After a few days of silence, Sherriff found time to write a brief note to his father. He was still on the sniping course – about half-way through he reckoned – and was enjoying it: ‘it is all about the most interesting subjects that war embodies’. He couldn’t go into them in great detail, but did note that: ‘We do a lot of shooting here, and Map Reading and many various subjects, chiefly about the manners and habits of the Huns – which study has been reduced to a fine art’. In the evenings after dinner he would go for a walk with a companion, and they would:

‘watch the beautiful sunset in the West, and the war rolling and flashing in the East – miles of front almost visible from my high point.’

Their had been Zeppelin raids in London recently, and he told Pips that he hoped that their area had not suffered too much. But he was quite dismissive of the reactions he had heard from home:

‘There seems to be a lot of fuss made over it. It lasted half an hour – how would the Londoners like a kind of continuous air raid lasting weeks on end, I wonder?’

He thanked Pips for his recent letter and card, and told him that he had also received a book from his Auntie Ede – Plato’s Dialogues – which he found ‘very interesting’. He was enclosing in his own letter two pressed flowers as a souvenir of the ‘beautiful woods which surround this district’, and which reminded him very much of Claygate and Oxshott – where hoped the two of them might ramble together if all went well and he received the leave he hoped for.

[Next letter: 17 June]