‘I have still a few days of rest left and I am enjoying them quite well,’ he wrote to Pips, ‘walking every day several miles in various directions…’. The canal was still thick with ice, and the weather was intensely cold, ‘although you feel it very little as there is no wind’. In fact, he had been for a walk with an officer from the Army Service Corps, and ‘after having a few slides on the ice we walked back without overcoats as we were much too warm.’ While walking by the canal they had watched a man trying to cut his barge out of the ice with an axe (‘but after three chops he fell down and gave up the effort as a bad job’). They had also come across a group of people, a couple of them armed with shotguns, apparently hunting for squirrels in the hedgerows, but since they were very excitable with their guns the pair had quickly walked on.

The previous day he had been to a service at the local cathedral – the first Catholic service he had ever attended. He gave his father a detailed description of the whole service, which began with an old man lighting candles round the altar (very slowly), followed by much muttering and ‘people coming in and out just as they please’. Just as they were thinking of going a priest came round from behind a screen along with ‘an elderly person with a cocked hat decorated with red ribbon, a sword girt to his side and a spear – a kind of beadle…I suppose, and quite out of place in such solemn surroundings.’

Extract from letter to Pips, 2 February 1917. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: 2332/1/1/3/9]

Sherriff had obviously not enjoyed the service, for he proceeded to let rip in his letter in an uncharacteristically bad-tempered tirade:

‘I don’t think you will think what I have said sacrilegious,’ he wrote, ‘but it is all really too absurd for such present days – the root of the religion, of course, is sound – but the absurd ceremonies and tawdry, trumpery decorations, all obviously intended to impress people and an insult to their intelligence at that – what a pity that such a fine sound doctrine should be utterly spoilt, almost ruined by the pantomimic way it is conducted – it is almost an insult to the magnificent building in which it is conducted. If a religious service can be held in a broken down shell battered schoolroom as we have it – where the chaplain gives a plain sensible sermon and a few hymns are sung, I cannot see why people should worship under the same doctrine amongst gaudy trappings…I cannot see why vast quantities of candles should be lit and that each person should have two chairs, one to kneel on and one to sit on, and why a man with a cocked hat with red ribbons on it, and a sword and spear should be necessary…but I suppose cleverer men than us are responsible for the service being carried out so as to be unintelligible to everybody, so we must not complain…….”

[Perhaps the bad temper was just an indication of the fact that he was not yet fully recovered from his neuralgia and headaches, and was stressing over whether and when he should speak to the doctor.]

[Next letter: 6 February]