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.

Quote of the day

My dear by the time you have this letter you may well have seen L. & possibly W. Q. may show up shorty. I visited Q. on Saturday. You can imagine my surprise when he met me on the train & said “I know you won’t believe me but I’m leaving for home at 4.” Well gee he was as twittering as a June bride. Could scarcely believe it himself. We stopped in town and bought 2 necklaces—amber—for the girls and a cannon for his boy. I bet [Q.’s wife] is mad when he teaches him to fire the thing off and goes away & leaves her with it.

Quote of the day

From a letter written to my grandfather by a fellow medical officer. If you’ve ever wondered if doctors gossip about their patients….

Was amused in your whoremaster friend. The situation must have been rough down there. One of my patients (an officer) says that it was so bad that he once sent a squad forward to take a machine gun nest and in half an hour they were back asking for prophylactics. He gave a pro to each one of them and sent them ahead again—in the second attempt they took the machine gun!

Quote of the day

Because nothing was scanned in any kind of order, today I was kind of bouncing back and forth between the early years of the war (“Why do I have to do all the boring butt stuff?”) and the later years (“Good thing that shrapnel wasn’t inside the aorta!”).

This is early:

We played softball Saturday p.m. P. has been running the show out there. In warning them how good we are he said, “The officers of the 5th are beating their privates regularly.” That will be wit in the annals of the 5th.

Quote of the day

I was planning to work on Trials, but I didn’t get much sleep last night, so instead I typed up World War II letters. In the early years of the war, my grandfather was stationed in Northern Ireland, and things were slow enough that he could go fishing in the country on the weekends, usually getting to good, isolated fishing holes by taking a bicycle on the train. Since he didn’t know the area, he often got a bit lost, or as in this case, he ran afoul of country notions of hospitality.

Having allowed a decent time to get back for the last train and being a little cold & very thirsty as all I had had to drink was a bottle of beer at noon, I accepted Mrs. M’s kind offer of a cup of tea. But damn it all they cooked eggs & biscuits and set up a big Sunday night supper—all on an open peat grate. They had lots of bread and big plates of home made butter & some home made cheese. Gee the butter was good. They kept pressing me and time wore on. By the time I got away I had 45 minutes to make 11 ½ miles and the awful thought that it was the last train home and it was either a hell of a sprint or some 80 miles to pedal home by 7:00 a.m. A hell of a sprint it was. I passed horses, boys on bicycles with gearshifts & handlebars down, and even an occasional small car. Fortunately the train was 4 minutes late & I had a 2 minute wait.

Progress report

Edited the first seven chapters of the printout of Trials—caught a lot of little things, but overall I was happy with the pacing and general feel of the book.

The chapters start out fairly long, and then get shorter and shorter as the book progresses, so I’ll have to look at that and decide whether that’s something I want to keep or not.

Quote of the day

Typed up more letters—here’s his account of the day he & a group of fellow officers were told that they had been promoted. To celebrate, they went on an epic bender, which began thusly (and continued on):

J. & I each broke out a bottle and with the assistance of surprisingly few friends started relaxing—we finally made up a party & went to town for a few cocktails & lunch.

J., B. & I went to see “Mrs. Miniver.” I would say it was the best picture I’ve ever seen—if you get a chance have a couple, get a supply of handkerchiefs & see it.

All the way home on the train the little men with hammers were very busy & bothered a good deal….

Quote of the day

Typed up a bunch more letters today. I’m going to include a quote from one, because it’s funny. So, this was in Great Britain during World War II, and my grandfather was a surgeon (my grandmother had been a nurse). The Princess Royal at the time was Mary, the aunt of the current Queen Elizabeth (I’m going to censor the other names, just to respect people’s privacy).

[Two] weeks ago the Princess Royal was here & went through the hospital. . . . She was apparently a very pleasant person though probably terribly fed up with having to visit 2-3 hospitals a day. She almost inspected my ward—I don’t know what I would have told her about the patients for mine all have pilonidal sinuses or hemorrhoids—or had them. When word came down to stand by for inspection my corpsman rushed about opening all the doors—kitchen, utility room, linen closet, coal closet, and latrines. He was ready—

. . .

Z. does not like mice & they are begging to come in & keep him awake by eating his Tootsie Rolls, etc. He tore his room all about trying to get them stopped and got someone to dump cement down in the corner where they came in.

That night C. wadded up a big piece of newspaper & tied a string around it & stuffed it behind the wardrobe. By pulling the string under the door—it made a noise just like a mouse. He kept Z. up till nearly 2 a.m. hunting for the mouse.

Progress report

Typed in a few more letters today—hit one of the love letters. It’s a bit funny to me because my parents were very much not romantic people, but my grandfather could knock out a My Darling Dearest I Love You More Each Day like nobody’s business! I was joking with some friends that it was a bit like a less-gothic Gomez and Morticia Addams.

But with the occasional “Why the hell haven’t you written!?!” cable for variety.

Progress report

I’m waiting to go over Trials again, so I worked on my grandfather’s letters from World War II. I basically have a billion scans—I tried to make sure that scans of pages & envelopes from the same letter all stayed together, but we’re talking about (checks) fucking 780 scans! Jesus wept! That’s not counting the photographs—OK, out of morbid curiosity I looked, and those are 740 scans. This, for the record, is only a portion of the massive boxes of photos I had to scan, because God forbid anyone in my family ever just throw shit away. You’re starting to understand why I didn’t get much work done on Trials earlier in the year, right?

Anyway, I haven’t read all the letters, and scans aren’t really something you can make into a book (I guess I could just toss them into an e-book, but that’s not going to be terribly accessible to readers), so I’m basically typing them up and organizing them at the same time. I think that’s a reasonable system—I want this to be edited into something entertaining to the average reader, not just be Here Is Every Word My Grandfather Ever Put To Paper Because We Are Just THAT Impressive A Family. I still obviously have a lot to go, but even just on the first day I came across two letters that I definitely want in—his kids were little, so he tended to write one version of events for them and then another, very different version for my grandmother….

Progress report

So I went back and cleaned up the earlier things—this edit is officially over! And I think things are far enough along that I’m going to print out a hard copy for the next edit. I’ll probably take that up in a week or so. Whoo!

Progress report

Finished this editing pass! Whoo!

I really do like the way this book winds up—I thought this would be hard to edit because this section hasn’t had a lot of editing done to it, and yes, there was some basic fixing that had to happen, but it just flows very nicely.

There’s some things in earlier chapters I want to go back and fix—kind of a timeline issue—but overall I feel like the book is really coming along. Of course, it’s kind of a busy time, so not a bad time to take a little break before I go at it again.

One of the non-book things that has been going on has been clearing out the belongings of a family hoarder, and among those are letters from (and some to) my grandfather during World War II. They’re actually pretty interesting—we donated the originals to the National World War II Museum, but I did keep scans, so I’m thinking of chunking out a quick e-book of letters.