I managed to get down the country, to Devon (remember I told you all about it: rain, rain, rain) to see my mother and my sister. My little brother is still at school but he’ll be called up next year and he wants to be in tanks. I keep telling him that, as an anti-tank gunner with strong opinions on the subject, I wouldn’t recommend it, but he won’t listen. He’s always liked loud things, machines. I’m worried but there’s nothing I can do, I suppose!

I’m pretty sure that you won’t get this letter. I somehow don’t think you got the last one either. A friend made the arrangements, but the chap who was going to deliver it was killed, unfortunately, and I’m trying to find another way to get things through to you. So perhaps it doesn’t matter what I write. I’ll tell it to you in person one day, one day soon, and you can tell me everything that’s happened where you are. But I’ll write anyway, just in case, and because when I write, I feel as if I’m talking to you.

I’m writing this in a wooden hut on the edge of Salisbury Plain. How to describe Salisbury Plain, except that, if you’re training to be a soldier, it’s a place you come to loathe. Which is a shame, as it can be rather beautiful. I am training, too. I’m going to be a parachutist. I can imagine you giving me one of your looks: well, all I can say is that it started out as a good idea. While I was in Cairo, I met an old acquaintance – the chap I gave your letter to – who was training for some secret stuff: jumping into Greece to liaise with the partisans. I thought – instantly, in less than a heartbeat – that I had to do the same thing. So I went along to my colonel and told him I was going to volunteer for special services. To cut a long story short, he refused. ‘I won’t have one of my officers joining that mob of amateurs playing at pirates,’ was the gist of it. ‘But seeing as you have the urge to do such a damn stupid thing, they’re forming some new units of airborne artillery.’ He signed me up there and then. This particular colonel isn’t someone you argue with. But I felt as if he’d just stabbed me through the heart.