At 9:30 on the morning of Thursday 28 September, Sherriff and his mother sat together in the Charing Cross station buffet drinking coffee. They had travelled up together from Hampton Wick to Waterloo, and taken a taxi across the river, and now they made small talk until it was time for him to leave on the 10 o’clock boat train. A few years later he recalled that after the train left and  ‘went round the bend, we saw hundreds of little white handkerchieves fluttering on the platform.’

The station in Folkestone was close to the quay. The officers were helped with their valises and within twenty minutes everyone was on board and the ship ready to set sail for Boulogne. They arrived at 2 o’clock, after ‘a very nice, smooth journey across,’ as he wrote to his mother later that day.

After arriving, he and the other East Surrey men found their way to the British Officers’ Club, where they had dinner, prior to a stroll round the town. ‘I can hardly believe I am in France,’ he wrote. ‘It seems just like a Cinematograph picture to see the gendarmes in baggy trousers walking about  and porters in blue overalls.’ But there wasn’t much time to linger:  at 5:30 that evening (as he told his father) they were due to catch another train, for their onward journey – ‘I expect to the base.’ That would be an eye-opener for him…

[Next letter: 29 September]