September 18,1944

Dear Billy:

I received your letter of september 10^th this morning. I am glad to hear that the mail has started to come through. I assume that the letters you mentioned were probably those addressed to you in France. I guess it will take a little while for those we sent to England to finally catch up with you. Dorothy Thom said she received a letter from her boyfriend on Saturday and he said he hasn’t had any mail in a month. He was in Italy but is now in France.

I’m so glad that you now have such nice quarters and I hope you are able to stay there for a while, especially now that winter is coming on. It certainly isn’t very pleasant to be in a tent when it’s cold.

In my last letter I told you that your socks seemed a little too big and that I was going to put them in hot water to see if they would shrink. Well, I did and I think they did. They seem to be much better now. When you wash them. Sort of get the spiral business tight together and pull them in the length a little. In other words, when they are wet get them together so they are about 1 ½” wide. You’ll know what I mean when you see them I hope they are all right and that you like them.

I’m also going to send you the pigskin gloves I bought for you some time ago. When I heard you were living at a camp I wasn’t going t send them because I didn’t think you’d have much use for them. But now that you’re in a city you probably will. Even if you don’t have any use for them, they’ve been burning a hole in my drawer ever since last April so Im going to sent them anyway. I’ve been so anxious for you to have them because I know you will like them.

Regarding buying souvenirs for us, Billy, please don’t. We appreciate your wanting to buy us something but it would be a shame for you to throw your money away. In several of Ernie Pyle’s columns he talked about the exorbitant prices over in Frace. One of the girls here in the building said that her brother had written her that he paid $7.00 for a ham sandwich. I wonder what a fillet mignon would cost.

We had a letter from heltie today and he said that they had very little of the hurricane up in Boston. He said they were all on the alert and all were restricted to quarters because they thought they all might have to move certain stuff that was on the water front, but fortunately that wasn’t necessary.

By for now, honey-lamb. Let me know if you want,

Helen