I dipped before she could catch hold of me, while the others shouted with laughter. The first moment was awful. Then came the glorious glow and tingle of reaction, and we felt quite jolly, as Vic promised that she and young Sybil would soon teach us to swim.
"In and out with you today, though," she decreed. "Here's the towel—have a scrub now. I'll rub you down."
Scarified but warm enough, we sat under an alder in our overcoats, watching the others until tea-time or supper-time as we cared to call it. And then—Ah! It was as though one substantial midday meal had never been....
We just legged it ("for the best!" as the Timber girls shouted) back to the mess-table in the Hut!
CHAPTER IX
OUR MESS-MATES
"Whence came ye, merry Damsels, whence came ye,
So many, and so many, and such glee?"
—KEATS.
Later Elizabeth and I talked to Miss Easton, who, while the Campites played, read, sewed, or danced as before, told us a little about them all—these girls, who were already less strange to us, and who were all to become our friends.
Miss Easton began with her own story. Her last job had been in a munitions factory, where she'd worked ten hours a day on a skeleton bridge 35 feet up in the air, which had danced and quivered with the heat of a row of furnaces below. She said it always felt like Vesuvius going to break into eruption. Not unnaturally her health had broken down.
At the Labour Exchange she had mentioned "Forestry" as a forlorn hope, and they'd given her a trial—in more senses than one.