Writing to his mother from the Officers’ Rest Station, Sherriff told her that the weather had been cold, but healthy, and that he had been watching some skaters on a lake where, in parts , the ice was six inches thick. He still felt guilty at being ‘back in the quiet while his friends were up in the line’, but fate had paid him back a little:

‘Yesterday as I went down the garden of the rest camp to the lavatories I slipped on the ice and went down with a hearty bang on my back and cut my hand rather nastily – luckily the RAMC in attendance immediately pounced on me to practice on and bound it all up – it has been rather painful today – throbbing, you know – but I hope it will soon get better.’

Letter to Mother, 29 January 1917. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: 2332/1/1/2/142)

Even in the rest station, however, he was finding it difficult to get thoughts of the line out of his head:

‘It seems that the further away from it [I am] the more it preys upon my mind and I feel I simply can’t go up again – of course the rest here may work a change and I am hoping it will but if I feel no better after a week here I will speak to the Doctor about it I think. Don’t worry dear, as I have said before, as I will be able to look after myself and if I have to go into the line again shortly I will make up my mind to bear it alright when the time comes.’

He apologised that his letters to her were shorter than those he wrote home to Pips, but explained that the latter were meant for everyone, whereas the letters to her were private – a means of expressing all his worries and troubles (‘exaggerated as you know only I can’). As regards his present situation, he told her that:

‘I feel extremely like the times when I did not want to go to school and worked up a worried expression and said I felt sick etc., but now, in a greater sense I feel the same thing – nothing bodily wrong, only a great mental tiredness’.

[Next letter: 30 January]