May 2/44

Dear Mother and Dad,

I got your letter of the 28th today. There is hardly a day goes by when I don’t get something in the mail. It is too bad that it is so dry out there. It will make it bad for the crops. I saw in TIME magazine that the prospects are the worst in 25 years. There is plenty of moisture here and things are growing up. There are a lot of little flies coming out now and they say that they are really bad in summer.

My “course” is coming on O.K. It is interesting especially when the instructor sends a message. We are learning the phonetic alphabet and mersig (signal flag alphabet). We had our first S.B.X. (signal exam) today. Anyone who got over 85% wouldn’t have to come back to night classes. Half the class made it. I got 98, the highest mark. The trouble with me is that I start off O.K. but then I deteriorate as time goes on. I hope I can keep up fairly good marks. We took up tidly letters today (combinations of letters that have certain meanings. I do not know them very good yet so I will have to study them. I guess I will go to the show tonight. It is a good one, a double feature all for 10¢

I am enclosing our exam paper to show you what it is like. P/L stands for plain language. V means from. The letters after CALL are the stations sending and receiving. Well, this is my last page of notepaper so you will see a new kind of heading on my next letter

Y. L. S.
Malcolm