Women's Barracks

by Tereska Torres

  In the end, there were to be some five hundred of us in this service during the war, and more than as many again in an ambulance and nursing corps that was formed later for service in France. Our own group was like the WACS or the ATS. We were to replace men in all sorts of jobs, so that they might be released for combat.

  From that first day, we were to be united by one act— our act of volunteering. For whether we had come from Paris or the provinces, whether we had already been in London when the war broke out or had made our way there from abroad, whether we joined in 1940 or reached London in 1944, all of us were impelled by the same ideal. All of us, workers, students, servants, divorcees, secretaries, the younger and the older, volunteered with the sincere hope of giving ourselves to France—the France beloved of every Frenchwoman, the France for whom every one of us was certainly ready, on that first day in the recruiting station, to die.

  From the recruiting desk I passed into a huge, cold, gloomy room where a dozen young women stood shivering, naked, waiting their turns for the medical examination. The first one with whom I became acquainted was Mickey, for, with her easy, impulsive way, she was never slow to greet a stranger. A rather tall girl, with the gawkiness of a figure just out of adolescence, she commented freely and laughingly as she looked about, finding something extremely droll in the military air that we all tried to assume. As she watched the physician, hurried and coarse, examining the teeth and eyes of the girls while keeping up a stream of questionable pleasantries, Mickey remarked that it was funny to be getting acquainted with the bodies of our future comrades before we even knew their names.

  Mickey said she had just escaped from France, where she had been spending her summer holiday with her aunt and uncle. Mickey's parents were in Scotland, where her father taught French in a small college. He was French and her mother was English. They had married late in life and she was a "December child," somewhat pampered, as we were to learn, impulsive, and avid for excitement, since she had been brought up as an only child in the muted household of an aging couple. Her father was a typical absent-minded, gentle old professor, and Mickey rattled on, telling everyone within earshot about him, as we waited for our medical examination. She simply adored him, she said, slurring the accent in "adore" with a quaint tinge of English inflection. Because of her father, Mickey considered herself French rather than English. She had spent much of her young life with her father's family in France, and now she had returned on a fishing vessel to enlist in the Free French Forces.

  Mickey prattled on, seemingly quite at ease in her nudity—perhaps because she knew that she was pretty. One could see that Mickey felt sure of herself in her body, as though she were wearing a Paris dress that no one could help admiring. Hers was a slim, boyish, somewhat gawky figure in perfect modern style, marred only by a few pimples on her shoulders, a temporary blemish.

  "What you need is to make love. That'll get rid of those pimples for you," said a slightly older woman, winking at Mickey confidentially.

  Mickey laughed, almost as though the whole thing were agreed upon; after all, she was eighteen, and the day was coming when she would "make love." The expression was obviously exciting to her, touching as it did upon something that was still mysterious and forbidden.

  In a corner a little girl awaited her turn, seated on a chair. She had pulled up her slender legs and hugged them close, so that all one could see of her was her head of glossy chestnut hair, cut in a page-boy bob, falling straight and thick on both sides of her face. Her legs hid her body, while her forehead rested on her narrow, boyish knees. Trembling with cold, she hugged her legs closer to her body. The older woman's advice to Mickey and the coarseness of the woman's laughter seemed to strike the little girl, for she reacted as from a muddy-handed slap. This was Ursula.

  I noticed her then, noticed how her frail body contracted at the crude words. Instinctively she passed her fingers over her face, and she turned her head away a trifle. Later, when I came to know her well, Ursula told me that this had somehow been a terrible moment for her; not that what was said was in itself so coarse, but because she had never before completely undressed in front of others, and because the ease, the very naturalness of the remark and the assumption that went with it, not only for Mickey but for all of us, gave her her first shock of reality, her first sense of what our coming life might be like. At that moment, she later told me, she felt as though a kind of dirtiness had entered her, and was sliding down her throat.

  I wasn't the only one who noticed her revulsion, for a silken-looking young lady standing beside Ursula said, "I hate vulgarity, don't you? My name is Jacqueline. I'm from Grenoble. And you?"

  Ursula told her name and said that she was from Paris. "You're cold," Jacqueline said. "Take my coat. How old are you?"

  Ursula seemed to hesitate. When we became friends she confessed that she was wondering, then, whether to reply with her official age, eighteen, or with her real age—just short of sixteen! She hesitated, for Ursula never learned how to lie quickly, and she ended by saying that she was seventeen. That seemed an honest compromise to little Ursula.

  "You look fourteen," Jacqueline declared, with her patronizing knowingness that was to become so familiar to us. "You still look like a baby, really. Listen, I'll help you out. I'll get us assigned to the same dormitory."

  Ursula thanked her. And yet, despite her frail and childlike air, she was, as we were to learn, quite a determined little person, used to living alone and managing for herself. Her parents were divorced, and she had been raised in a variety of schools and by servants, by cousins, by nurses, in the course of travel from place to place. Indeed, she showed some embarrassment at the sudden possessiveness with which Jacqueline, aristocratic even in her nudity, had taken charge of her, and she politely refused the coat Jacqueline had offered.

  A door opened and a woman in uniform entered.

  "All those who have completed their examinations come and get uniforms," she shouted.

  Mickey led the rush to the next room, where there was a table piled with khaki garments. She was broad-shouldered, with narrow hips, long muscular legs, and diminutive pointed breasts, and she moved with a tennis-playing directness that nevertheless had a touch of the peculiarly awkward feminine charm of a girl of that age. Just after Mickey came Jacqueline, who, at the alluring call of the uniform, had momentarily deserted her new protegeé. Jacqueline was, in contrast to Mickey, finely made, with delicately rounded hips and exquisite round breasts, and small altogether, as though all that was coarse in civilization had been refined away, to leave this elegant little body, a complete statement of perfection.

  The corporal behind the table took our measures at a glance. "Sizes medium and large." She tossed each of us a jacket and a skirt of rough hard wool, two khaki shirts, two neckties, a pair of stockings, a rose-colored brassiere, a linen undershirt, a pair of knee-length khaki jersey panties, and shoes.

  We all began to dress, emitting little cries, laughing. We tried to knot our ties, to button skirts that were too large and jackets that were too small.

  The only one who seemed to know how to knot her tie properly was a strapping large girl with a boyish haircut, who looked immediately natural and in her place in uniform. When she had finished dressing she glanced around the room and called out to the corporal, "Do you want me to help you?" She had a heavy, almost masculine voice, reassuring and cheerful, and the confidence in her voice contrasted with her expression, which was a little oppressive, and predominantly sad. The oppressiveness was in her heavy chin, and there was a sadness in her very beautiful eyes, violently blue, and in her mouth with its large lips, sunken at the corners.

  The corporal accepted her help, and I think that several of us noted, mentally, that the large calm girl with her air of self-possession and, an ability to command would make good officer material.

  "What's your name?" the corporal asked. "Ann," the other replied in her deep voice, and the light feminine name seemed unsuited to her.

&nbs
p; Ursula was among the girls before the counter. Ann handed her a uniform, and then helped her to dress and to knot her tie. She had a friendly, easy way of being helpful—like a big brother.

  We studied each other in our uniforms. It was dainty Jacqueline who immediately drew every eye. She was instantly classified as ravishing—so ravishing that one could scarcely feel jealous. Jacqueline had the sort of impersonal beauty in which every other woman feels she is somehow represented. Jacqueline's complexion was the freshest, purest, rosiest imaginable. Her face was positively luminous, irradiated by her glamorous hazel eyes; her beautiful white teeth, bright and gleaming, were framed by a mouth with rather large sensual lips, as soft to the eye as they would be to kiss.

  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.

  Chapter 2

  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 s
tood 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.