The following is extracted from an Englishwoman's letter received in Shanghai. There are so man of these letters and yet they never pall—because of the courage that sticks out of every line of them.
"I have a very nice woman staying with me now who has been in all of the worst London bombing as an ambulance attendant, Actually she was buried under debris with only her hand sticking out, She was frightened to go to bed her first night here because she has not slept in a bed for weeks.
Her husband is a war firemen and they lived just beside where all the worst of the dock fires were, Gradually an organization is being built up to give these people rest in the country but the slowness in getting anything going is appalling and the only thing is to do as I am doing and that is, go ahead with the scheme and fall into line later, I hope to go to London at the end of next week to see if I can facilitate matters, "This woman is very keen on the violin, so much so that she has made her husband learn to play the cello and although their house and some furniture they cherished has been bombed, the cello is safe even though it is ina room that has a large hole in the ceiling which shows the sk through, but this they say stops the blast and gives some measure of safety for the cello. She started learning to play the violin after her baby died some years ago and says she has had the greatest joy and comfort out of arranging concerts, ete, "Miss Cooper is going to try and borrow a violin for her as we feel it may be a help to her, and if she wants some musie you' have left plenty behind, She tells me her husband has been on fire duty for sever-teen hours at a stretch wita bombs and fire all around and that no one could get near enough to the men to give them even a drink because of the heat, exploding bombs, etc. and they made jokes about it the whole of the time.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.