Letters From an Unknown Woman by Gerard Woodward

a cattle truck. Food not too bad, the other chaps are a good crowd – some Canadians and Australians. The English and the Aussies are teaching the Canadians how to play cricket.
    My one problem is that I am starved of sex and I can’t seem to take my mind off the thought of giving you good ol’ fucking. You are always on my mind, Tory, but it is a lonely business when you are not here to do your duty. I therefore beg you to write me a dirty letter by return, as dirty as you can possibly make it, full of filthy thoughts and deeds. Even better would be if you could send me a photo of yourself with no clothes on – I know, it would be a difficult thing to fix. Perhaps you could get a camera from somewhere, and use a mirror. I’m running out of room, damn block caps.
Love to your ma
Donald
XXX (merry Xmas!)
    ‘Well?’ said Mrs Head, after Tory had read Donald’s letter to herself, remaining silent and motionless long after she had finished reading. ‘Am I to take it from your contemplative immobility that your husband has repeated his earlier request?’
    ‘Not just repeated it,’ said Tory, offering her mother the letter, ‘he has asked more.’
    Mrs Head read it quickly. ‘The nerve,’ was all she could say for a few moments. ‘The nerve.’
    More letters arrived in the following days. Sometimes two or three were delivered in the same post. They had all been written at fortnightly intervals, yet were delivered in the space of a few days. Donald’s despair and frustration had spanned several months, yet for Tory they were compressed to about a week and a half. Perhaps if she had received them fortnightly she would have felt differently, would have had more time to be persuaded by their insistence and urgency, but to receive them en masse , to have the months of Donald’s frustration crushed into the space of a few days, gave them such density and weight – it was as though she had been struck by a bomb made of words.
    Each letter repeated the request made in the first, though phrased differently, with variations each time, and with relentlessly increasing coarseness.
Dearest Tory,
I have been writing letters to you for some time now and I do not know if they have reached you. Letters here arrive sometimes months after they were written, so I am hoping that there has simply been a delay with the post. My news is that I was captured in the desert and transported across the Med, then up the leg of Italy to here. I think we’re in the east of Germany somewhere.
    I am a bit worried that you may have been offended by something I said in my earlier letters. I know it was a bit of a sauce of me, but I have this most burning desire for carnal gratification that only a wife can satisfy. In my earlier letters I asked that you write me a dirty letter. Please forgive me if you find that rude or bad of me. I do not know what else to do. I also wrote that I would like a nude photo of yourself. I know that was a crazy thing to ask because how would you get it developed, even if you could take it? Well a chap here knows of a photographer’s studio in Stepney where they will develop such pictures with no questions asked. If you change your mind, here is the address: 17 Barrow Street, Stepney E1. The fellow there is called Watts.
Yours lovingly
Donald

Dear Tory,
The mail is coming and going quite smoothly out here so I am beginning to think that you are ignoring me. Perhaps you are offended by my requests or are too shy to reply. Come on, old girl! Don’t be a prissy little missy (that’s what the Canadians call ’em). You will do me great wrong by not complying – you might even be breaking the law (denying a husband his conjugal rights is grounds for divorce, you know), so take your knickers down, dip your nib in your fanny and write me a letter full of juice!!!!!!
Love to your ma (ask her for some writing tips!!),
Donald
    From this letter onwards Donald’s correspondence became so filthy that Tory could not