It is not a bad record, this continuous service of the Fannies since the outbreak of war, is it?
For remember it is not work that can be taken up and dropped. You sign on for six months at a time, and only have two fortnights of leave in the year. And the girls sign on, again and again; they are nearly all veterans at it. And, comfortable as the camp has been made—all the necessities of life are provided by the War Office and the "frills" by the Red Cross—and in spite of the tiny separate cubicles—greatest blessing of all—decorated to taste by the owner, in spite of everything that can be done to make the girls happy and keep them well—it is still a picnic. And a picnic may be all very well for a week or even a fortnight, but a picnic carried on over the years is not at all the same thing....
Certainly they all seemed very happy, and are all very well. Girls who go out rather delicate soon become strong in the hard open air life, and there has not been a single case of strain from working the heavy ambulances. The girls do all cleaning and oiling of the cars themselves, and all repairs with the exception of the very complicated cases, for which they are allowed to call on the help of two mechanics, but only after the request has gone through those in authority.
The domestic staff, with the exception of one Frenchwoman in the kitchen, is supplied by the girls themselves, and on this subject of domestic staffs in France I shall say more later. Their food is Army rations, which are excellent, as I can testify after straitened England—supplemented by milk and fresh vegetables, while the Red Cross gives the extras of life such as custard, cornflower, etc.
When at tea I saw butter brought forth in a lordly dish and was told to take as much as I liked on hot toast, I felt it was a solemn moment. There seemed a very care-free atmosphere about the Fannies, and at this camp the Commandant was known as "Boss," a respectful familiarity I did not meet anywhere else. Some irreverent soul had even inscribed it on the door of her cubicle. The Fannies "break out," so to speak, all over the place; even the bath-room is not sacred to them. It is a pathetic sight, that bath-room of the Fannies, more pathetic, I thought it, after I had seen the rows of big baths in other camps. The Fannies have a limited and capricious water supply, and their bath is so small as to remove forcibly the temptation for one person to use it all up. Perched on two stalks of stone stands a long bath in miniature, long enough to sit in with the knees up, but of no known human size. Inscribed above it—(under a fresco in black and white of cats in the moonlight)—are these touching words: "Do not turn on the hot water when the cold is off or the Boiler will Bust."
Everything I have been saying and describing is external, I know, but you see I was still grasping at externals, though underneath certain things were beginning to worry me. But I couldn't bring myself to voice anything I was wondering to these splendid strangers; later, though I never was with any one convoy more than a night, still I got the feeling that seeing so many of them had made me more familiar with the ones I happened to be with at the time, and so I screwed myself up to the point and was richly rewarded. But that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story.
We drove away in the windy evening, past the parked rows of great glossy ambulances, and I bore with me chiefly an impression of gaiety, of a set purpose, of a certain schoolgirlish humour and that knack of making the best of everything which community life engenders when it does not do exactly the reverse; of long wooden huts that might have been bare but were decked with pictures, patterned chintzes, bookshelves, cushions; and above all, I took an impression of a certain quality that I can only describe as "stark" in the girls, though that is too bleak a word for what I mean. It is a sort of splendid austerity, that pervades their look and their outlook, that spiritually works itself out in this determined sticking at the job, this avoidance of any emotion that interferes with it, and in their bodies expresses itself in a disregard for appearances that one would never have thought to find in human woman. It leaves you gasping. They come in, windblown, reddened, hot with exertion, after recklessly abandoning their hands to all the harsh treatment of a car—the sacrifice of the hands is no small one, and every girl driving a car makes it—they come in, toss their caps down, brush their hair back from their brow in the one gesture that no woman has ever permitted to herself or liked in a lover—and they don't mind.
It is amazing, that disregard for appearances, but of course it is partly explained by the fact that the natural tendency in young things would be to accentuate anything of that kind once it was discovered ... and for the rest—I really think they are too intent on what they are doing and care too little about themselves or what anyone may be thinking of them. What a blessed freedom!... This at last is what it is to be as free as a man.