David to May HOLZMINDLN March 1st 1918 Letter No. 18
My Dearest,
The waistcoat has come and is just splendid, even better than the first one. It is so nice and long and fits like a glove (how did you manage to get it to fit like this) and seems to hug me. I nearly went to bed in it the first night, but didn’t after all as I thought I should pull it out of shape.
The third lot of books has also come. Thanks awfully for getting them, it is good of you. The Estimating and Lockwoods books are going to be most useful, Batsfords however did not send their list and the Surveyors Institution Library list of Architectural books was not included. In my letter of November 16th I enclosed a form to the Board of Education. As you have made no mention of it and the books haven’t come I am enclosing another. Will you please forward it.
I am also enclosing a letter to Cox, asking them to increase the monthly amounts to £15. I find I can manage this amount. Also there is Mum’s letter as usual. I have most of your letters up to January 16th. You do say some nice things in some of them – things which have to be read over many more times even than the letters themselves. I do wish I were home and able to carry you off somewhere, instead of your having to stay working on Saturday afternoons or any other time. Can’t you possibly do without this sort of thing. I an awfully glad you have managed to go so long without a cold. Hope you manage to go through the winter in the same way. You ask how I am – I am “quite well thank you” but still I am longing to be looked after in the way you mean and want it badly.
It is awfully good of you to spend so many weekends with Mum and to look after her business matters in the way you do, but don’t let her keep you talking until midnight when you have to go to the office next morning. I have had “a second epistle to the Lieutenant” from Ethel Barnett for which she hopes the censor won’t excommunicate her and in which she offers to send me a book. Isn’t good of her? Please thank her both for the letter and the book, but tell her that we now have a small library here, from which we can get novels, so that I only really want technical books and the few that you send me.
The last few days we have been out for some walks on parade and it is good to get out again. We go out in parties of about forty. The Weser runs close by and the other morning we walked down to it and went for some distance along the bank, (on the opposite side the hills go up practically from the water’s edge for about 600 or 700 feet and are very well wooded) for some distance, then crossed some fields and came back through two villages which are close to the camp. One of these villages is rather picturesque, as nearly all the houses are half timbered, the panels between the timbers generally being filled in with rough cast and whitened, giving a very clean appearance to the whole place. Our party going through caused a small stir, numbers of the people coming to their windows to see us. I have never had so much notice taken of me in my life. Another day we went a somewhat different route through a piece of pine wood, about two miles from the camp. Nearly all the hills round the camp have these pine woods growing round their upper slopes and they really are fine, both the woods themselves and from the point of view of scenery. As we came out of the wood we got a very good view over part of the Weser and down a valley between two ranges of hills with 2 or 3 villages in the distance. All this will, of course, be even better when things begin to get green later on.
It will be your birthday within a few days after you get this, so be a dear little girl again and buy yourself something for me. I know you will. I wish I could be with you, to wish you many happy returns in the way I would like most.
Goodbye.
David