21/2/1917
My Dearest Father
I don’t know when this will reach you as one of our girls has been at Havre for over four days waiting to go home on leave. However here goes. The cold has quite gone but it is horribly foggy and raw: a nasty damp feeling which eats into one’s bones and personally I feel it much more unpleasantly than the dry frosty cold. I hope your leg is quite all right now: you will have to have a little electrical treatment with me!! Fancy poor old Siddy breaking his arm! I do hope he is having plenty of massage and medical gymnastics they are so essential. He ought to have started a few days after the fracture.
I suppose all the War Loan business is concluded now: it is a blessing they will let one condense all one’s scraps: it is much more sensible. Captain Shaw must have had a nice long leave: how lucky for him to have skating. Did they have much skating on the brickpits: there is a lot of flooded land round here and there has been nearly 3 weeks skating, but of course it is all finished now and is very muddy indeed.
To-day I have been fearfully busy there were thirty new men came in and Dr Stouffs examined them all and kept calling me to undo and do up dressings and so forth and so on. Then we took ten x-ray plates one after another: I never left the room between 11 and 12.15 and it was one wild rush. It is no end of a job: dressings to undo, limbs to fix in the proper position, focus the apparatus, fix the plate, write the men’s names down tell the doctor that I’m ready for him and then he comes to see if my preliminary arrangements are correct and the we take the photo. He regulates the tube and I work the switches and regulate the current and time the exposure. We have a lot of new apparatus coming and we are going to do Radiotherapy or treatment by X-rays.
Last week we dined with Miss Hunter, we got special late leave and had some bridge afterwards. It was great fun and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. We had to walk up as the trams stop running pretty early.
Have you been very short for sugar? Everyone in France is on tickets, we are very severely rationed here but have enough really.
I must dry up now as I am going to write a few lines to Mother.
Best Love
Your loving Dorothy
About Alford 