“Will you tell me,” said Mrs. F. confidentially, “if that young man is engaged to Miss B.?” (The “young man,” I might add, has a very charming fiancee of his own), and how we all laughed when she came up with the news!

The faithful “Wuzzy” had been confided to the care of a friend at the Remount Camp, and I was delighted to get some snaps of him taken by a Frenchman at Neuve-Chapelle—­I felt my “idiot son” was certainly seeing life!  “In reply to your question” (said my friend in a letter), “as to whether I have discovered Wuzzy’s particular ‘trait’ yet, the answer as far as I can make out appears to be ’chickens’!”

In time I began to get about on crutches, and the question next arose where I was to go and convalesce, and the then strange, but now all too familiar phrase was first heard.  “If you were only a man, of course it would be so easy.”  As if it was my fault I wasn’t?  It was no good protesting I had always wished I had been one; it did not help matters at all.

I came to the conclusion there were too many women in England.  If I had only been a Boche girl now I might at least have had several Donnington Halls put at my disposal!  I was finally sent to Brighton, and thanks to Lady Dudley’s kindness, became an out-patient of one of her officers’ hospitals, but even then it was a nuisance being a girl.  Another disadvantage was that all the people treated me as if I was a strange animal from the Zoo; men on crutches had become unfortunately a too familiar sight, but a F.A.N.Y. was something quite new, and therefore an object to be stared at.  Some days I felt quite brazen, but others I went out for about five minutes and returned, refusing to move for the rest of the day.  It would have been quite different if several F.A.N.Y.s had been in a similar plight, but alone, one gets tired of being gaped at as a rara avis.

The race meetings were welcome events and great sport, to which we all went with gusto.  I fell down one day on the Parade, getting into my bath chair.  It gave me quite a jar, but it must be got over some time as a lesson, for of course I put out the leg that wasn’t there and went smack on the asphalt!  One learns in time to remember these details.

It was ripping to see friends from France who ran down for the day, and when the F.A.N.Y.s came over, how eagerly I listened to all the news!  The lines from one of our songs often rang through my brain: 

     “On the sandy shores of France
      Looking Blighty-wards to sea,
      There’s a little camp a-sitting
      And it’s all the world to me—­
      For the cars are gently humming,
      And the ’phone bell’s ringing yet,
      Come up, you British Convoy,
      Come ye up to Fontinettes—­
      On the road to Fontinettes
      Where the trains have to be met;
      Can’t you hear the cars a-chunking
      Through the Rue to Fontinettes?