Part of letter to David Donaldson from his mother
Title
Part of letter to David Donaldson from his mother
Description
Mother expresses her delight and pride at hearing the recent news of his second Distinguished Service Order. Writes of father's visit to London and catches up with family/acquaintance news.
Creator
Date
1945-07-18
Temporal Coverage
Language
Format
Three page handwritten letter
Publisher
Rights
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
EDonaldsonFIDonaldsonDW450718-01-Part
Transcription
Brambridge
Wed. July 18
Dearest David
I cannot tell you how pleased & thrilled I was when I arrived home last night & Mrs Masters said she had a message for me, but it was a nice one, and when she told me I was so afraid that she had not got it right, & whether it was a bar to the D.S.O or D.F.C & then the miserable telephone went out of order like it always does at Brambridge & so I could not ring anyone up to tell them.
But I have got hold of tonights Echo & its in there alright, and now all I want to know how does one address a D.F.C. & DSO & Bar, are you really now so grand that I merely put D.S.O etc.? I have been going round looking superciliously at everyone all day
[page break]
& thinking to myself, none of you poor things in the road have got a son who is as grand as mine, the result being that I forgot to hoot going over the bridge here & nearly had [word deleted] a collision with a car coming in the opposite direction - . I have managed to control myself all day and have not told anyone, leaving them all to see it for themselves in the Echo
Papa is up in London & the telephone having recovered I have just rung him up to tell him. He was supposed to be staying at the Goring Hotel, but when he got there they said they had to board him out & sent him on to a place in the Cromwell Rd where he found he had to share a room with a stranger & “there was no lavatory accomadation [sic] so he fled to the Aunts, who as usual acted nobly and took him in, although Eric was already
[page break]
staying there . - He was duly suitably impressed & for once did not disown you & explain you were nothing to do with him, which is what he generally does if he thinks any of his family are distinguishing themselves at all.
I enquired about John Francis engagement & if it was official & ought I to write, her name is Warwick & she comes from Wickham where her father has a small business, do you think she is a relative of Rene's, she used to live at Wickham for years, they had a saddlers shop there ?
Will you thank Joyce very much for ringing me up to tell me about you, I was terribly sorry to miss her, I got caught on y way home by Mrs Heseltinne who took me in to have a drink & she
Wed. July 18
Dearest David
I cannot tell you how pleased & thrilled I was when I arrived home last night & Mrs Masters said she had a message for me, but it was a nice one, and when she told me I was so afraid that she had not got it right, & whether it was a bar to the D.S.O or D.F.C & then the miserable telephone went out of order like it always does at Brambridge & so I could not ring anyone up to tell them.
But I have got hold of tonights Echo & its in there alright, and now all I want to know how does one address a D.F.C. & DSO & Bar, are you really now so grand that I merely put D.S.O etc.? I have been going round looking superciliously at everyone all day
[page break]
& thinking to myself, none of you poor things in the road have got a son who is as grand as mine, the result being that I forgot to hoot going over the bridge here & nearly had [word deleted] a collision with a car coming in the opposite direction - . I have managed to control myself all day and have not told anyone, leaving them all to see it for themselves in the Echo
Papa is up in London & the telephone having recovered I have just rung him up to tell him. He was supposed to be staying at the Goring Hotel, but when he got there they said they had to board him out & sent him on to a place in the Cromwell Rd where he found he had to share a room with a stranger & “there was no lavatory accomadation [sic] so he fled to the Aunts, who as usual acted nobly and took him in, although Eric was already
[page break]
staying there . - He was duly suitably impressed & for once did not disown you & explain you were nothing to do with him, which is what he generally does if he thinks any of his family are distinguishing themselves at all.
I enquired about John Francis engagement & if it was official & ought I to write, her name is Warwick & she comes from Wickham where her father has a small business, do you think she is a relative of Rene's, she used to live at Wickham for years, they had a saddlers shop there ?
Will you thank Joyce very much for ringing me up to tell me about you, I was terribly sorry to miss her, I got caught on y way home by Mrs Heseltinne who took me in to have a drink & she
Collection
Citation
F Donaldson, “Part of letter to David Donaldson from his mother ,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed December 10, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/12021.
Item Relations
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