The girls at his billet

Imagine getting up in the morning and looking out of the window at the brown, flat shore and at the distant sea, with a few fishing-sails dotted about on it. Imagine dressing for the day in country clothes that it doesn't matter what they looked like exactly, considering that nobody ever looked at one, or saw whether one was plain or pretty, dowdy or smart. Imagine coming down to breakfast, always the same breakfast--porridge, fish (for Aunt Victoria won't have bacon in the place), toast, marmalade, and tea. We never have coffee. It is too much trouble to make for just a household of women. That's the keynote of our lives!

And now imagine looking round the table and seeing, morning after morning, the same faces. One old one, that's Aunt Victoria, and two young ones, my sisters, Evelyn (aged twenty-two) and Nancy, who is going to be twenty-one next month.

Also, if I craned my neck a little to look into the gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece, I could see a third young face--my own. Really, I sometimes get as tired of that view as of the view out of the windows.

Nancy and I often say what a mercy it would be if, one morning, one could look in the glass and suddenly see a perfectly different face staring at one! The face of quite another girl: dark instead of fair, say. (For all of us are sickeningly fair! I get so tired of it sometimes: tired of the gold and blue and pink and white colouring.)

Or, better still, if the face of one of us suddenly turned into the face of a young man with a nice, firm, jutting-out chin, and a toothbrush moustache! Really, it would be a comfort! Anything for a change, in fact.

Even a change for the worse! Not that there could be anything worse than this stage of absolute deadly monotony. For we never catch a glimpse of the world outside, even though it's no more than a two and a half hours' journey up to London. Aunt Victoria never lets us go. Also she is very, very "difficult" about when we get invitations to stay from girls we were with at school. It would be awful if we went and actually SAW anything of Modern Life! We can only read in the papers about what is going on. And isn't that a flavourless way of getting to know what's on at the theatres, and what sized hats people are wearing?

Even the war, when it came, seemed to have nothing to do with Mud Flats. For months and months after everywhere else was seething with excitement and military, nobody here seemed to think of going to join the Colours. The few young men in the place seemed only busy fishing, or whistling about the boat-building yards as usual. No khaki here--except in the colour of the beastly landscape! No drilling, no route-marching, no doings of any kind!

As I said to the girls: "I don't believe it would make the slightest difference to this hole even if the Germans did land: even if the Kaiser did go into residence at Buckingham Palace and ran that beastly Spread-eagle of his up in place of the Union Jack! Even that couldn't make it any more absolutely mouldy than it is now!"

So you see the state of mind we were in up to about a fortnight ago.

And now perhaps you will have some idea of what the inhabitants of our house (the "Moated Grange" we call it) felt like when the Great News came to Mud Flats.

When I say the "inhabitants," I mean, of course, we three girls, Evelyn, Nancy and me. You couldn't expect any feelings in Aunt Victoria, who is sixty-two, and has a Roman nose, and a figure like a padded armchair. Unless you count feelings about mud on the carpet, and scratches on the mahogany, and the wear and tear of the hearthrug, and her new "_Patience_" that the Doctor's old-maid sister has just taught her, and so on.

But about the Great News!

I've been chattering on so about other things that I've forgotten to put that first, as I should. It's this kind of thing that has given me my nickname of "Rattle." Everybody calls me that who knows me at all, absolutely ignoring the fact that I have got a most pompous name of my own, and that I have had my hair up for six weary months (ever since I came back from school to drag out an existence in this swamp!). You could only call it a swamp, and an unhabitable one at that, until the great----

Oh, yes! The Great News!

Well, the great news is this: Mud Flats is to be turned into a camp of instruction. Soldiers are to come here in batches, with their officers, and stay for six weeks at a time, undergoing a course of training in making bridges and pontoons, and blowing up houses, and all sorts of thrilling things that they'll have to do when they get out to the front. And when one batch goes another batch will come in and do it all over again.

The long and short of it is that Mud Flats, this awful spot ten miles from Nowhere Junction: Mud Flats, this backyard of beyond, where we live because there are only a few old people and some boat-builders and other civilians in it--_Mud Flats_ is going to be positively crammed with men!

"Men, my dears!" said I to the girls. "Do you understand? Real live young men in trousers (khaki ones, my beloved sisters!) with puttees, and enormous boots, and pipes, and deep bass voices, and by-Joves, and swaggering strides and spurs and tobacco-pouches, and all those things that we've been panting and pining for the merest glimpse of in this desert!"

"Rattle! I do wish you wouldn't allow your high spirits to run away with you like this," said Evelyn to me when she heard me giving vent to those expressions of delight upstairs in the bedroom the day after we had heard the news. You know Evelyn's the eldest and the prim one. She thinks she has to set an example, poor long-suffering dear. She said to me, "Sometimes you become positively vulgar!"

"Vulgar?" I said indignantly. "Why is it vulgar to show I'm delighted that we are all going to have some sort of a change in our lives at last? You know you and Nancy are both as glad as I am that there is now a chance that we shan't have to live the rest of our lives in this perpetual hen-party of four! Even if the new state of affairs does only last for a few months, we shall have had some fun! We shall have had some youth and tobacco-smoke about the place at last!"

Nancy's face went all quivery in her attempt not to let it crumple up into smiles. She has the prettiest face of the lot of us, I think. And we all three are as decent-looking as they make them, though I say it, in our large, blond, Greek-goddessy style. I never did hold with mock modesty, and considering that all nice girls are in duty bound to consider themselves frights, which is what seemed to be the fashion in Aunt Victoria's time. Why should it be correct for a girl not to realise that her skin is white-velvety, and her eyes like corn-cockles with dew on them, and her hair like yellow silk and masses of it?

She would be expected to notice those things quickly enough if they were on another girl, wouldn't she? In fact, she would be looked upon as stupid and unobservant if she didn't.

And if I pretended I didn't it would be merely insincerity, and insincerity is a thing I don't hold with. I told Evelyn so. I am afraid she is just a little inclined to be given to it. I suppose she thinks it's always an eldest sister's duty to look shocked at what the two younger ones say.

"It isn't as if it need make any difference at all to us, even if the village is full of soldiers," Evelyn went on, pouring cold water over my glee. "We shan't get to know any of them, just a houseful of women like ourselves."

"Shan't we!" said Nancy, from the glass where she was trying on her last Spring's hat, which she had retrimmed with a quite smart and rather military-looking "pom-pom." "Shan't we, indeed? Now I will burst upon you another bit of news that I have just heard at the post-office. These men and their officers that are going to come--where do you suppose they are going to live? There aren't any barracks for them: there aren't any tents. And they are not going to be in huts either. No," she finished impressively. "They are going to put them all into billets."

You know, until this war, we were all so benighted that I don't think any of us would have known what a "billet" was. Perhaps we should have imagined that it was a piece of wood. So it is, in the dictionary.

But now, of course, we realised exactly what was meant. It meant that every house in the place would be expected to put up some of these soldiers, to have them to board with them.