The Sword of Deborah: First-hand impressions of the British Women's Army in FranceJesse, F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson)
History
The Sword of Deborah: First-hand impressions of the British Women's Army in France
Jesse, F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
Personally, I don't like a Nissen hut nearly as much as the ordinary
straight-walled sort. I know they are wonderfully easy to erect and to
move, but when it comes to trying to tack a picture on those curved
walls.... And the girls depend so on their little bits of things, such
as pictures and photographs from home. You will always see in every
cubicle, above every bed in a long hut, the girl's own private gallery,
the _lares and penates_ which make of her, in her bed at least, an
individual. In a Nissen hut you have to turn your head upside down to
get a view of the picture gallery at all, though it has its advantages
to the girl herself as she lies in bed and can look at the faces of her
parents, absolutely concave, curving over her nose.
As I was leaving this camp I heard sounds of music and the stamping of
feet, and going to the Y.W.C.A. hut the Unit Administrator and I looked
in. There, to a vigorously pounded piano, an instructress from the
Y.M.C.A. was teaching a dozen or so girls Morris dancing. They beamed at
us from hot glowing faces, these mighty daughters of the plough, and
continued to foot it as merrily, if as heavily, as any Elizabethan
villagers dancing in their Sunday smocks around a Maypole.
* * * * *
One more camp I saw, on a later day, and though it was a camp, yet it
had that about it which distinguished it from all others. For it was
built round about a hoary castle, grey with years and lichen, from whose
walls they say Anne Boleyn looked down, standing beside her robust and
rufous lover on that honeymoon which was almost all of happiness she was
to know.
Now it is an Army School, and within its grey walls and towers the
officers are billeted and in its great kitchens the Waacs cook for them
and do all the rest of the domestic work, waiting on the officers' mess
and the sergeants' mess, serving at the canteen, doing all the cleaning,
everything that there is to be done for a whole army school of hungry
men down on a five-weeks' course, to say nothing of all the work for
themselves in their camp at the castle's gates, and there are sixty-six
of them, not counting the three officers who are at every Waac camp--the
Unit Administrator, and the Deputy and Assistant Administrators. It is
hard work, and endless work, and though every Waac gets a few hours off
every day, and though, as you have seen, everything is done for their
healthy recreation that can be done, yet the life is one of work and not
of fun, and though the girls flourish under it, we at home should not
forget that fact when we give them their due meed of appreciation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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