Mrs. Kenneth Penman
Maycot
12 Commonside
Keston
Kent

Brum
19.8.40

Darling,

I very much appreciated your letter this evening; I had been worrying about you since reading in the paper this morning the Jerry communiqué in which he mentioned Biggin Hill. It was very sweet of you to write so soon after the raid when you must have still been feeling the shock a bit.

I shall feel very much better when the G.P. on the Common is again manned; although it will greatly increase the noise, I feel that proximity to the Ack-Ack is one of the safest places to be. The garden incident would never have happened; they would just have got blown out of the way. I don’t doubt that Aunt Beth heard shrapnel on the roof; it would have come from some of our own metal, it breaks up, you know, into ounce fragments and is only dangerous…

…if one happens to be actually hit when you are in the open.

We have now moved to another G.P. rather further outside Birmingham; the other promise, I’m afraid, to be rather a hot spot, situated as it is only a few hundred yards from Fort Dunlop and Nuffields’ Spitfire works.

The last night we were there, we were very encouraged when ten of the fourteen bombs he dropped (all misses) failed to explode. Three actually dropped on the gun position, and when the R.Es came in the morning, we told ’em we thought they were duds and asked ’em if they had many to deal with. Apparently, they were not duds but “small fragmentation anti-personnel bombs,” they are designed to explode only on hitting a hard surface such as the floor (concrete) of a large factory.

I admired the picture my imagination drew of my two girls reading Snow White together in the shelter, that’s definitely the…

…spirit, darling. How did Edie and Pat behave? I think eleven is a bit thick for your small shelter, darling; apart from the discomfort, any trace of fear shown by the grown-ups is so quickly communicated to the children.

Our raid here last night; perhaps I should mention we get alarms every night now; we are having to do most of our sleeping in the daytime. What was I going to say? Oh yes, the A.R.P. last night went into rather a flat spin sounding the all-clear when the sky was full of shell bursts and bombs were actually dropping. Unfortunately, all our raids have been at night, and Jerry has consistent by day his bombing from 20 to 25,000 feet.

We have had to content ourselves with giving a box barrage round Nuffields, and hoping to get some illumination from the searchlights. The guns we are using here have a ceiling of 42,000 feet (just short of eight miles)…

…the searchlight lenses have nothing like this range.

Have you heard about the bloke who, in the interests of stiffening his own morale, computed the number of pigeons in London against the strength of the Luftwaffe and came to the conclusion that as he had never suffered from a “direct hit,” he had therefore very little to worry about if Mr. Goering did visit his locality.

My other story is about a mature boy who, not knowing how far to undress while turning in, decided to watch his next-door neighbor, an old soldier. The old soldier, finding himself observed rather too closely for his liking, remarked, “Ain’t you got no brothers, chum.”

I’ll write again, darling, as soon as I hear from you. I only seem to have a little piece of note paper left to tell you how much I love you this time, it’s a bad show, however, herewith kiss stop. Love very much stop. Don’t you think rather sweet stop. But infatuated stop.

K.