October 27, 1943

Hi!
The autumn fogs are setting in now. It was pretty thick this morning, but burned off + we had a beautiful afternoon. Now, tonight you can’t see six feet ahead with a flashlight. They tell me that in a real pea-souper in London at night, with a flashlight, sometimes you can’t see the ground. I hope I can keep out of any such. In London, of course, it is what they call “smog” in St. Louis, due to soft coal smoke plus moisture. I haven’t got any mail since Sunday. But yesterday we received a carload or so of Xmas packages + others. Most of them were mailed a month or more ago, so I won’t be looking for yours for quite a while. I seem to have some duties as Asst. Mess Officer this time, (I don’t make the sandwiches). They have been leaving in droves there last three days, over half the outfit. So now we are getting quite cozy. I also figure out mess bills (ie the number of rations to be charged to each officer). That has also been keeping me fairly busy, though it only takes a couple of hours a month ordinarily. This time it is complicated by our recent travels. And tonight we ate off plates for the first time since we got off the boat. It’s a grand improvement over mess kits. We’ve had the dishes (enameled plates + cups) all along, but there had been no drying rack for them. Now ‘Arg ? had finally got it built + we can be civilized (moderately) again.