CX
Hazel Barrance To Verena Raby
Dear Aunt Verena,—Since Roy has come back from his visit, I seem to know so much more about you. I don’t mean that he tells us anything, but he answers questions. I want to thank you for your kindness to him, which was just what he was needing to pull him together, because father never has time to take any real interest in him and is impatient too. Fathers and sons so often, it seems to me, are the last people who ought to meet. Mothers and daughters can hit it off badly enough and misunderstand each other thoroughly, but I don’t think there is so much real hostility between them as between those others. I don’t think hostility is the word; it is a kind of rivalry, particularly as the mother usually takes the boy’s side. Anyway, if you are going to be as much interested in poor old Roy as he says, I am sure he will buck up and do something worth while, because he has lots of ability and makes friends too. In fact, when it comes to the other sex he makes them too easily. His chief trouble is that he had just enough Army life to unsettle him and not enough to give him discipline. The War came for him at the wrong time: he ought to have been younger and escaped it or older and have gone properly into it.
I was much more lucky, for I shall never regret a moment of my V.A.D. work. But I wish I could be busy again. So does nearly every girl I know. We all miss the War horribly; which sounds a callous and selfish thing to say, but isn’t really. It shows, however, that there must be something very wrong with our civilization if it needs a ghastly thing like that to give thousands and thousands of girls their only chance to be useful!—Your loving
Hazel
P.S.—A hospital nurse I know said a funny thing yesterday. She said that one of the tragedies of nursing is that the officer you restore to life is so seldom the officer you want to dine out with; and another tragedy is that that is what he can’t understand.