If Mary could see him now, stirring his underwear in a bubbling dixie of petrol-tainted water, she’d laugh her head off. It was a far cry from any kind of laundry she knew, with no soap or mangle and a metal tin precariously perched over four stubby candles in the dark instead of the copper boiler she used at home. That he was attempting the task at all would have amused her, but it wasn’t something he could add to the letter he was trying to write. For a start, he wouldn’t want to mention the bayonet he was using to stir the pot, or the lice he was trying to kill. She didn’t need to be worrying about that kind of thing. The trouble was it was difficult to find anything to write about that wouldn’t make her worry. One way or another, even the most innocuous things tended to end up running to horror, and every letter he wrote could so easily be his last.
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