“Just shut up and leave her alone!” Eve bellowed at the worst offender. “She’s doing her bit like the rest of us, isn’t she?”
“Thanks for standing up for me,” Audrey told Eve later.
“You could do it yourself, you know.”
“I don’t know how. I didn’t know how in boarding school, either, and those girls were all from the gentry. Remember how miserable I was? This is even worse.”
“It’ll get better. Once we survive basic training, we’ll have something useful to do.”
Audrey wasn’t certain she would survive. In the past seven days, they had stripped her to the bone of everything familiar and comforting, everything that told her who she was. Physicians poked and prodded her during humiliating medical examinations. The screaming sergeant major bullied and harassed her until she dreamed of “left-right, left-right” in her sleep. She wouldn’t have made it this far without Eve.
“You’re much better at adjusting to change than I am,” Audrey said when they’d finally collapsed onto their narrow cots that first night. They slept in the former dormitory of a bleak boys’ preparatory school. Eve had to show Audrey how to put sheets on the bed. The scratchy fabric felt like sacking. The ugly Army-issue pajamas would fit a girl twice Audrey’s size. Prison must be like this.
“The only reason I can adjust to poor conditions is because I’ve been poor all my life,” Eve had replied. “At least you can go back to your posh life after the war ends.” Audrey wanted to assure Eve that her life would also be better after the war when she married Alfie, but neither of them truly believed that Eve’s romance would have a happy ending.
For now, Audrey’s only reminders of her former life were the civilian clothes she’d worn to the training center, now stowed inside the locker by her bed, and the framed photograph of herself and Alfie on top of that locker. The picture had been taken on board the Rosamunde the last summer she and Alfie sailed together, the sun in their faces, the wind blowing their hair. Eve also had a photograph of Alfie on her locker, looking handsome in his uniform, a carefree grin on his face. The ATS had stripped everything else from Audrey, including her own underwear and brassieres. The Army-issue ones were ghastly.
“These frumpy old things look like something our grannies would wear!” one of the girls said, holding up a baggy pair of the long-legged underpants.
“Our grannies wouldn’t be caught dead in those knickers!” someone else shot back. Every girl in the dormitory received the same-size brassiere, whether they were plump or thin, well-endowed or flat-chested, and was told to make it fit. The girls joked about sharing the surplus or stuffing the cups with socks. As the other girls stripped without a care, the lack of privacy humiliated Audrey. It was one of the things she’d despised about boarding school.
The food in the dining hall of the former boys’ school required another adjustment. “I can’t even guess what kind of meat this is, can you?” she asked Eve as she sawed into a rubbery brown lump.
Eve shrugged off her concerns. “I don’t care. I’m eating a lot better than my flatmates and I did before I enlisted. None of us had time to stand in queues all day with our ration coupons. All the meat would be sold by the time we got home from work.” Audrey had lost weight, not only from the inedible food but from the endless marching, day after day, and the requirement that they run from place to place rather than walk. Her blistered feet spoke of how unaccustomed she was to such rigorous exercise—and of the awkwardness of her clunky Army-issue shoes. She remembered how gracefully Eve had skipped barefoot across the rocky stream the day they’d first met, and how she’d climbed down from the tree as if she’d been born to do it. Yes, Eve fared much better in the Army than Audrey did.
Now she sat on her bed in the few remaining minutes before lights-out, using her regulation sewing kit to alter her brassiere and various other items in her uniform kit—jacket, skirts, pullovers, slacks, shirts, and ties. The sleeves and hems were miles too long for her and Eve’s petite frames. The thick stockings resembled the ones her housekeeper wore. Everything needed to be labeled with her name and number. And she still had to shine her shoes and uniform buttons before she went to bed. They’d issued her a cleaning kit for each task, and Audrey hadn’t known what they were for. Her shoes and clothing would appear in her wardrobe at Wellingford as if by magic, clean, polished, ironed, and brushed. Audrey had never sewn in her life, and now she sucked blood from the latest prick to her finger. Yes, Army life required a bigger adjustment than she’d ever imagined. How had Alfie endured it?