To slave for others all day as long as you can come in and find things ready for you at night--your hot cocoa in its cup and your hot-water bag--that great consolation of the women members of the B.E.F.--in your bed, is endurable. But to come in and have no cocoa if you don't make it yourself, no bag if you don't see to it--that is a different affair, and that is where these two girls seemed to me to touch a point that of necessity the others I had seen did not. And now that women are doing men's work it is to be supposed they have found out the value of meals and no longer look on an egg with one's tea as the greatest height to which nourishment need rise, and hence have honourably to set about cooking for themselves--and there is no woman but will understand the boredom of that--the rations that a paternal army insists on showering upon them. Under such circumstances to work is human, but to eat divine.
As I stepped out of the car at the door, feeling terribly impertinent at this rolling round in luxury to gaze at the work of my betters, one of the V.A.D.'s came to the door of the shanty to greet us. She was a fair creature, with windblown yellow hair and a smut which kindly accident had placed exactly like an old-time patch upon the curve of one flushed cheek. She was wrapped in a big pinafore of butcher blue, and explained that she was "cleaning up."
It all looked very clean to me, certainly the little dispensary, the room into which you first walked, was spotless, everything ranged ready for Sick Parade, glass, white enamel, metal, shining in the shaft of sunlight which came palely in at the open doorway. To the left was the kitchen, stone-floored, fitted with an English stove, to the right the tiny slip of sitting-room from which opened the two still narrower little bedrooms. That was all.
This is the atmosphere in which the two girls live, but, as usual, they have done everything that is possible with it. Brilliant curtains, pictures, rows of books--the rest stations keep up a sort of circulating library, exchanging their books from time to time amongst themselves by way of the ambulance trains, which are thus supplied with a library also--and charming pottery ranged along the shelves. The rest stations rather make a point of their pottery. It is their tradition always to drink out of bowls instead of cups, and their plates have the triumphant Gallic cock, in bravery of prismatic plumage, striding across them.