Letter from Bill Akrill to his mother

Letter from Bill Akrill to his mother

Writes of guard duty, gas exam and inoculations and their effect. Talks of food and domestic matters. Catches up with home news and makes requests for specific food when he gets home

Four page handwritten letter

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.

EAkrillWEAkrill[Mo]XXXX11

Royal Air Force crest]
1436220 AC 2 Akrill
A6 Flight No 4 Sqdn.
No 6 I.T.W. Raf.
Aberystwyth.
Cardiganshire.
[underlined] Sat. [/underlined] [inserted] ? 11th [/inserted]
Dear Mum,
Glad to get your letter yesterday. Thought I’d better get this off tonight as its my turn for guard tomorrow and I shall want to spend all the spare time I have then swotting for our wretched Gas Exam on Monday morning. I shall be quite an Air Raid Warden by the time I’ve finished.
At the moment I’m in a very bad state of health. Reason being that we had another (2 more in fact) innoculations [sic] on Friday morning. These two [deleted] were [/deleted]
[page break]
[underlined] 2 [/underlined]
were double the strength of the last one, and we got them in the right arm. In the afternoon I began to feel the effects & by the time all our lectures were over I’d had enough & as soon as we’d had tea we went to bed. It gives us a terrible fever, though the first one didn’t affect me. This one hasn’t made me as bad as some of them but it’s made me feel very miserable & wretched. Our arms are badly swollen & painful & I’m dreading meeting an officer for I can no more salute than walk on my head. We had to turn up for maths this morning but were excused lectures & everything else after 10.30. so I spent a nice quiet day cutting out photos of airoplanes [sic] & sticking them on the wall. We’ve just come down to the Canteen
[page break]
[Royal Air Force crest]
[underlined] 3 [/underlined]
and had toast & treacle & a good cup of tea followed by [deleted] my [/deleted] our nightly glass of milk & feel much better.
We take our washing to a woman. I think the RAF have a fairly good laundry here but things are liable to get lost.
I had a very excited letter from Miss Holmes today to tell me that a very dear old friend of theirs is living in Aberystwyth. He [deleted] is a [/deleted] used to be schoolmaster at Eagle and Miss Mary was more or less in the act of writing to him when she got my address and so wrote to us both right away. I must see if I can find him out. He lives with a retired proffessor [sic] from the University so I expect it will be a
[page break]
[underlined] 4 [/underlined]
learned and elderly circle.
It sounds to be getting winterly at home. I should think all seasons are pretty much a like here. Same old green and grey mountains year in, year out. I shall be glad to see some fields & trees and soil again. Bet the Caravan will take some chucking out. Glad you had a little outing & went to see Bitter Sweet whatever that is. Wonder if you can manage a brace of pheasants for when I come home on leave? Getting a bit tired 99 1/2% bread sausages & mince & potatoes.
Must get on with my gas. Think about me on Monday & Maths. on Wednesday. Sooner have an inoculation!
Best of love
Bill.
[inserted] Dave tells me he’s had his medical & next has to have an interview with an Admiral at Cambridge. It’s a much harder course than ours [/inserted]