March 10/44

Dear Mother and Dad,

I am writing this as I am waiting for duty watch to sound. I am on duty tonight and I have to report at sick bay at 1800. We took a lot more drill today and we are really getting down to serious training. At 1600 today our division went for a swim and it sure felt good after a morning’s drill.

If this is hard to read, it will be because I am writing on two stools one on top of the other in front of my locker. For the next letter I will go down to the writing room, and it should be a little better.

I will get off tomorrow at 0100.

Everything is going fine here and we learn more about it every day. We begin to take our school classes on Monday. More kids are coming in every day and we have quite a bunch in our division now.

This is being written just after I have come off duty watch. We were sent to the sick bay, where we waxed some of the floors. In a few minutes fire stations will sound and we will all go to an extinguisher which is assigned to us. When the location of the fire is announced, we run to the place with our extinguishers.

Here are some portraits of a few of the boys here:

[Four side-view portraits drawn of: “sub-lieutenant Anderson,” “leading-seaman Kirkpatrick,” “Nimmo,” “Cole”.]

Your loving son,
Malcolm