THE LAND-GIRLS' LETTER-BAG
"A word in due season, how good it is!"--SCRIPTURE.
At the Camp we found the Timber-gang buzzing about what constituted
for all of us the great event of the day--the day's mail.
It arrived after the girls were already at work, so that since
breakfast they had been looking forward to the letters, wondering
about them....
Ah, these letters! Most people realize by this time how much they
have always meant to the boys at the Front. They meant as much and
more to the war-working girls! You people who "can't be bothered to
write much," you correspondents who "forget"--I wish you could have
seen that group of uniformed lasses with the green Forestry ribbons
round their hats, clustering about the forewoman who held the packet.
I wish you could have heard the eager tone of their "Any for me?"
"Two for you, Curley--one from France. Oh! girls, look at the
snapshots of me sister's nippers. 'To Auntie Vic, with love from
Stan'--all right, ain't it?" cried Vic.
"Only these four for me?" exclaimed the red-haired Welsh timber girl.
"And none for me! Isn't it a cruel shame?" lamented Lil. "Here,
Aggie, do let me have a read of yours----"
"I say, this isn't for me. It got slipped in among mine. 'Miss
Weare'--who's she when she's at home? Oh! The little new one.
Here, Mop----"
Elizabeth took the letter.
I was reading a kind letter from Agatha, my step-mother, who ended
with, "Still I hope you will not find that this new venture of yours
is a mistake after all," when there was a little sudden laugh and a
quick exclamation from my chum at my elbow.
"Joan, I say, Joan!"
"Yes? Who've you heard from?"
"Who d'you think?" she returned amusedly, taking me by the elbow to
draw me aside into the porch. "I'll give you three guesses!"
"Man or woman? Ah, I needn't ask. Woman, of course?"
"As it happens, no!"
"What? A man?" I exclaimed. "But you never write to any men----"
"Don't I? I do."
"Only to one landlord," I said. "Only to the ancient Colonel!"
Elizabeth gave her gurgling boyish chuckle.
"Right in one," she said. "It is the old Colonel again. You know I
wrote to him last about that loose scullery tap that we had to leave
as it was. Well, he's home on sick leave now, he says, and he writes
from our flat--his own flat, I mean. Only he's coming down here very
shortly----"
"Here?" I exclaimed, glancing round the big hut, with its
characteristic grouping of Land Girls off duty.
Some of them were still poring and chattering over their mail; Peggy,
with her foot upon a chair, was cleaning her hobnailed boots; Vic,
now clad in a bathing costume and her Land Army hat, was sitting on a
corner of the table, swinging her legs, whistling, and stitching at a
button that had come loose on her khaki breeches.
"This is no place for a dear old gentleman like your colonel! What
does he want to come here for?" I added.
"Says he'll be staying with a friend of his in this neighbourhood,"
explained Elizabeth, handing me the note with the neat, precise
handwriting that we had seen on so many business letters, "and that
as I was here he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon me
if he might. Antediluvian touch, isn't it? And, of course, he won't
be allowed to call here, I suppose, even at his age."
"Oh, but I hope we shall meet him," I said, as I prepared to get into
bathing-things again for my swimming lesson from Vic and Sybil in the
pool. "It will be rather fun, after all our guess-work, to see what
the funny old thing really is like."
Now this was vouchsafed to us in a few days from then. And I admit
that this, and what it brought in its train, has been quite one of
the shocks of my life.