An undated letter from Calshot. Probably Sept/Oct 1942. FX 83787 C4 Hut RN Unit Eaglehurst Camp Calshot Hants Dear Mum, Well, I’m sorry I’m late with your letter, as I wrote one out and forgot to post it so now as it’s out of date I’m writing one more. Things seem to be still going slowly down here. A bit of Scotland’s rain has found its way down here by the looks of it. It’s making me miserable because if there’s one thing I hate and that’s rain. We had a route march yesterday for about ten miles. I had a letter from Betty the other day. She started nagging about those books of hers. By the way, I’ve just found out one of my thumbs (the left one) is shorter than the right one. Did you give ‘ding gong’ the card I gave you Saturday night. Tell her I think she’s ‘the goods’ if she will get a ‘combined operations’ badge for me from the shop. (A red one) and find out how much the gold ones cost. If she does go, she had better take this letter and show it, if the guy wants to know who its for. I’ve got one badge already which has been issued to me, but as you can see, it’s not a very good one. Please send it back in your next letter. I must fall in for church now but I’ll as soon as I can. All my love to you and ding dong and Jim David David probably returned to Calshot around September 1942. His first letter from there has a Devenport header on it, but the next has an RAF logo. Calshot is an RAF station, Eaglehurst Camp. As the letters state, having completed his training at Dunoon, David is now part of Combined Ops. FX 83787 C4 Hut RN Unit Eaglehurst Camp RAF station Calshot Hants Dear Mum, Well once more they have been an gorn and shoved me around to a new camp, deep in the heart of Hants. It’s taken us over 28 hours to get here, starting from last Sunday. It’s a better camp all around than the last one, but it’s a dam disamel hole just the same. The grubs very good here, WAAF being the cooks. For breakfast we had – Prunes, bread and butter, ham – fried bread and tea. Dinner – veg soup. Steak and kidney pudding, greens, potatoes and gravy, with rice and apple for the sweet. Not so bad eh? ]We are to be issued with a new badge. It has a bit of everything in it. A eagle for the RAF, tommy gun for the army and a badge anchor for us. Thus the combined operations badge [image] Boy was I glad to leave Scotland. It rained every day we were there and mud everywhere. I might get leave some time if, IF!! I’m lucky, so don’t count on it. Coming down on the train we spent more time in the sidings than going anywhere. From London to Scotland going up was not so bad, but coming down was a nightmare. Every five minutes someone would pop his head in the door and count us like a lot of sheep. About 12 o clock I was in the mood to kill the next subby of ours who poped in. Lucky he didn’t. We are under RAF jurisdiction down here and it looks as if some trouble will start soon, but don’t worry, Jack can look after himself against any Brylcream boy. [scratched out/censored sentence] By the way, we have a strange sight here. It’s a old railway which runs round the camp. It’s the daftest thing you have seen. It’s more like a toy and a very old man drives it.
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David SaundersBorn July 31st 1923 Topics
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