Free Women's Barracks by Tereska Torres Page A

advice, screaming as each bomb fell. The sailor had put her down in the hold, and in the meantime the captain had raised anchor for England. On arriving, he had been startled to discover his stowaway.
    The little girl had been even more astonished, but there she was in England, together with a number of French sailors, who advised her to stay. She had wept, imagining that her mother would believe her to be dead, but she had decided to remain, hearing the call of General de Gaulle. A woman's army was about to be formed—and at home there was the Boche.
    That was how most of these daughters of the fishermen and peasants of Brittany had arrived, to be assigned by the Captain to kitchen work or to the daily cleaning of the barracks. The little girls from Brittany went out with the sailors from their own province, who took them dancing in sordid little halls and slept with them in disreputable hotels. Otherwise, they'd have been left alone, always stuck at the barracks. With the sailors they could talk of home, of St. Malo, of Brest, of Cherbourg. What else could they have done, in a London filled with heretics who had never even set foot in Brittany?
    As assistants, these girls had the women who were on punishment. The penalties were posted in the hall. One could read:
    Jeanne, 50 lbs. of potatoes to peel, for being drunk.
    Louise, dishwashing, for painting her nails red. Andree, confined to quarters for a week, for disrespect to an officer.
    Two or three times, Ursula had been punished. Once she had appeared late for morning roll call. Another time the corporal had found her hair too long. Ursula peeled potatoes to atone for her long hair—it had reached to the collar of her jacket, which was forbidden. This regulation was relaxed later on, and Ursula again let her hair grow; but at first this rule, like all the others, was rigidly enforced.
    Seated on the kitchen stool, enveloped in a long yellow smock of rough canvas, she had endured the jesting and the ribaldry of Machou and her acolytes for two hours. No one spoke directly to her, but their voices, which seemed to be purposely raucous, and their descriptions of their affairs with men disgusted Ursula. She felt sick and dirty. There was no feeling of superiority in her, as in Jacqueline. On the contrary, Ursula was embarrassed by her own feeling of revulsion. She would have liked to be able to hide it, as though it were some disability, and to laugh with the others, and to be treated as one of them. She wanted so much to be liked, but there was nothing to be done. Whenever she opened her mouth, her voice seemed to come out false, strange, and forced, so that Ursula herself couldn't recognize it, and she was sure that the others were not deceived. They called her a sissy, and gave their tales an extra seasoning so as to make her blush.
    All this was not purposely vicious; except for Machou, they weren't badhearted. But they were bored in the kitchen, and the presence of a timid little girl who blushed was a diversion. Their cruelty was only childish. Actually most of them were of the same age, or scarcely older than Ursula. And they knew well enough what would be thought of them at home if their mothers or fathers were aware of the life they were leading in London.
    At her table in the hall, Ursula heard the coarse voice of Machou, and the voice of one of the Brittany girls answering in the same tone. She sighed and opened a book that she had taken from the barracks library. The door of the switchboard room was closed. Claude was angry with her, and wasn't speaking to her, for it was generally known how the news had spread of their night together, even though Mickey swore that she hadn't said a word. And for Ursula there was another complication. The women were no longer speaking to her. Claude, nevertheless, had lost none of her popularity. She was admired and rather feared by the girls. It was Ursula whom they all held in disfavor, and every night Ursula wept in her