May to David Beckenham 4.10.18
My dear David,
We are all fearfully excited, so if this letter is disjointed you will know the reason. It is not the news in the papers that is doing it, though that is enough to make us all stand on our heads, including the highly respectable and much respected chiefs, but it is owing to the fact that we have had our war bonus doubled, and the extra is to start from the beginning of last July. Our bonus has been 12 ½ %, in addition to having had our standard salary raised. Now we are to have 25% on the first £150, and 50% on the second £150. When I came back from my holiday last Monday I had over £22 waiting for my gracious acceptance, and now we get this news!
Your letter of 1st Sept, however, pleased me still more than the bonus as it sounded as though you were more cheerful than when you wrote the previous one. Now for answering it.
I read your description of sheet making out to Mama & the others, and we all laughed heartily. When we are settled you will certainly have to look after the house linen. It will then be unique, to say the least of it.
I posted the form on to the Education people.
So I can send you general news. Very well. I will add a postscript to this letter, so that if the Censor considers I am saying too much he can cut it off.
I like your description of Barbed-Wireitis, and am sure you will want an extra lot of fussing up generally when you return, and I expect you will see that you get it, too. I wonder what you will look like when you become a “puffick shadder”. I am not keeping you company, as, sad to relate, my last winter’s clothes are somewhat tight on me; but I comfort myself with the thought that Maud is fatter than me. She looks awfully well.
I wish I could get another enlargement of me like the one we have, but the photographer has been and gone and got killed.
O, your cooking! Perhaps my own won’t seem to you so awful after all. I can’t understand those things, viz meat, sugar & butter, being left out of your parcels. The matter is being taken up with the Red Cross.
I shall not be going to Balham this weekend, as I must go to the cemetery, and I also want to call on Helen as she wants a little jersey I made one of her children last winter made a little larger. By the way last time I went to Putney I put some fresh mould on the grave, some I commandeered.
Cannot stop any longer, fearfully busy. Goodbye.
May
PS The general situation from our standpoint seems, to my ignorant civilian mind, to be excellent.