I began a correspondence with Nancy about some children’s rhymes of mine which she was going to illustrate. Then I found that I was in love with her, and on my next leave, in October 1917, I visited her at the farm where she was working, at Hilton in Huntingdonshire. I helped her to put mangolds through a slicer. She was alone, except for her black poodle, among farmers, farm labourers, and wounded soldiers who had been put on land-service. I was alone too in my Garrison Battalion. Our letters became more intimate after this. She warned me that she was a feminist and that I had to be very careful what I said about women; the attitude of the Huntingdon farmers to their wives and daughters kept her in a continual state of anger she said. I had been passed B1 now, but orders came for me to proceed to Gibraltar. This was a disarrangement of my plans. Gibraltar was a dead-end; it would be as difficult to get from there to Palestine as it would be from England. A friend in the War Office undertook to cancel the order for me until a vacancy could be found in the battalion in Egypt. At Rhyl I was enjoying the first independent command I had yet had in the army. I got it through a scare of an invasion of the north-east coast, to follow a sortie of the German Fleet. A number of battalions were sent across England for its defence. All fit men of the Third Garrison Battalion were ordered to move at twenty-four hours’ notice to York. (There was a slight error, however, in the Morse message from War Office to Western Command. Instead of dash-dot-dash-dash they sent dash-dot-dash-dot, so the battalion was sent to Cork instead. Yet it was not recalled, being needed as much in Cork as in York; Ireland was in great unrest since the Easter rising in 1916, and Irish troops at the depots were giving away their rifles to Sinn Feiners.) The colonel told me that I was the only officer he could trust to look after the remainder of the battalion—thirty young officers and four or five hundred men engaged in camp-duties. He left me a competent adjutant and three officers’ chargers to ride. He also asked me to keep an eye on his children, whom he had to leave behind until a house was found for them at Cork; I used to play about a good deal with them. There was also a draft of two hundred trained men under orders for Gibraltar.