Two letters today, one to Pips and one to his mother, and differing tones begin to emerge. He is much more matter-of-fact with Pips, focusing on what is going on round about him, trying to explain things as best he can, within the confines of military censorship. With his mother he is more emotional, recalling the time they spent together before he left for France, and looking forward to being together again – either when he gets leave, or that ‘joyous time’ when it would all be over and he could return home.

He was upbeat about his surroundings. The shed provided adequate shelter, especially since two of his three companions had left on a course, and there was much more space. The food was good and the mess – a dugout with a table down the middle and little sleeping bunks down the sides – comfortable enough. His steel helmet had felt heavy at first, but he was getting used to it, but the rats and mice were more of a problem, one of them gnawing its way into the haversack he was using as a pillow, and biting through the liner of his emergency rations. The rain had stopped, but the ground was still sticky – although the men remained cheerful, drying themselves off around their braziers.  He told his father that ‘I have seen plenty to interest me here and enough of war to disgust me without having been into the Front Line yet’.

Sherriff’s sister, Beryl, in nurses uniform (around 1918). (By permission of the Surrey History Centre.)

The previous day he and a fellow officer (unnamed, but we know from his later war memoir that it was 2nd Lieutenant L.H. (‘Jimbo’) Webb, who had arrived in France just a few days earlier) had taken a trip up to the front line, to find their way around. He told his father that ‘All the way up the trenches you hear a bang behind and then a fearful screeching overhead as the shell flies by and a second later a dull crash as it comes down behind the German lines’. He told his mother, too, about the ‘constant crash! crash! bang! over ahead of us’ but he tried to be stoic about it: ‘I feel that it is useless feeling miserable and so really feel quite happier than expected.’

There were two Captains in the company (Hilton and Spencer, according to his Memoir), and six Lieutenants. He was in charge of a platoon of about 25 men (companies were usually about 150 in strength, although numbers varied), and he would be taking some of them on a working party up towards the front line the next day – something he was not looking forward to. In the meantime, his biggest concern was to receive some goodies in packages which he might share with his mess mates: he wrote that, even in rest billets, it was hard for him to find things that he wanted – ‘chicory and coloured glass vases seem to be the chief articles which French people specialise in’. A couple of packages from home bearing chocolate and peppermints would be very welcome.

[Next Letters: 5 October]