‘I am still back with the training Battalion and having quite an enjoyable time,’ wrote Sherriff to his mother. ‘The weather is very changeable – snow, biting winds and warm sunshine in turn – but on the whole it is very fine weather and the country is very beautiful – the spring is beginning to show everywhere’. The previous evening they had enjoyed a show performed by a Pierrot group known as The Tonies, whose songs and sketches had been ‘quite good’.

He presumed she had heard the good news from the front, which also seems to have made him more hopeful that the war might be coming to and end: ‘The time passes very quickly sometimes and sometimes very slowly – generally the time in the line hangs badly and the time out passes very quickly – but all the time is gradually passing towards the day of peace which I sincerely hope will not be very long now.’

Apologising for the lack of news in his letter he drifted into reminiscence about home, as he often did when writing to his mother:

‘Home always seems so near somehow. I can shut my eyes and see every detail of the place – the crack in the plaster outside, and above the front door – the trees in the front garden and the light in the scullery window at night – every detail seems so plain, and all the scenes, too, in the Park, and in Kingston etc. I hope it will not be long before we are back to them all again – and then all the castles we have built in the air may come true, I hope.’

[Next letter: 12 April]