My Dear Bessie Read Free Page B

each other much better through an ‘in confidence’ understanding, which is implicit in our different relationship.
    Your comments on Abbey Wood * etcetera rather puzzle me, and if you feel like enlightening me, please do so (‘I remember also the day, when I found that you never understood why I cut my losses, you returned those letters, a very black day,’ is what you say). I am more than hazy on the subject. What letters did I return? I like your observation that you can never dramatise for long, and ‘humour wins the day’, it is my own view, too.
    You say it is odd that I can be so ignorant about women, but apart from the important omission of never having slept with one, I regard myself as capable of detecting a wile when I see one, and I do not think women are so very different from men in any important aspect. If I were really plonking down what I did know, I should have to admit that I am puzzled very often by the behaviour of many of my own sex, and not a little quizzical about my own at times. Certainly I am no quidnunc in the labyrinth of sex matters. How bored I should be if I was, my mysterious Bessie!
    I am sorry you felt the least bit ‘weepy’ at my chess, garden, pigs. The things your tears are best reserved for are beetles this size, and fleas whose size is much less horribly impressive, but whose powers of annoyance are far greater. I exult in the possession of a sleeping sheet, which is very nice to have next to the skin compared with the rough Army blankets. At night, if the fleas are active and I cannot subdue them with my fevered curses, I take my sheet and my naked body into the open, and turn and shake the sheet in the very cold night air. Then I get back into bed and hold the ends of the sheet tight around myneck, to keep out my nuisance raiders. The last few months have been very pleasant as regards heat, and fleas have been few. I am not looking forward to the summer.
    A Sergeant Major is usually a curt, barking, more-in-anger-than-in- sorrow, kind of chap. Yet the one we have here couldn’t treat us better if he was our Father. He does more fatigues than anyone else in the Camp, asks you to do things, never orders. When he came here three months ago, we had one dirty old tent to eat our meals in, and that was all. Since then, we have added several more tents; plenty of forms and tables; a Rest Tent with a concrete floor; dozens of games, a regular weekly Whist Drive, a small library. Once we could only bathe in our tent, petrol tin fashion. Now, we use the showers in town, doing some forty miles in the process. If this is the Army – well, it’s not bad.
    Christmas Day was quite happily spent, as I haven’t been away from home long enough to feel bad about separation. True that last night I dreamt of my Mother, and as she called me in my sleep, I awoke to hear my brother calling ‘Holl!’ (my family name), as, in a vague kind of way it was my turn to first brave the morning air and put on – what do you think? – the shaving water.
    We have been doing very well lately for evening entertainments. On five successive evenings we had an Accordion Band and Concert Party, which was very good and clean; an RAF Concert Party, which dripped muck and innuendo; and an ENSA * show, ‘Music Makers’, who rendered popular classics, and gave a thoroughly good evening, though the audience thinned out when ‘legs’ did not show. We get a Film Show every Saturday; whateverthe weather, it is held in the open air, the audience (stalls) sitting on petrol tins, while those in the gallery sit on top of the vehicles, many of which come several miles for what is usually the only event of the week. I have sat in the pouring rain with a groundsheet over me. I have sat with a gale bowling me over literally while Barbara Stanwyck (in The Great Man’s Lady – she was a brunette) bowled me over figuratively. We take our fun seriously, and