Jan. 9/44

Wigtown,
Scotland

Dear Dad,

I received your letter yesterday and was really pleased to get it as it's the first mail I've received for a month. I guess you haven't been receiving my mail so well either by the sound of things. We heard that they are going to use six fortresses to carry all the mail between here and Canada, so that should speed things up considerably.

I'm up in the wilds of Scotland now and have been for about ten days. What I notice most is the cold as we sleep in tin huts. There are no batwomen so we have to do our own work which is not very good. We get very good meals so I am gaining in weight again. In fact I have been ever since I came over here. We also do lots of walking as the flying field is a mile from where we live and we have to go back and forth four and five times a day. It would be worthwhile having a bicycle over here-most people have. I have been up flying three times so far. It's not much different from Canada except its very mountainous, and we do a lot of flying over water. We do bombing exercises and navigation trips. We had just been up for a few minutes today when one of the practice bombs went off. It didn't do any damage but it filled the cabin with smoke and we could hardly breathe. There was really panic for a while so we had to turn back.

It is supposed to be a six or eight week course but usually last longer than that as we have so much bad flying weather. We are also supposed to get a week's leave so Walt and I will be going back to visit Mrs. Hawksworth. You said Mother received a letter from her. I hope Mother wrote her back as she was just like a mother to us. They really want us to come back. We phoned them on New Year's Eve and she was quite happy about it. We also sent them flowers for Christmas which they were pleased about.

We get each Saturday off so last Friday night we went into a place called Newton Stuart. There was a dance which we attended and I never had so much fun in all my life. They were all Scottish dances which we had never seen before and practically broke our neck trying them. We also got a quite a kick out of the Scottish accent. We stayed in town for the night and had a good sleep for a change.

Well Dad I must write to Ian Boyes and Mrs Miller so must be off for now. So glad to hear that you will be home for the hatching season-you and Mother should really make it go now.

Love George