March 14/43
Camp Borden

Dear Marg and Marie,–

Well you will probably be surprised to receive a letter from me, I have been getting both your letters right along but never seemed to get around to answering them until now.

In one of your letters you gave me Pat Shea’s address I haven’t been around to see him yet because A19 is quite a piece from A11 which I am in.

You were asking me what we did for entertainment around here. Well first of all there is the camp theatre Lee Hall, they have a different show there every two nights, the addmission is only fifteen cents the show holds about four thousand soldiers. I go there quite often about every second night. Then we have a bowling alley which costs you ten cents a line for that. We also have a gim where we can go and more or less keep in condition that is if we feel like it when the day is over. We have wet and dry canteens gallore in some of the canteens they have free shows for us. That is about all the entertainment I can think of right now, but you don’t appreciate all these things unless you can get away from them for a while, and to get away from them you must have a pass and they are rather hard to get right now.

I had a pass last week-end they finally broke down and let us go home for four days. Mum was really glad to see me as it had been they first time I had been home since Christmas. There wasn’t much doing up home, about the only thing I did was go to the dance at the Blue Room on Saturday night. We should get two passes a month but whether or not we are going to get them is a different question altogether. I may be getting a short week-end this coming Saturday till Monday morning but it isn’t certain yet, I think probably we will be done out of it for another two weeks again.

Oh by the way you knew that I tried my signals test well the week before I went home our Looy came up to me on a route march one day and told me that I had passed it. He certainly picked a good time to tell me because I was just about done out then, it happened to be a twenty-four mile route march we were on.

I will be going to Kingston on my course at the end of seven weeks training here which is almost up now, I expect to be going down in approximetly two or three weeks at the most. If I hadn’t passed my test I would have been going overseas in side of a months time because as soon as our training is over here they give us a two-weeks furlough and then we are sent to the coast on an overseas draft. I consider myself as one of the lucky ones boy, because one thing I wan’t before I go over is another summer in Canada and by the looks of things I think probably I am going to get it.

Our training here has really been extensive lately, you can’t imagine how they pore it into us. We have been doing a lot of shooting on the ranges lately, my score averages fifty-three out of sixty which isn’t bad at all so I was told. They had us in the 30 yd. range 100 yd. 200 yd. 500 yd and 1000 yd range. All we see down here are guns, here are a few we have taken. First of all we have our rifle which isn’t too bad except for a little kick. Then we have the Bren Gun which is the best of all, that is the one John Inglis makes you know. We also have the Thompson Sub. Machine Gun, and the Sten Gun which are practically alike except that the Tommy Gun discharges our own cartridges and the Sten Gun discharges the enemy’s cartriges and can be thrown away after using, it really is a smart gun but only cheap. Then we have the Anti Tank Rifle which is used fighting against armored veicales, it really has a kick to it about five time worse than the rifle, then we have our different types of mortars which fire bombs.

We have been doing quite a lot of ski work down here lately. Yesterday I took part in the annual Camp Borden cross country race which is five-miles and on skies by the way. I happened to be on the winning team. They had four fellows to a team, and almost every centre in the Camp entered a team. I myself came in fifth out of the whole works, but our team came in first I repeat. They took pictures of us all at first and then afterwards of the winning team. Keep posted with the papers for the next few days and you may find I am not shooting a line. They presented our team with a plack and gave each one of us a metal which I will show you some time.

Well girls I think probably I have said enough for one night so I’ll say “so long” for now

Your big brother
Lloyd.

P.S. I hope you can read my letter because I just came from the wet canteen which isn’t hard to tell.