standing beside her robust and rufous lover on that honeymoon which was almost all of happiness she was to know.

Now it is an Army School, and within its grey walls and towers the officers are billeted and in its great kitchens the Waacs cook for them and do all the rest of the domestic work, waiting on the officers' mess and the sergeants' mess, serving at the canteen, doing all the cleaning, everything that there is to be done for a whole army school of hungry men down on a five-weeks' course, to say nothing of all the work for themselves in their camp at the castle's gates, and there are sixty-six of them, not counting the three officers who are at every Waac camp-the Unit Administrator, and the Deputy and Assistant Administrators. It is hard work, and endless work, and though every Waac gets a few hours off every day, and though, as you have seen, everything is done for their healthy recreation that can be done, yet the life is one of work and not of fun, and though the girls flourish under it, we at home should not forget that fact when we give them their due meed of appreciation.

But, hard as the life is, it seemed to me that at that camp which has the happiness to be at this castle, its duress must be assuaged by the beauty of what is always before the eyes. Buried in woods it is, still bare when I saw them, but with the greenish yellow buds of daffodils already beginning to unfold in great clumps through the purple-brown alleys, and with primroses making drifts of honey-pallor and honey-sweetness beside the slopes of ground ivy, while from beyond the curving ramparts of the castle shows the steely-quiet glimmer of a lake.

For war this castle was built, and war she now sees once again, for the arts of war are taught within her walls. And how Anne Boleyn's roving eyes would have brightened at the sight of so much youth, at the sound of so many spurs! Let us hope her sore spirit can still find pleasure in wandering again over the scenes where she once was happy, and if she has kept enough of innocent wantonness to love a straight man when she sees one, ghost though she be, and if her nose turn up ever so daintily at the clumsily-clad members of her own sex, whose toils she would so little understand ... why, she is but a ghost, and the modern mind must contrive to forgive her.

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These slight vignettes have all been of vision; let me add one of a less pictorial nature. The Unit Administrators, as I have said, have to act not only as commanding officers, but very often as mother-confessors as well. Parents write to them about their daughters, would-be suitors write to them for permission to marry their charges, and amongst the letter-bag are often epistles that are not without their unconscious humour. One day a mother writes to point out that she and the rest of the family are changing houses, and so may Flossie please come home for a few days ... another mentions that Gladys's letters of late have been despondent, and please could she be put to something else that will not depress her? Then Gladys is had up in front of the Unit Administrator, and perhaps turns out to be one of the born whiners found everywhere, perhaps to be merely suffering from a passing fit of what our ancestresses would have called the megrims. If her work is found to be really unfitted to her and it is possible to give her a change, then it is done, but as a rule that is seldom the case, as, rather differently from what we used to hear was the way in the Army, every Waac Controller finds out what the girl is best at and what she likes doing most, and then, as far as possible, arranges her work accordingly.

Perhaps a letter comes from a Tommy in His Majesty's forces, and begins something like this:-

"Dear Madam,

"I beg to ask your permission to marry Miss D. Robinson, at present under your command...."

The Unit Administrator writes back that she will endeavour to arrange leave for the marriage; and perhaps all goes well, or perhaps some such lugubrious letter as this will follow:-

"Dear Madam,

"Re Miss D. Robinson, at present under your command, take no notice of my former letter, as Miss D. Robinson has broken off the engagement...."

Human nature will be inhuman, in camps and out of them, and because Miss D. Robinson is doing a man's work is no reason why she should shed the privileges of her sex.

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