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war.
    Yet these English people appeared cheerful and calm.
    The only betrayal was that the women on line stared at the American girls’ nice stockings. Their own were homely makeshifts, much darned.
    The girls looked in the window of a food shop. There was little except potatoes, mutton and Brussels sprouts.
    No eggs, no red meat, no oranges.
    Cherry sighed. “Let’s go see the church,” she suggested.
    They went up High Street, past a staid chemist shop which, unlike an American drugstore, was not a won-drous bazaar but sold only drugs, past a stationer’s with books in the small window, past the familiar red front of a Woolworth’s. They found the church was lovely within, and with the rector’s permission, they lingered there.
    Coming out, the girls remembered Major Thorne’s suggestion that they have a tea party.
    “Have we the right to eat these people’s limited food?” Ann asked.
    They debated it, and decided Major Thorne would not have suggested having tea if it were not all right.
    “Besides,” Maggie offered shyly, “we’ll be careful to eat very, very little.”

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    Cherry remembered having passed a shop with a sign reading Tiffin at Four O’clock . She proposed, “Tiffin must mean tea, and four o’clock must mean you can’t buy food at any old hour of the day.” They found the shop and went in. It was a modest little tearoom. A plump woman in a flowered apron bustled over to them. She addressed the nurses, in a country accent which they could hardly understand, as “our transatlantic friends.” It made Cherry feel very strange to realize she now had the status of a foreigner, albeit a welcome one. The woman apologized that there were no traditional strawberries and thick cream and crumpets for tea during wartime. Instead, she served them excellent tea and paper-thin cucumber sandwiches. They were fun but not fill-ing. Cherry, who had a hearty appetite, began to sympathize in earnest with war-hungered people. Paying for their tiffin led to confusion and hilarity. The big English bank notes looked like wallpaper to them, and the huge coins like lockets. The obliging teashop woman explained, and said as they walked out the door:
    “Come back after the war. Then you’ll see what a jolly country this is!”
    The six nurses waited under a great oak for a passing jeep or Army truck.
    “We had quite a lark, didn’t we,” Lieutenant Gray said soberly.

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    “It was lots of fun,” Maggie said in such a subdued voice that they all half-smiled, rather grimly.
    “Not much fun, this business of having war in your own front yard,” Cherry summed up. She thought gratefully how lucky she was to be an American. She thought too, “It’s just as well that I didn’t find Mrs. Eldredge this afternoon. I needed to see all this before I could talk with any understanding to any English civilian!” For the next few days, Cherry helped out in the Army hospital. She met so many new people and was shifted around so much, from ward to X-ray rooms, from giving treatments to soldiers to being circulating nurse at surgeries, that her head whirled. One tired Chief Nurse said to her, “I wish to goodness more of our young girls would enter nursing. There’s the free Cadet Nurse Corps scholarship for them, and all. Student nurses, right at home, could relieve this shortage so much, if they only would come forward to help and release older nurses for overseas duty.”
    “It would mean more American boys’ lives saved,” Cherry agreed. She knew that, against tremendous odds, the Army and Navy Medical Corps managed to save ninety-six men out of a hundred.
    Some extra help did come—from British children, eleven to fifteen years old, who called themselves Cadets. Cherry saw many of these Cadets from the neighborhood around the hospital. United States doctors gave them training. These Cadets proudly did 44
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