letters from WWII

Rum Soakers & WTF

I’m about halfway through part 4—not much left to do, but I won’t be able to finish today.

One of the things that stumped me and now the copy editor are references in the letters to things called “Barbinettes.” No idea what those are, but I’m guessing some kind of dried fruit, since they often are mentioned along with “rum soakers.” I wasn’t sure how to spell “Barbinette” either, but having gone over the scans very carefully, I think that’s the spelling—he capitalizes the “B” consistently, which is about the only consistent usage of capitalization you’re likely to see in those letters.

Quote of the day

From a letter to the children.

The other day Lt. Colbaine Conflict—a very dirty raggedy lop-eared Irish terrier—had this nice little pair of pants. I took them away from him and washed them out. Now I can’t find whose pants they are and I’m sending them along to you….

The pants are pretty hard to button and so they must be English.

This, of course, leads to a researcher’s quandary—was this Irish terrier Lt. Colbaine Conflict, or Lt. Col. Baine Conflict? I’m assuming it’s the former, but given my grandfather’s loose attitude toward capitalization, I feel obligated to point out that it very well could be the latter.

Quote of the day

My grandfather discussing a photograph of my mother, who was about 4 years old at the time.

G. has a tremendous tummy, with her britches about down & her tummy out. The pictures will be worth a good deal in blackmail in about 12-15 years.

Spitballin' here

As I’m getting closer to the end of the letters, I think what I’m going to do with the World War II stuff is to have the book have no art other than the cover (easier from a production standpoint) and then have bonus content on this Web site (instead of sample chapters) that will include stuff like my grandfather’s gazillion photographs, his cute little drawings, and the art side of the postcards.

I think that wouldn’t be too horribly time consuming, and that way people will have some access without having to go to the Museum of World War II and getting into the archives. My grandfather was pretty good about identifying the people in his photographs, and sometimes included where and when, so I think it might be useful to family and historians to have the photos in particular be more accessible. I am going to have to rope off the more-graphic surgery photos in some fashion, but that should be easy enough.

I have a cover mock-up that my sister doesn’t entirely like but (as she said) it’s my book (honestly, I think she’ll like it more, or at least understand it more, once she reads the letters). And I have a title that we both like. Once the letters are all typed up, I plan to give copies of them to various family members and tell the side that doesn’t know that I’m planning to make a book out of this, so you know—totally looking forward to splitting the family and being disowned. “Everyone mentioned is dead, so they can’t sue” while legally accurate is, I suspect, an argument that will work less well with relatives….

Quote of the day

So this is in the middle of a letter where my grandfather is explaining that he got orders to go to a different hospital the next morning. Both he & his CO thought that was impossible, so they bought him another day and shipped his things after him. He went to London, got a 20-minute INTENSE briefing, and then was sent off to a hospital with some 1,100 patients, most of whom needed complicated surgery. While in London waiting for a train….

While killing time I visited Madam Tussaud’s wax works & enjoyed it very much. I suspect that you have seen it as it would certainly appeal to you. The figures are lifelike to say the least. When one of them suddenly turns out to be a guard instead of a wax figure it makes you start.

Quote of the day

From a letter to the kids.

I picked some fuchsia seed to dry and send home for you to plant. They are a pretty red flower on a bush—but a mouse came into my room and you know sompin—he ate up all the fuchsia seeds. I have set a trap for him but he eats the bait off. He has eaten cheese, a peanut and a piece of chocolate candy without even springing the trap. And I tied them on too with a piece of thread. At night he rattles the papers in my box but when I turn on the light he stops. I think I shall never catch him.

Quote of the day

Ah, the woes of wartime cooking—if I’m remembering who Mrs C is correctly, she was someone my grandfather met while stationed elsewhere in Great Britain.

Mrs C sent me some shortbread and a fruit cake. She didn’t have any fruit for the fruit cake and it seems a little heavy to undertake. I think I’ll put it on the bar….

My wooly slippers got pretty dirty and I had them autoclaved. They came out pretty small—about bit enough for Alice and very hard. Lucky I have the old canoe shoes isn’t it.

Quote of the day

Both grandparents worked at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (PBBH), which is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Today I have had a wonderful day. Visited the 49th Station Hospital where K. is chief of surgical service. Did you know him at the PBBH? He has a grand service at a hospital that is serving Air Bases as ours is & I got a lot out of being able to spend the morning with him. He even had steak for lunch. It reminded me a good deal of the PBBH steaks we both know but was very good for a change….

One of the officers here…wrote his wife asking for some elastic for ladies bloomers. It came today by air mail without letter or comment.

Quote of the day

Bonus quote!

Went shooting today with D. We walked around the fields near the hospital & put up 4 bunches of partridges but couldn’t hit them. I also missed a hare & one pigeon. Did get one hare. While we were waiting for the farmer to come out a little cocker pup I had brought along whipped in & drank out of the milk bucket…. [The] dog is a great dog on pails but no damned good as a hunting dog.

Quote of the day

My grandfather’s letters to the kids were usually really short, because the kids were very young. But as the war wore on and the kids started to write him, he wrote some longer letters that were more descriptive of his life.

Right now there are lots & lots of bees and wasps. There were so many crawling in & out of a hole in the Manor House that one of the officers smoked them out. He took out a brick or two & there were 10 pounds of wild honey—we at it and it was good.

Quote of the day

The peat bogs are seen all over the northern part and are high on the mountains surprisingly enough. The peat is cut in the winter & stacked to dry & burned the next winter. It smells a house up much as grandpa used to when he voided down the hot air register.

Quote of the day

Doctors…view the world a little differently.

I am so glad the Easter flowers etc. arrived. I thought that if the children had small plants to put into the ground and to consider their own they might learn about the birds & the bees that way.

Progress report

So, obviously I’ve been a bit focused on my grandfather’s World War II letters, and I realized today that I’ve typed up maybe 40% of the letter pages I have. (Whether to include photos or not will be another issue, and will probably depend on how easy Amazon has made that process—doing photos for The Weirld was kind of a pain.)

Anyway, at this point I think it’s clear that I do have a book here, and I will probably not excise huge portions of the letters. I was a little worried because my grandfather did tend to natter on about needing a wrench to fix his watch and some film, please, but assuming the remaining 60% of pages are like the initial 40%, the letters are actually pretty interesting. I didn’t realize this, but he was pretty close to some of the men who were leading the mad scramble to have medical men & supplies where you needed them when you needed them, which was no small task during World War II. (One surgical facility he was at went from 80 patients to 500 within a couple of weeks.) Even when he wasn’t in a leadership role, he was a close observer, and decisions to, say, not allow patients to stay in the hospital more than a few days before sending them on to a convalescent facility had a big impact on him.

So, I think this project is worth moving ahead on, and it’s nice to have clarity there. But I’m going to put my focus back on Trials for a bit, since I’m pretty close to it being ready for a beta read, and it would be nice to send it out. I’m a little concerned that I’ll be in production for both books one right after the other, but I’m not planning on doing a paper book of my grandfather’s letters, so it shouldn’t be too bad. (Famous last words….)

Quote of the day

Mo S. has just opened a can of kippered herring and a can of coffee and with some snitched bread and a little butter has served a snack to 11 of us in his room—10 x 12 + furniture. Mo is wearing very well—every ½ inch a soldier—and my spirits are much better now….

Quote of the day

Since my grandmother herself had been a nurse, my grandfather freely wrote about stuff like….

V.D. of course makes up a fair proportion of our work. We are very fortunate in have a Capt. H. (1st Lieut till a week ago) who is really interested in gonorrhea & lues [an archaic term for syphilis]. Lues now gets a 20 day crack of intensive therapy then a once a week for a spell and seem to be brought really under control—a great contribution I feel. Gonorrhea now gets treated in the units with the men on duty with sulfadiazine and if they don’t clear up they are hospitalized. Here they get a second course, then switch to sulfathiazole. If they still don’t clear up they are given fever therapy—wrapped up in blankets & rubber sheet & put under a light cradle. This brings the temp up to 105 in about 2 hours, then the lights are shut off and they are kept wrapped up for about 6-8 hours. This really cooks up the bugs & they mostly clear up in 24 hours.

He enjoyed the occasional visual aid.

He enjoyed the occasional visual aid.

As this Rx is rather rigorous & some people are temperamentally unsuited for it, a certain few can’t take fever therapy. These are given penicillin. This is given intramuscularly at the rate of 10,000 Oxford units every 1 hr for 10 hours. At the end of 5-6 hours the smears are negative and at the end of the Rx the discharge has stopped. Isn’t that something. We’ve been very fortunate in being able to have a certain amount of the stuff to work with. It is scarce and we feel very good about being able to put it on.

Quote of the day

From letter written by a friend, also in service, to my grandfather:

Thanks for your nice letter, but I’m sorry you’re so stretched that there’s no little chance of our getting together for an evening. If I had any excuse to go to North Ireland I’d take it, but I can’t think of any at the moment. It’s nice to hear of your children, hens, and dogs. I can’t return much along that line—at least as to hens & dogs, because we have no hens and no one tells me anything about Janke….

The war is getting very hard here. Our monthly liquor ration is to be cut out entirely, I hear, and there’ll only be a quart of scotch in the bar each night. How much more can we bear?

Children & hens

Children & hens

Quote of the day

Appropriate given how many people seem to be spending Memorial Day weekend….

Now that people have stoves in their tents and the wood is wet we do have a little trouble with people using lighter fluid to start their fires with. People just seem to have to learn the hard way that lighter fluid is very volatile.