Letter from Jack Darby to Jean

EDarbyCAHWellandJ441010.pdf

Title

Letter from Jack Darby to Jean

Description

Jean's house has been damaged by a doodle bug. They did an exercise in thick cloud and other exercises were stopped because of the weather. He hopes to see her soon.

Creator

Date

1944-10-10

Temporal Coverage

Coverage

Language

Format

Two double sided handwritten sheets and envelope

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.

Contributor

Identifier

EDarbyCAHWellandJ441010

Transcription

[inserted] 11-10-44 [/inserted]

[postage stamp] [postmark]

Miss J. Welland,
7. Queens Drive
Surbiton
Surrey.

[page break]

OFFICERS' MESS
R.A.F. STATION
WINTHORPE
Nr. NEWARK
Notts.

10.10.44.

My dearest Jean,

Thanks so much for your two letters which arrived by the same post yesterday. I thought I was seeing things! the earlier letter arrived just after I had written my last letter so we are all square again.

Am so sorry to hear that you've had another doodle which has caused mostly damage in the back of the house, I did'nt know they had such strong rafters as well! how did you climb up there? does this come under the heading of war damage?

[page break]

2/

Walking over the rafters I mean.

Well, to review things from this end its not too good, we have seven exercises in eight days to finish so we shall be lucky if we get away on time, however we are pressing on. We did a cross country yesterday, the weather was appalling, the worst I've flown in, only two of us got off and we had to climb through cloud over a mile in thickness, luckily we did'nt ice up and the weather was glorious up above. When we had to descent we came down to 800' before breaking cloud, then we did some air firing over the Wash at about 200', when we got back to base the fog was so thick we could nearly put our

[page break]

3/

wheels down and taxy on it. ([indecipherable word]).

Today we rose at 5 AM to take off at 8 AM for bombing, we were unlucky, the cloud base was 1,000 feet and very misty so back we came, another day wasted, tomorrow we start again at the same time. We are due out of here on 21st, at least thats according to the programme, so perhaps if the weather is good we shall get a few days, expect you will suddenly feel ill and Eastwoods will be short-staffed for a day or so.

Regarding the socks, do you mind keeping them until I come home as

[page break]

I've plenty of kit at the moment, are these a product of the firewatching efforts?

So Rebecca has given up the unequal struggle at last, should think she needs a major overhaul. I wont say any more as I [underlined] may [/underlined] be home soon.

Well darling, not much more news at the moment, hope to be seeing you soon, take care of yourself, perhaps we can find a 'seat for the weary' near home, do you think we could make use of it?

Cheerio for the moment, remember me to Mother & Dad.

Yours always

Jack

Citation

Jack Darby, “Letter from Jack Darby to Jean,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed February 16, 2025, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/40089.

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