G Branch

HQ 1 Corps District

BAOR

Saturday 9^th March

My dearest Maz

I was delighted to get your Bexhill letter yesterday and to hear all about your stay there – from the fact that it was written in bed after breakfast I gathered that you were being a 100% Aunt Kate and that was just how it should have been!

This letter, which will be my last ever to you from an Army address I hope, is not really intended to be a very newsy one, except to tell you that I am well but not fit yet.  I got up on Tuesday and on Wednesday, the day my relief arrived, I was back in harness again, looking like death!  I had several jobs to do for the Chief of Staff and he ordered me to go back to bed, but I disobeyed the order!  I now have a streaming cold and feel so much in need of a rest.  Poor Eileen has had a bad time and I’ve decided that, short though the time will be 11 days in Scotland will do us both a world of good, country air and a lazy time.  So I think we shall go up on Tuesday the 19^th and come back on Saturday 30^th – I’m sure it is wise, because I still look like a ghost!  I only hope I look and feel better when I get home.  We, 4 of us from the same mess which we’ve been in now for 2 years, leave on Monday morning from Hanum and ex Major PCB should arrive in the Borough some time on Thursday.

Maz dear, the real purpose of this letter is one of my most grateful thanks – my thanks for looking after Eileen so terribly well and for being a real mother to her, my thanks for all the very many things you’ve done for me while I’ve been in the Army, far too numerous to mention one by one, your letters of encouragement and hope, the parcels and papers and the wonderful leaves you have given Eileen and myself, you and Pari and Brian have been the most wonderful family anyone in the world could be blessed with, and for all these things, Maz dear, I shall be internally grateful.  It hasn’t always been easy, and all parents have the same thing, but in my case, through the war, it has been quicker, the transition from ‘glorious 21’ to a woppish second-Lieut, a married Adjutant, and now an approaching the 30s retired Major!  But through yours and Pari’s youthfulness I shall always be the same I hope, and I hope, like you both, to seem to my children when they are my age, the same as you and Pari do to me now.  If sometimes I seem to shut myself up at home these next 7 or 8 months you will understand, the reasons being the exam and my orienting myself to life with Eileen, a new life we’ve never known and have lived on these last 5½ years – now Maz I must pack my bags and bid you au revoir ‘til Thursday when I’m just longing to see you again.  Again thanks a whole lot for everything and God bless you, and Pari and Brian, my love to you

            Yours as ever

very affectionately

                        Peter

In envelope headed ‘O A S’ addressed to Mrs Gerald C Benham, 5 Oxford Road Colchester Essex.

Postmarked FIELD POST OFFICE 734 dated 10 MR 46.  Signed P.C. Benham.  

On front of envelope Written March 9^th 1946 rec March 13^th 1946 (12)