Women's Barracks (3 page)

Jacqueline twisted her reddish-brown hair into an amusing little bun, and smiled at Ursula with a well-bred graciousness precisely suited to her appearance.

Mickey was laughing over the way we looked; she laughed over everything and over nothing, eager to find fun. Her pale blue eyes were perpetually wide-open, and her nose puckered out of sight when she laughed. Because of her mixed Anglo-French parentage, she spoke French always with that quaint little British accent which added another droll quality to her fun-loving air.

"Are you English?" Jacqueline asked her.

"No, I'm French," Mickey insisted, repeating her history. "My mother is English and my father is French, but I'm French! I just came from France. I adore France!"

With her impulsive warmth, she seemed to be establishing herself as a firm friend of Jacqueline's. And indeed, Jacqueline responded to her as to someone who was also, obviously, from a family with good breeding.

The silken, precious-looking Jacqueline came from the world of the aristocracy. Her story, too, came out soon enough. She was among us almost as a runaway, to escape a depressing family life, mangled as it can sometimes become only in high society. Jacqueline's father had died when she was a child of seven, and her mother had remarried only a year later. Jacqueline had never liked her stepfather, and as soon as she reached adolescence the child had discovered that her beauty carried with it something of disaster and doom. Her stepfather's too pressing attentions had aroused a frightened loathing in Jacqueline, and as soon as she was old enough she had seized the first opportunity to escape from her family on an exchange visit with some of their friends in England. But there too her beauty had won her too much attention, and one night she had tried to escape by dropping from the roof, and had injured herself quite seriously. As soon as she felt well enough, she had come to London to enlist.

The corporal shouted, "Form ranks in pairs, and try to march in step if you can. Forward march!"

With much confusion we managed to form ranks. The scene reminded us somehow of our classroom days.

"Silence!" cried the corporal, and our little column marched out of the room, with the women jostling each other and choking back their laughter as they squeezed through the narrow doorway.

Outdoors, in the street, it began to rain; a small, fine, clinging rain, sharp and cold. No one marched in step. I was surprised how difficult it was, since marching always looked so easy when one watched a parade of soldiers. I was in line with Ursula. "I never believed marching was something that had to be learned," she remarked, and blushed for having offered her observation.

A few passers-by turned to look at us. I wondered whether they could possibly realize how much that march meant to us. We were literally marching into a completely new life. I kept saying to myself, This is what I wanted. This is what I came for. This is the first time that I decided on something for myself, and made it come true. And it gave me a frightening sense of entering not only the Army, but life itself.

And so we marched behind the corporal, who had placed Ann at the head of the column, and it was a ridiculous column, zigzagging, with the tall and the short all jumbled together, a column of women half running, in our ill-fitting uniforms, too long, too short, too wide. But neither long-striding Ann nor the glowing Jacqueline nor the elderly woman with the coarse voice nor even the fun-loving Mickey—not any of us thought of laughing.

A truck stood in front of our barracks, and a soldier was gesticulating for assistance; there was luggage and furniture to be unloaded.

"I want a volunteer to help unload the truck!" our corporal cried out.

The first to offer herself was tall, husky Ann. With ease she lifted a table onto her back, carrying it as though it were a feather. The rest of us were immediately assigned to clean the house.

Another corporal, dark and dry, with a face like a prune, meted out our tasks. Dainty Jacqueline and little Ursula were ordered to scrub the large entrance hall of the ancient mansion. I was to work on the main stairway that circled upward to our dormitories.

Jacqueline donned a huge beige-colored smock, rolled the sleeves up to her elbows, got down on her knees, and began to scrub. Ursula stood there staring at Jacqueline, as though she didn't know where to begin. She looked at the pail of grayish water, the wet brush, and the blackened rag. I suppose she had never been faced with such a disgusting task, and there was a dismay about her, as though she had no idea how to go about scrubbing a floor, as though she might just as well have been suddenly commanded to run a locomotive.

Jacqueline was scrubbing energetically. It seemed all the more aristocratic of her not to be upset by the most menial of tasks. But suddenly she gasped and put her hand to her back.

The prune-faced corporal, passing by, cried out, "Well, my little one, so you've already got a sore back after two minutes of work! This is a barracks, not a drawing room!" And seeing Ursula standing there confused and inactive, she was overcome with sudden rage. All these daughters of the idle rich! She poured out her anger upon Ursula. "You! You will do me the pleasure of scrubbing the hall, and after that, I've got work for you in the kitchen."

"There's no need for you to shout," Ursula murmured, red with shame and dismay. Whereupon she received a look that announced more clearly than words that this girl was already on the corporal's black list.

Jacqueline raised herself on one foot, with her hand still to her back. A lock of hair had fallen over her forehead, giving her a slightly melodramatic look. She looked a bit as though she were acting in a film, playing the part of the poor and beautiful orphan, forced to slave under the command of an ill-tempered mistress. To everyone's astonishment, Jacqueline talked back to the corporal, defending Ursula.

"Can't you give that sort of work to the stronger girls? I don't care what I do, but she's too little, she's much too frail. Why don't you find something else for her to do?"

"If she's too frail, then she's got no business joining the Army. She'll scrub the hall, and you've got no business interfering!"

The tension was eased by Ann. From the height of a ladder, on which she stood washing the high hall windows, she called out in her deep, easy voice, "Come, come, children, don't argue! It'll give the little girl some muscle to work a bit. The corporal is right."

I couldn't tell if big Ann were making fun of the corporal, or trying to help out Ursula by appeasing the corporal's anger. In any case, the result was good, for Pruneface softened a little; she even squeezed out a smile for Ann, and went off without saying any more.

Ursula got down to work near the stairs. She was furious with Jacqueline for having come to her defense. "Now the corporal hates me," she whispered.

She watched Jacqueline, who kept at her scrubbing, pausing from time to time to gasp. Mickey, who was working beside me, waxing the stairs, was also intrigued by Jacqueline's behavior. "It's an act," she said. But Ursula called to our distinguished-looking scrub lady, "Is something wrong with your back? Does it hurt all the time?"

With a resigned and rather mysterious air, Jacqueline replied, "It's nothing. Don't worry." And at the same moment the brush fell from her hand, and she toppled unconscious on the stone floor.

At our outcry, the corporal came hurrying back, with an air of supreme annoyance. She stood over us as we tried to revive Jacqueline. After all, the girl's collapse might be considered her fault.

Ursula slapped Jacqueline's hands. Ann arrived with a glass of water. Jacqueline quickly opened her eyes, apologized, and said that the fainting spell was of no consequence. She insisted that she could go on working. After a moment's hesitation, we all went back to our tasks.

Mickey, with her chattery ways and her funny little accent that made everything she said seem somehow a bit more intimate, now declared, "You know, I think she really did faint. She looks like she's acting all the time, but I think the faint was real."

One of the girls above us on the stairs began to sing
"Aupres de ma blonde";
she had a Brittany accent. The warm, reassuring voice of Ann joined in the refrain, and then, one by one, we all picked it up. The tense and somber atmosphere that pervaded the large dim hall seemed to dissolve.

Ann paused in her singing to remark that it was still raining outdoors. This was London, where it always rained. We would get used to it, as to everything else.

A bell rang, and several women came up from the kitchen, carrying enormous steaming dishes. "Dinner!" they cried.

There were not yet enough tables and benches for all of us in the dining room. We had to crowd together on the benches. Finally everyone managed to squeeze in somewhere, and there was a kind of general sigh of relief. But just then the corporal shouted, "Attention!"

Ann was the first to jump up. The rest of us instinctively imitated her. The door opened, and several women entered. They were dressed in impeccable uniforms, with gold stripes on their sleeves.

The Captain was in front. She was a large and handsome woman, with graying hair cut short. She had a heavy face with a self-satisfied mouth, an intelligent forehead, and impenetrable eyes. Behind her stood the warrant officer, Petit, a smallish woman who had the look of a little old man, with reddish-gray hair and a face filled with small wrinkles. She was altogether like a gallant old fellow holding himself quite erect and looking over the girls with a friendly eye.

"Everything here is still on a makeshift basis," said the Captain. "In a few days we'll have the house furnished and each of you will be assigned to a job in the forces. If any of you has any difficulty, come and see me. You know that my job is to help you, and I count on making this barracks a home for each and every one of you, since you are so far away from your families. I have some important projects in mind; I have big ambitions for you. I hope that you will put in a great deal of work these first days, and that you will get along well with your officers. France, for whose sake you have…"

While the Captain talked, I could see Ann studying the warrant officer, Petit. Yes, Petit had the air of an elderly man, and I suppose Ann knew that it was inevitable that Petit should notice her. She touched her tie to make sure the knot was in place; she passed her hand over her hair.

Petit was studying all the girls, smilingly, looking from one to the other of us, until her eyes met Ann's, and then her eyes remained immobile for an instant. Petit had small gray clever eyes. It seemed to me, watching her, that her little pupils were suddenly drowned in Ann's large somber blue eyes, and even I, only a bystander at this silent exchange, could sense a current passing between the two women.

They looked at each other over the heads of the rest of us, and I thought: They've never met before, but they recognize each other; they know they're the same kind. It was plain that there was no need of words or of explanations between them. It was quite simple, quite clear, and even if nothing came of it, they could count on each other in the eternal battle between themselves and other women—those of us who were subject to the needs, the fears, the weaknesses that neither Ann nor Petit felt.

We resumed our places at the tables. There was no table linen, but the food was good. After all, the cook was French, and from Normandy. She knew her work; she had operated a restaurant before the war. The cook was large and fat, with hair dyed a hard black. She didn't know how to speak without shouting, and her voice was rough.

Assigned to her in the kitchen were three little girls from Brittany who had just arrived on a fishing boat. They were young, fresh, round-cheeked; they didn't use make-up, and they looked even more unsuited to their uniforms than the rest of us.

No one ate very much. We all felt homesick. On the wall, there already hung a huge photograph of General de Gaulle. Occasionally someone would raise her head toward him, as though looking for reassurance.

The alert sounded precisely at six o'clock, as it did every night. No one had gone out that evening. It was our first day, and we were busy arranging our things, and besides, very few of us knew anyone in London.

In the evening, a second group of a dozen women arrived, and we "old ones" experienced a certain feeling of superiority. We were already forming little groups among ourselves.

The silken Jacqueline, noisy Mickey, and little Ursula were in my dormitory, and from the first we were somehow drawn together. The reason came out, perhaps, when a young woman with a large full mouth and an absolutely round face approached our little group, and standing facing us asked, without any preliminaries, whether we were virgins.

Mickey began to laugh. Jacqueline assumed a haughty, offended air. Ursula simply blushed and said yes. On the instant, our dormitory was baptized "The Virgins' Room" —though the young woman who had asked the question could obviously not be included in that category. Her name was Ginette, and she informed us that she was a salesgirl and a divorcee. She undressed, promenading naked among the cots, and declared to Jacqueline, "You know, the best thing about my face is my legs." It was true that she had pretty legs.

Presently Ginette held up a pair of the regulation khaki panties they had handed out to us. "Just look at that! What a monstrosity! How can I expect to get a lover with that?" And on the spot, Ginette brought out a pair of scissors and a needle and thread, and began to turn the panties into briefs. At once, the rest of us followed her example. Each of us remade the regulation underwear.

A bomb fell not far away; then there was a crash of breaking glass. Mickey, sitting at the foot of her bed, was putting curlers in her hair. A woman who was a hairdresser in civilian life came over to help her, and then the hairdresser began to discuss Ursula's coiffure. She declared that Ursula ought to have her hair done up in curls, to make her look a little more mature. An argument began. Jacqueline wanted Ursula's hair put up in a bun, to make her look sophisticated, and Mickey was all for having it in short curly clusters, to make her look boyish. But Ursula rejected all of our suggestions, holding her head in her two hands as though to keep us from tearing out her hair.