A truck stood in front of our barracks, and a soldier was gesticulating
for assistance; there was luggage and furniture to be unloaded.
“I want a volunteer to help unload the truck!” our corporal cried out.
The first to offer herself was tall, husky Ann. With ease she lifted a
table onto her back, carrying it as though it were a feather. The rest
of us were immediately assigned to clean the house.
Another corporal, dark and dry, with a face like a prune, meted out our
tasks. Dainty Jacqueline and little Ursula were ordered to scrub the
large entrance hall of the ancient mansion. I was to work on the main
stairway that circled upward to our dormitories.
Jacqueline donned a huge beige-colored smock, rolled the sleeves up to
her elbows, got down on her knees, and began to scrub. Ursula stood
there staring at Jacqueline, as though she didn’t know where to begin.
She looked at the pail of grayish water, the wet brush, and the
blackened rag. I suppose she had never been faced with such a disgusting
task, and there was a dismay about her, as though she had no idea how to
go about scrubbing a floor, as though she might just as well have been
suddenly commanded to run a locomotive.
Jacqueline was scrubbing energetically. It seemed all the more
aristocratic of her not to be upset by the most menial of tasks. But
suddenly she gasped and put her hand to her back.
The prune-faced corporal, passing by, cried out, “Well, my little one,
so you’ve already got a sore back after two minutes of work! This is a
barracks, not a drawing room!” And seeing Ursula standing there confused
and inactive, she was overcome with sudden rage. All these daughters of
the idle rich! She poured out her anger upon Ursula. “You! You will do
me the pleasure of scrubbing the hall, and after that, I’ve got work for
you in the kitchen.”
“There’s no need for you to shout,” Ursula murmured, red with shame and
dismay. Whereupon she received a look that announced more clearly than
words that this girl was already on the corporal’s black list.
Jacqueline raised herself on one foot, with her hand still to her back.
A lock of hair had fallen over her forehead, giving her a slightly
melodramatic look. She looked a bit as though she were acting in a film,
playing the part of the poor and beautiful orphan, forced to slave under
the command of an ill-tempered mistress. To everyone’s astonishment,
Jacqueline talked back to the corporal, defending Ursula.
“Can’t you give that sort of work to the stronger girls? I don’t care
what I do, but she’s too little, she’s much too frail. Why don’t you
find something else for her to do?”
“If she’s too frail, then she’s got no business joining the Army. She’ll
scrub the hall, and you’ve got no business interfering!”
The tension was eased by Ann. From the height of a ladder, on which she
stood washing the high hall windows, she called out in her deep, easy
voice, “Come, come, children, don’t argue! It’ll give the little girl
some muscle to work a bit. The corporal is right.”
I couldn’t tell if big Ann were making fun of the corporal, or trying to
help out Ursula by appeasing the corporal’s anger. In any case, the
result was good, for Pruneface softened a little; she even squeezed out
a smile for Ann, and went off without saying any more.
Ursula got down to work near the stairs. She was furious with Jacqueline
for having come to her defense. “Now the corporal hates me,” she
whispered.
She watched Jacqueline, who kept at her scrubbing, pausing from time to
time to gasp. Mickey, who was working beside me, waxing the stairs, was
also intrigued by Jacqueline’s behavior. “It’s an act,” she said. But
Ursula called to our distinguished-looking scrub lady, “Is something
wrong with your back? Does it hurt all the time?”
With a resigned and rather mysterious air, Jacqueline replied, “It’s
nothing. Don’t worry.” And at the same moment the brush fell from her
hand, and she toppled unconscious on the stone floor.
At our outcry, the corporal came hurrying back, with an air of supreme
annoyance. She stood over us as we tried to revive Jacqueline. After
all, the girl’s collapse might be considered her fault.
Ursula slapped Jacqueline’s hands. Ann arrived with a glass of water.
Jacqueline quickly opened her eyes, apologized, and said that the
fainting spell was of no consequence. She insisted that she could go on
working. After a moment’s hesitation, we all went back to our tasks.
Mickey, with her chattery ways and her funny little accent that made
everything she said seem somehow a bit more intimate, now declared, “You
know, I think she really did faint. She looks like she’s acting all the
time, but I think the faint was real.”
One of the girls above us on the stairs began to sing “_Auprès de ma
blonde_”; she had a Brittany accent. The warm, reassuring voice of Ann
joined in the refrain, and then, one by one, we all picked it up. The
tense and somber atmosphere that pervaded the large dim hall seemed to
dissolve.
Ann paused in her singing to remark that it was still raining outdoors.
This was London, where it always rained. We would get used to it, as to
everything else.
* * * * *
A bell rang, and several women came up from the kitchen, carrying
enormous steaming dishes. “Dinner!” they cried.
There were not yet enough tables and benches for all of us in the dining
room. We had to crowd together on the benches. Finally everyone managed
to squeeze in somewhere, and there was a kind of general sigh of relief.
But just then the corporal shouted, “Attention!”
Ann was the first to jump up. The rest of us instinctively imitated her.
The door opened, and several women entered. They were dressed in
impeccable uniforms, with gold stripes on their sleeves.
The Captain was in front. She was a large and handsome woman, with
graying hair cut short. She had a heavy face with a self-satisfied
mouth, an intelligent forehead, and impenetrable eyes. Behind her stood
the warrant officer, Petit, a smallish woman who had the look of a
little old man, with reddish-gray hair and a face filled with small
wrinkles. She was altogether like a gallant old fellow holding himself
quite erect and looking over the girls with a friendly eye.
“Everything here is still on a makeshift basis,” said the Captain. “In a
few days we’ll have the house furnished and each of you will be assigned
to a job in the forces. If any of you has any difficulty, come and see
me. You know that my job is to help you, and I count on making this
barracks a home for each and every one of you, since you are so far away
from your families. I have some important projects in mind; I have big
ambitions for you. I hope that you will put in a great deal of work
these first days, and that you will get along well with your officers.
France, for whose sake you have....”
While the Captain talked, I could see Ann studying the warrant officer,
Petit. Yes, Petit had the air of an elderly man, and I suppose Ann knew
that it was inevitable that Petit should notice her. She touched her tie
to make sure the knot was in place; she passed her hand over her hair.
Petit was studying all the girls, smilingly, looking from one to the
other of us, until her eyes met Ann’s, and then her eyes remained
immobile for an instant. Petit had small gray clever eyes. It seemed to
me, watching her, that her little pupils were suddenly drowned in Ann’s
large somber blue eyes, and even I, only a bystander at this silent
exchange, could sense a current passing between the two women.
They looked at each other over the heads of the rest of us, and I
thought, They’ve never met before, but they recognize each other; they
know they’re the same kind. It was plain that there was no need of words
or of explanations between them. It was quite simple, quite clear, and
even if nothing came of it, they could count on each other in the
eternal battle between themselves and other women—those of us who were
subject to the needs, the fears, the weaknesses that neither Ann nor
Petit felt.
We resumed our places at the tables. There was no table linen, but the
food was good. After all, the cook was French, and from Normandy. She
knew her work; she had operated a restaurant before the war. The cook
was large and fat, with hair dyed a hard black. She didn’t know how to
speak without shouting, and her voice was rough.
Assigned to her in the kitchen were three little girls from Brittany who
had just arrived on a fishing boat. They were young, fresh,
round-cheeked; they didn’t use make-up, and they looked even more
unsuited to their uniforms than the rest of us.
No one ate very much. We all felt homesick. On the wall, there already
hung a huge photograph of General de Gaulle. Occasionally someone would
raise her head toward him, as though looking for reassurance.