Sherriff had not written home for a week, during which time the Battalion had moved into positions in the frontline again (on 14 March). He was not with his colleagues, however, for, as he wrote in letters to both his mother and Pips, he was in a little village (‘away back behind the guns’) helping to train recruits newly arrived from England. He thought that the job might last a fortnight, after which he would return to the Battalion, and some other officers would come down. Since it offered a short rest from the front line he imagined that everyone would be given a turn. He felt he had been chosen first because he was now ‘practically senior officer in the Company’: of the 11 officers who had been with the Company when he arrived, 8 had gone, transferred to other units or companies.
Writing on the same day to his mother he enclosed a couple of pictures of his fellow officers. One of them was of the whole battalion. Although he thought it was not a very good likeness of some of his colleagues, he took the trouble to identify two of them to his mother: ‘The man standing on my right is Hatten – [an] old Grammar School boy…the man with the glasses on my left is Reynolds who is in the Sun Fire office’ [whom he had mentioned once before].
In the middle row, from left, are Hatten, Sherriff and Reynolds. Enlarged section of photo of 9th East Surrey Officers. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: ESR/25/Clark/7)
The other picture was of the officers of ‘C’ Company, and he thought it was rather better, although he was not entirely happy with his own picture in it:
‘You see I am doing the usual shutting up my lips – I don’t know why I always do that in a photo – I suppose it is the strain of keeping still. Have I changed much? I expect I am looking rather worried.’
In his letter to Pips he described his billet at some length:
[The room] looks into a genuine French farm yard, from a big window which nearly reaches the floor. There is a dovecote in the middle with a weathercock boasting a roman nose – underneath an old horse is slowly walking round and round in a monotonous circle harnessed to a pole…another equally aged horse laboriously walks on a kind of treadmill which churns up hay. An old French man with blue trousers and a not-too-clean shirt and face is sharpening a knife and talking to an old lady who is sitting at the door of the farm shouting inarticulate words every time he removes the knife to feel the blade. A pit on the side of the yard is filled with mashed swedes – the purpose appearing tone to give off a violent smell. The whole yard is strewn with straw (or is it manure?)’
He additionally told his mother that he had his own room, with another officer in an adjoining room, and ‘as we have electric light in the room you can imagine we are very well put up here’.
The officers of ‘C’ Company, 9th East Surreys. Front row, left to right: 2nd Lt Douglass, Capt Warre-Dymond, 2nd Lt Trenchard. Back row, left to right: 2nd Lt Kiver, 2nd Lt Sherriff, 2nd Lt Toplis. Seated: 2nd Lt Homewood. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: SHC 2332/6/4/2/3)
He was writing in the evening, having been out all day with the men: ‘The country here is very beautiful in its way…very much like Surrey with woods and hills…sometimes, looking down from the training grounds, you catch glimpses of country exactly like England’. The training that day had consisted of shooting on the range and bomb-throwing (which he found ‘very exciting’). He told Pips that he had to bring his letter to a close as he was just about to go to a ‘cinema show’. He was obviously relishing what he called the ‘quiet homely sort of days’, but he was well aware that they would soon pass.
[Next letters: 21 March]