1021 Docks Operating Company, R.E.
A.P.O. 5145
_ _ _

24th. July 1943

FROM SICILY

Dearest Heart,
Lockley has just unpacked my uniform case and produced with a flourish my typewriter ! So now I am complete ! It travelled alone, or rather with a store ship, and here it is. So you know I’m all right. I have my typer, I need only you and Candy – or perhaps Dickie Anne if he-she is there now, this twenty fourth day of July.

I spend so much time censoring letters and rushing about that I have no time of my own and this letter is being written while I wait for the lorry to go to Town with the mail for the unit and with the returns from pay parade, made in the sandy waste which is our home. We move on Monday to a port, name to be divulged later.

Fine spirits, fine company a la hi-de-ho. No news, just sandy life under a tarpaulin tent. Maybe we shall get a school or an aubergo in our next place, if the R.A.F. have left anything. Otherwise its the camp life again wolf-cubs delight.

One sergeant said in his letter, very charmingly, darling, keep in touch with the stars, for I sleep under them every night. That is a nice thought. Naughty to quote from censoring letters but its so sweet.

Peter has a battered Time of the Singing he found in the library on his ship, which he hawked around. He’s enthusiastic and gay as ever. Matthews, the elderly Uncly subaltern, is absent, sick with a fever, otherwise we are all healthy and very fit, though sandy.

This is a little letter, “slipped in” this evening I hope to get two quiet hours by great strength of mind to write properly to you. This says I love you, I think of you, I am you, and I plan everything with the objective as our reunion. Be happy, draw and paint, play with your child, be well, and God bless you.
Ever your devoted though hurried husband.

P.S, Now for a dusty five mile drive to Town, with the trim square, renaissance church, untouched by the R.A.F. though houses around are bashed to dust, and with the almond blossom. Greetings to Uncle Jack, love to your mother.