Sherriff’s letter to his mother began with a sigh of relief:

‘We are now settled down for a little while in a quiet village a long way behind the line, almost out of sound of the guns – just a faint rumble in the distance a very long way away.’

He told her he was back with his old company (‘with the same old friends’), and that, as his neuralgia was better (‘thank goodness’) he had not yet been to see the battalion doctor. He told her, as he had Pips the day before, that the doctor who had examined him while at the transport had given him a note, but he hoped that he would not need to make use of it: ‘perhaps the quiet will do me good and I may get rid of it [the neuralgia] entirely’.

Fragment of letter to his mother. By permission of the Surrey History Centre (Ref: 2332/1/1/2/166)

‘I went for a ride into town today,’ he wrote, ‘to get money for the men to be paid’. It had been a glorious day, and he had chosen to ride a bicycle (rather than a horse) and had a very enjoyable time. Summer seemed to be coming on in earnest, with the days getting longer, and the countryside looking greener.

The men were in need of a rest, he felt, ‘having done extremely useful work’. They had also obtained plenty of trophies ‘in the form of German helmets etc – you can read in the papers how they left in such a hurry as to leave plenty of useful stuff behind for our people’. There was a possibility that officers who had been out in France for 6 or 8 months might be allowed 4 days leave to go to Paris; he would much prefer 6 days to go to England – ‘but I am afraid that is out of the question owing to the submarines’. Nevertheless he would still go on hoping that the time would come when he would be able to be back home with her again.

[Next letter: 23 April]