Your Daughter Fanny: The War Letters of Frances Cluett.

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

Newfoundland in 1916 was not yet a part of Canada when teacher Frances Cluett of Belleoram joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment to assist medical personnel in the First World War. After learning to bandage in St. John’s, tasting luxury on the Atlantic boat crossing and seeing some sights in London, she started work in a Lincoln military hospital where she washed patients, scrubbed tables, sorted laundry, and on her fifth day fainted while helping a nurse with a dressing. However, she must have been a hard worker because six months later she was chosen above others who had been in Lincoln longer than she to go to France. In Rouen, she bathed and oiled wounded and dying men, some of them Germans, and saw the terrible effects of gassing.

In these chatty letters, mostly to her mother and usually written over several days, she tells of her daily routines and only occasionally exclaims at the horror in which she works. She finds the energy to complain to her mother of a cake that arrived in crumbs, tells happily of Newfoundlanders she meets in her travels, some of whom she knows, and reports on occasional shopping expeditions and long walks on her infrequent times off.

The work was hard, the hours were long. Her first leave of the war came in March 1918. She went to Cannes, stayed in a palatial hotel, and returned to Rouen to write “it is enough to drive one mad.” After the war ended, she worked in a Constantinople hospital, and a year after that, she was on her way home. Surprisingly, she wrote from London that she could never do home service, that the camp and barrack life is “quite free and easy.”

There are brief footnotes, some photographs, a short preface introducing the letters, and a helpful introduction giving background on Belleoram and Fanny. The first carefree letters reveal Fanny at home in 1908 as the go-getter who would soon put her varied and pragmatic gifts to use at the service of others.