Then I started washing up. They had had kippers for breakfast, and I had no idea that they were so disgusting cold, or how impossible it was to prevent water going over one’s feet when one emptied a big panful down the sink. By the time I had been at it an hour I was soaking, I could feel it on my skin, and the floor was all awash. A diver’s costume would have been really useful. The girls who had been there for months thought I was such a fool. (They do not suffer fools gladly in a military hospital!) They were quite polite, of course, that’s why it was so hard. I’m not used to people being polite to me.
The only person who was really decent was the charwoman, who was also new that morning, so perhaps she had a fellow feeling. She did not, however, seem to be quite clear as to what a V.A.D. was, for she said,—
’Oh, duckie, you are wet; new at it, ain’t you? Why don’t you buy yourself a mackintosh apron? I did in my first place, they aren’t expensive.’
Later on, when I had dried up a bit and was cleaning a saucepan with great vigour, she said,—
’Nice ’elp you’ll be to mother after this, duckie.’
I was very bucked at that remark. It’s nice to feel that one person, at any rate, believes you to be young enough to be ’a nice ’elp to mother.’
At 10.30 a.m. the kitchen staff all came into the scullery and sat on boxes and drank cocoa, and ate bread and dripping (I hid the dripping part of mine) while the orderly and boy scout had theirs in the kitchen. After cocoa I helped with the potatoes and then cleaned saucepan lids. Then I washed up the men’s dinner things. They had had Irish stew and suet pudding. Have you ever washed a pudding cloth? My last job was the pig pail! In the happy past when I have gone and loved the little pigs at Uncle Jasper’s I never knew there was a pig pail. Ours stands outside the backdoor in the yard. It’s rather like a domed cathedral; into it you scrape the kipper skins and bits of bread and fat and apple cores, and things like that.
I can do it now without active sickness. By the end of the week, perhaps, I need not shut my eyes or hold my nose.
But my hands are disgusting. My finger-nails are in deep mourning and the grease will not come off.
On Wednesday I committed the sin that can never be forgiven, for, unaddressed, I spoke to a General in front of matron, and I am to be shot at dawn on Friday.