Mail From Home

You’re always looking for, for word from home, and I always thought they didn’t send me often enough. Every time the mail came in, I looked for mail, and if there’s none in, you couldn’t do anything about it. But you see, they never realized … they thought, you know, there’s a lot of them. If one letter came, that was enough. But, I used to have to write to different ones. When I went on leave after the Armistice, I went to London and I took a couple of days in London just writing. I wrote a letter, thirty-two pages, of what had been going on …those things that I couldn’t write up front when we were in France, because everything was censored, you know. Our letters were all censored and we had to, when we wrote them, they went to the officer’s office, not sealed, and the officer, the one on duty, read them. Well, but in London they were free, of course, and I spent the time telling all of what had been happened that I could remember. There was 32 pages of that letter, and I sent that home to my mother. Then when I got home, I found that she had burned it. I only got one letter, one letter in my time there that I sent and that was to my aunt, and I sent dozens of letters. And it was always that, everybody looked forward to getting mail.