Friday, December 1st, 1944

Darling Joan,

It is Friday evening and the twins are having their supper before going off to bed. Mummy is working in the kitchen and Betty is shampooing her hair upstairs. She has been playing games with the children since tea time; they think a lot of her. Then I took over and read them “Sunny Stories”⁽¹⁾.

Mr. and Mrs. Kemp are coming up tonight because they have received a cine film from Rochester of Janet and John, They haven’t seen it yet and I have promised to run it through on my projector tonight. Janet is now a proper young woman and John quite a young man. They have had two other films of them which they bring up now and again for me to run through for them, So we are as familiar with them as they are.

It has been a quite a week and the weather for the most part drizzling with rain. Even so late in the year as this we haven’t really had a good hard frost yet, but the weather has been so wet that most of the jobs I have been doing have been indoor ones.

In the shed Mummy found what was left of a child’s wheelbarrow that once belonged to John. Its wheel and axle was missing and it was badly knocked about, so I have fitted a new wheel and repainted it green, and it looks quite good. Toys are very hard to get over here and of very poor quality, so when you can fix something up like that it is really worthwhile. It will do as a Christmas present for Brian. The shops are empty except, for trash and most of the buying done is in second hand things. People are digging out all sorts of forgotten toys and things.

Last night I went to a shooting tournament between my department and another. We get these up at times so that people get to know one another and they are very enjoyable. I shot much better last night than I have for a long time and got an 87, but I am not a good shot. We won by 63, which was a good performance because as we only had seven men and they had eight, all our scores counted whereas they counted the best seven out of eight, which gave them a definite advantage. They will be after a return match, I expect. I say we had seven men, but we really had six men and one woman and she was our best shot, getting a 93.

Well that’s all for this week, Joan dear, with lots of love from the twins, your Mummy and Daddy
xxxxxx
xxxxxx