‘All being well we are to be relieved this afternoon and go back to a village in rear for a rest,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘I do not know how long we will stop in rear but it should be about eight days…It is no use saying I am not fed up because I am, and when I look back on the weary hours I have spent up here, I feel it will be hard to stand another eight days, but I have got to and a rest will no doubt make a difference.’

He had been thinking of putting in for the Flying Corps – he thought he would like it, and it wouldn’t be much of a greater strain than what he had experienced. Not that he had seen anything he didn’t expect – he just thought ‘there is something [more] free about the air service than in this trench in which you feel something like a worm crawling about with your head down.’ In fact, he told her, he would prefer to be in any branch of the service than the infantry. ‘Let me know,’ he asked, ‘if you would like me to try for the Flying Corps.’

‘Rossendale’, the family home in Seymour Road, Hampton Wick. By Permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: 3813/14/3/1)

He told her he had felt well since arriving in France, apart from ‘an occasional touch of headache owing to the nerve strain out here’, but he had been able to sleep it off. ‘I’m always thinking of you and dear old home,’ he told her, ‘and am wondering how long it will be before I get home again; it seems so far off that it is almost like a dream but I hope the time will come again when I shall walk round Harmans corner… and come across Seymour Road [where he lived, in Hampton Wick] and see puss sitting on the wall and looking at me just as though I had never been away.’

[Next letter: 20 October]