Letter No 75
11th March ‘43
Dear Mum,
Here I am settling down to try & scratch out a
few more lines to you but I have absolutely nothing at all to tell you. I have
gone right off my letter writing this last few weeks – as a mater of fact, I
still have a couple of letters to answer from the last lot of mail.
I have been learning quite a bit of Arabic this
last week from one of the wogs from a nearby camp. He has been coming over to
the tent each morning & sits down for a few hours & talks to us. We
christened him “Darby Munro” because he only stands about five feet high. I’m
afraid we won’t be able to see any more of him now though because one of the
wogs ‘cliftied’ – pinched about five blankets out of one of the tents & now
they have all been kept out of the camp area.
Every morning at the squadron sick quarters there
is a sick parade for all wogs suffering any ailments. The main trouble with the
children seems to be their eyes & desert sores & with the older people
it is their teeth that give them most trouble. They are all extremely grateful
for what the medical orderlies do for them each & morning they trot over
with eggs by the dozens & give them to the orderlies. Our friend Darby
invited us over to have a cup of tea with his granddad but of course we didn’t
go because that is one of the things we are definitely not allowed to do.
The food situation has been getting better of late.
We are now on an Australian ration scale again for the first time since we left
Alexandria. This scale makes a vast difference to us because we get Aussie
tinned butter instead of “margy” & extra of everything else. Yesterday they
brought back a lot of fresh New Zealand mutton & with the exception of what
we killed ourselves at Xmas time this is the first fresh meat we have had since
we started to move over four months ago.
I forgot to tell you before but when we were near
Tripoli our cooks caught two extremely small pigs & for the last six weeks
they have been fattening up & in a few weeks will be making a meal for us.
For a while the cooks kept them in a slit trench so they wouldn’t get away but
they did not thrive very well & so they let them out & now the pigs
just wander around & get fat. Sometimes they wander a few hundred yards
from the mess & if the cooks want them they just whistle & the pigs
come trotting back like a pair of pups. There is going to be some strife when the
time comes for the killing of their ‘family’ cause one of them says that he
will shoot the first person who harms them. The pigs, by the way, are called
Hitler & Musso & they respond readily to their names.
The cooks had a rooster but it used to crow at all
unearthly hours of the morning & so it got it in the neck very smartly.
Well, Mum, that’s a lot further than I thought I
would get & now I’m out of new so I had better close & try & answer
a couple of the letters I have here.
Give my love to Dad & Betty & my regards to
Leo.
Lovingly
Yours,
Frank
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