Читать книгу Sand In My Shoes: Coming of Age in the Second World War: A WAAF’s Diary - Joan Rice - Страница 53

In the morning of Thursday the officer I work for snatched my Daily Express from my hand and said, ‘Hoorah, hoorah! The war will be over in six months. The Germans have done the very worst thing now’ – and a lot more hoorahs. In my heart I don't myself believe it but I spent the morning saying ‘six months of war and three months of cleaning up and I'll be in Paris by next April’.

In the afternoon we went to be inoculated and filed one by one into rugged grandeur's (the doctor's) office, to have our right arms pierced by the tetanus and our left by the anti-typhoid. I had no time to wait and think about it. Everyone else was genuinely indifferent. I didn't look at the needle. I was really quite brave – an improvement anyway on my screaming days at the dentist doorstep. ‘You'll feel awful in the evening,’ previously inoculated WAAFs told me, ‘freezing cold and nothing you can do will make you warmer.’

Accordingly, that evening I built up a colossal fire in my billet, piled blankets high on my bed with a further reserve on a chair, put on several jumpers and got to bed with a hot-water bottle, two aspirins, a box of cheeses, some broken chocolates, four buns and grapes from South Africa given to me by Bridget Prouse. I got extremely hot and soon went to sleep but the great frost came not at all. In the morning, noble to the last, I got up for breakfast. After breakfast I felt very odd and went back to bed. Finally I felt so foul I cast aside my book and unwisely toyed with the remains of last night's food. At lunchtime friends brought me a letter from Barbara. Cheered by that (she's asked me to Wales for my holidays), I tottered, pale and aching, to the Mess to work and on to a Chinese restaurant with Joyce, Mickey and Boompsie and finally feeling better to Bunty's where she and I laughed a lot about old days at school, while Mrs Goldie knitted (until she broke her needle and pulled it all undone) a year-old coat for a yet unborn baby. Eric listened and fed us with chocolates he's brought over with him for us.