Vera tried to convey, too, how she was now a traveller. She wanted to give Earl some idea of the sprawl and space and harsh grandeur of the country she was passing through. She wrote to him of what she had witnessed early one morning as her train rattled through Manitoba; wrote of a vast, distant field crawling with hundreds of minute figures. The scene would forever have remained a puzzle if the track had not curved just then, carrying her nearer and nearer. Vera had laughed aloud when the tiny figures grew larger and larger, resolving themselves into soldiers bending and straightening under the brilliant morning sun. They were stooking. On a whim an officer had turned a day of back-breaking labour for some farmer into a few minutes of diversion on a route march for a company of men. Now the troops were larking about, ramming the butts of sheaves into the soil and tossing the heavy heads together, battle-dress drab against the sun-drenched gold of stubble. As the train rumbled by, reducing speed on the bank of the curve, the men closest to the tracks waved to the passengers who were the first witnesses to their joke, looking not at all like soldiers but like boys on an outing, and one or two threw their caps exuberantly into the air, their mouths yawning in a soundless cheer.
Vera tried very hard to get things right in her letters, to capture the strangeness of being far from home. The descriptions came so thick and fast her pen could scarcely record them. There were the prosperous farms of old rich Ontario with acres of tall corn and huge barns and sleek black and white cows with heavy udders, dreaming in the flickering shade of great trees she guessed were maples. And she described the enormous temple of Union Station in Toronto which by rights ought to have seemed empty and hollow because of its soaring roof, but which bustled and teemed with soldiers and airmen and sailors and women and children all rushing about every which way, hugging and kissing while the arrivals and departures rolled on like some awful announcement of the doom of journeys missed, chances never seized, life never lived. So hurry up! And when she came to the end of her trip, a young girl in a town in Ontario, she wanted, out of the fullness of her nineteen-year-old heart, to write a letter that said, “Tell everyone in Connaught that Vera Monkman is alive and kicking!” Both words underlined three times for emphasis. She didn’t write any such words, however. Instead, she signed it, “Your loving sister, Vera,” and enclosed a dollar of her pay for Earl, to show she was thinking of him and also to demonstrate to her father she was doing just fine, thank you very much, without him. Because, for as long as Vera corresponded with Earl, filing her reports on life in the Army, she never sat down to write without imagining two faces reading her letters, one Earl’s, and the other, hovering just over his shoulder, her father’s.
Not that everything about the Army was wonderful. By the time she was transferred to Saint Anne de Bellevue Vera was having second thoughts about being a cook. In summer the kitchens were hotter than the hubs of hell and the noise, the incessant rattle of pans and clash of pot lids, the thin steamy stench of watery vegetable soup, the smell of raw chickens and burned food so jangled her nerves and upset her stomach that she found it next to impossible to eat. For days on end she could keep nothing down but weak tea, soda biscuits, and Jello. Yet never once did Vera present herself on sick parade. What if they found something really wrong and she was given a medical discharge? The last thing she wanted was to be forced to quit the Army just when she was proving herself so able. Because she was able. In six months Vera had been promoted to lance corporal in recognition of her general efficiency, precise and accurate record-keeping, and careful management of supplies. There were predictions she would make sergeant before long.
It was difficult to bring her success to Earl’s and her father’s attention without seeming to brag, bragging being much disparaged among the Monkmans. The solution proved simple in the end. Vera had a studio portrait taken of herself in uniform, taken in three-quarter profile so that the stripes on her arm were clearly visible. She was certain they would be noticed. Of other matters, which reflected less directly on her, it was not necessary to be so modest. She had the excuse that her descriptions to her brother of extended leaves taken in the fabulous cities of the U.S.A. were justified because of their educational value. If they also happened to cast Vera in a sophisticated, worldly light, maybe that couldn’t be avoided.
In particular, she dwelt at great length on her one visit to New York, where she and her companions had plucked up the courage to storm the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria looking for movie stars and from there, in a moment of insane bravado, pressed an assault on the restaurant, requesting a table for luncheon. They got one, it being an unfashionable, slack hour, and they servicewomen in the uniform of an ally. It was the uniform, Vera once again explained to her brother, which earned her the right to eat in a hotel that numbered among its guests millionaires, European nobility, and the stars of stage and screen.
Later, they took in all the city’s tourist sights, saw Radio City Music Hall and the high-kicking Rockettes for whom they harboured a mild contempt as frivolous women who did not appreciate the seriousness of war and the sacrifices it demanded. They went to the top of the Empire State Building and then uptown to see Grant’s Tomb.
These were the things she wrote to Earl, to mark the changes in her. There were other things of which Vera was scarcely aware and, if she had been, could not have written of to a brother.
Old friends like Phyllis and Mabel might have thought that life in the Army had led to a deterioration in her manners and turned her just a tiny bit vulgar and unladylike. They would certainly be alarmed to see the way she drank beer, straight out of the bottle rather than a glass, and how, when she was tight, she would rise unsteadily to her feet and say loudly, in mixed company, “Make way, boys, this lady’s got to tinkle.”
Somehow, too, the promises which Vera had made to herself to improve her mind had been neglected. She only glanced at the war news in the papers and had given up attempts to read books in the barracks during the evenings. The hubbub there was too distracting, her attention snagged on bits of camp gossip and talk of men. Most evenings she spent playing cribbage with a homesick recruit from Newfoundland who cried in the shower, believing tears couldn’t be detected in the midst of all that streaming water. But as the case of that girl proved, Vera was learning it was impossible to hide anything in the Army, or hide from anything. Like sex. She was getting sick and tired of being importuned and bothered by soldiers. The young ones were no better than beggars, all beseeching mouths and beseeching hands. They fumbled at you on the dance floor and in ill-lit doorways. What was worse, they struck sentimental poses and talked of dying because their bragging, lying friends told them that never failed to produce the desired result. To Vera it was exasperating and wearying, fending off this desperate stroking and fondling. They were nice enough boys but fools. Couldn’t they see that all this talk of death sounded ridiculous standing under a lamppost in Kitchener?