Elizabethan, after all!

It is such a pity that Ross is away, as I have no one to gloat with me, but when he comes back and rows about the hospital, I shall say,—

'Yes, but I've found the date,' and then all will be harmony and love. No one could be angry with a person who had found the date 1570.

I have to get up so desperately early in the morning. Nannie is horrid about the whole thing, refuses to call me or help me dress, says she is sure Master Michael won't approve and that she's not going to have any hand in it. However, 1570 consoles me for much, though everything else is rather beastly.

So on Tuesday I went to the hospital. It was a vile morning, blowing half a gale and raining. It took me so long to get into the unaccustomed clothes without Nannie that I had to run most of the way to avoid being late.

If you were outside a place and wanted to get in, what would you do? Ring the front door bell, of course, you say. Well, that's what I did, but it wasn't right, quite wrong, in fact. The person who opened the door to me seemed to think I must be dotty. I ought to have gone to the back door and taken off my hat and coat in a kind of mausoleum in the yard. By the time I had rectified all these mistakes it was a quarter past eight. I didn't know how the veil ought to be worn either, so I put it on as the nurses did in Ross's hospital in London, which turned out wrong, for when I went to matron for my orders, she snapped,—

'Washing up—you're not an army sister yet, and no use at all to me unless you're punctual.'

I could see that she meant something horrid, but couldn't think what, and I blushed and stammered like a school child. There was a nice girl in the scullery who came behind the door and altered my veil and tried to console me by saying,—

'Matron isn't a bit like that usually, only she's absolutely overdone, as we all are.'

Then I started washing up. They had had kippers for breakfast, and I had no idea that they were so disgusting cold, or how impossible it was to prevent water going over one's feet when one emptied a big panful down the sink. By the time I had been at it an hour I was soaking, I could feel it on my skin, and the floor was all awash. A diver's costume would have been really useful. The girls who had been there for months thought I was such a fool. (They do not suffer fools gladly in a military hospital!) They were quite polite, of course, that's why it was so hard. I'm not used to people being polite to me.