Trip from Trinidad - 7 Some of the other passengers

May 13

Dear Phoebe and Philip,

I want to tell you about last night’s film, but first want to finish off what I was writing about Mairi Chisholm before I forget all about it.

I was mentioning about things being written about the Corps, but especially Mairi and Elsie, back in England. They wrote about their ladylike appearance and cool courage under fire and this often dominated the wide coverage given to Munro’s work .War correspondents could not help themselves from being bowled over by their beauty. In his mid-thirties, the swashbuckling Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, the Daily Telegraph’s veteran war-reporter on the Western Front, was clearly smitten when he met them arrayed in the most-up-to-date khaki uniforms believing their names should enjoy an immortality associated with the greatest heroines in history.

He described Munro’s ‘daring enterprise as ‘the most remarkable and useful voluntary organisation I have ever seen in any campaign.’ Philip Gibbs, another journalist, met the women and his initial impressions remind us how resistant and sceptical the authorities were to having women close to the fighting, but seeing them in action his mind was changed: “They did not seem to me at first the type of women to be useful on the battle-field or field hospital. I should have expected them to faint at the sight of blood, and swoon at the bursting of a shell. Some of them were at least too pretty to play about in the fields of war among men and horses smashed to pulp.” However, he was humbled to see them holding their nerve when helping the wounded, without shuddering at sights of agony which might turn a strongman sick."

We are more than half way through our journey to England. I must say, people have been very interested in us and what we are doing, and it is fun to tell them that this is our first visit back to England since we left in 1890. How much the country will have changed in nearly forty years. We will hardly recognise my brothers and sisters, and Ebenezer has so few of his relatives left. We will go to see his brother Warren’s remaining family of course. Why I think we have such an interest in Margaret’s daughters’ story - is that we know how much our relatives also gave in terms of their children to the Great War. All three of Warren’s sons died in the conflict.

There is another clergyman on the ship. Ebenezer found him out one day at breakfast, and has been spending as much time talking with him as I have been with Margaret. He is called Arthur Cocks, who is about our age, but his wife Laurel, his second wife, I am sure, is much younger. They are heading for London, and retirement. and the interesting thing is that he also has been working in Trinidad for many years, and we didn’t bump into him at all. He didn’t get on until Barbados, and says that his ministry was on both islands, so that is probably why we didn’t meet up with him. He is a Baptist.

We have spent a bit of time with another couple going home for retirement - and well ready for it. He, Robert Craig, is 88 and she, Fanny, is 77. He was a planter in Jamaica, but like so many of us, he wanted to go back to England to die.

We had yet another film last night, but I didn’t enjoy it at all, so I won’t bore you with the details. It was called Metropolis.

I am enjoying the book you gave me just before we left, Phoebe - Death Comes to the Archbishop, by Willa Cather. Several of the  priests in the book are depicted as examples of greed, avarice and gluttony, while others live simple lives among the Indians. Cather portrays the Hopi and Navajo sympathetically, and her characters express the near futility of trying to replace culture with religion. It is something that we often had to contend with in Trinidad as well.

I am still carrying on my conversations with Margaret about Mairi and the war, but thought perhaps it would be better not to spend every letter talking about them.

I will tell you a bit more about some of the other passengers we have come into contact with, during meals. Another of the families with children are the Hardys. Fredrick is a chemist in Trinidad. He is only in his mid to late 30s, but his wife, Sarah, is a mere child herself, and yet has a daughter, Beatrice, who is 3. They are going back to Bradford in Yorkshire, basically because they feel that they want their child to be raised in England where there is a more structured educational system.

We tend not to spend too much time with the straight forward tourists, but Marjorie Lampert, a woman in her late 20’s and travelling on her own is an exception. She came into an inheritance and wanted to spend some of it on a cruise to the Carribean, but I think she was very disappointed with what she found, and will be pleased to get back to Tewksberry where she will be a woman of quite considerable means.

Enough for now.

Love

Grandma Louise