Monday, 11^th December 1916

Dear Wilfred,

I don’t usually start my letters with a lie, especially the first one to a new correspondent, yet I have lied right at the top of this letter.  Today is a Sunday, not a Monday; the year is 2016, not 1916.  The thing is, I am trying to remember you and as part of that I am trying to imagine what things were like for you one hundred years ago, so I hope that you will forgive my little deceit.

You’ve been in France for less than a week.  Looking at your army paperwork, I don’t think that you have joined up with your new battalion (the 19^th) just yet.  My guess is that you are doing training or acclimatisation work somewhere behind the lines.  However, what I’m really thinking about at the moment are the sorts of questions that army paperwork can never answer.  How are you feeling?  Having been in the army for just over a year now, three and a half months after returning to Britain, are you impatient to get stuck in?  What is it that you think you’ll find when you reach the front line?  Two years into the war I wonder how much of the truth of what you will face you have been told?  What have you seen since you have been in France?  Has there been anything to shock you, to give you pause for thought?  Perhaps the injured returning from the front line, or maybe the insistent sounds of distant battle?  Do you talk about these sorts of things with your pals from the 120^th that you came over to France with?  In your quiet moments alone, are your thoughts different?  Are you are missing home?  Where is it that you think of as home?  Did you leave a sweetheart behind in Canada, or is it the family back in Brackley that you miss?

Talking of family, I wonder whether you are any better at remembering birthdays than I am!  It’s your niece’s first birthday today – little Katharine, Kate’s daughter.  I don’t think you can have met her, what with her being born in South Africa, or as you would have known it, Transvaal.  As far as I know, the family didn’t come home this soon after she was born, so they wouldn’t have been in England while you were based at Bramshott.  However, perhaps your sister Kate had sent a photograph of Katharine to your mother and perhaps your mother showed it to you whilst you were in England.  I hope so.  In case not, I have enclosed a photograph of little Katharine in her high chair.  By the way, I’m her grandson.  That makes me your great-great-nephew, so perhaps I should be calling you Uncle Wilfred.  Maybe I will, next time I write.

The other photograph is also of Katharine, my Granny, but she’s the old lady in that one.  She lived until she was 94 (spoilers!).  It was Granny that first told me about you and about how you fought in the Great War, passing on what her mother – your sister – had told her.  We have remembered.  Some members of your family are helping me in my quest to find out some more about you.  Others are reading what I write.  We are remembering.  The baby that Granny is holding in the second picture is my daughter.  She’s eight now.  As I find things out about you, I am telling her and her older brother.  I showed them your picture the other day:  the one of you in uniform (with your stripes) that was taken when you visited home a month or two ago.  We will remember.

With love,

David