After tea of cakes and rolls the bridge-players settled down to a quiet game, with pipes to hand and whisky and siphons on the sideboard.  We took it in turns to cook some delicacy for supper at 8—­sausages, curried sardines, liver and bacon, or—­rarely but joyously—­fish.  At one time or another we feasted on all the luxuries, but fish was rarer than rubies.  When we had it we did not care if we stank out the whole lodge with odours of its frying.  We would lie down to sleep content in a thick fishy, paraffin-y, dripping-y atmosphere.  When I came home I could not think what the delicious smell was in a certain street.  Then my imagination struck out a picture—­Grimers laboriously frying a dab over a smoky paraffin-stove.

On occasions after supper we would brew a large jorum of good rum-punch, sing songs with roaring choruses, and finish up the evening with a good old scrap over somebody else’s bed.  The word went round to “mobilise,” and we would all stand ready, each on his bed, to repel boarders.  If the sanctity of your bed were violated, the intruder would be cast vigorously into outer darkness.  Another song, another drink, a final pipe, and to bed.

Our Christmas would have been a grand day if it had not been away from home.

At eight o’clock there was breakfast of porridge, bacon and eggs, and bloaters—­everybody in the best of spirits.  About nine the Skipper presented us with cards from the King and Queen.  Then the mail came in, but it was poor.  By the time we had tidied up our places and done a special Christmas shave and wash, we were called upon to go down to the cookhouse and sign for Princess Mary’s Christmas gift—­a good pipe, and in a pleasant little brass box lay a Christmas card, a photograph, a packet of cigarettes, and another of excellent tobacco.

It was now lunch-time—­steak and potatoes.

The afternoon was spent on preparations for our great and unexampled dinner.  Grimers printed the menu, and while I made some cold curried sardines, the rest went down into the village to stimulate the landlady of the inn where we were going to dine.

In the village a brigade was billeted, and that brigade was, of course, “on the wire.”  It was arranged that the despatch riders next on the list should take their motor-cycles down and be summoned over the wire if they were needed.  An order had come round that unimportant messages were to be kept until the morning.

We dined in the large kitchen of the Maison Commune Estaminet, at a long table decorated with mistletoe and holly.  The dinner—­the result of two days’ “scrounging” under the direction of George—­was too good to be true.  We toasted each other and sang all the songs we knew.  Two of the Staff clerks wandered in and told us we were the best of all possible despatch riders.  We drank to them uproariously.  Then a Scotsman turned up with a noisy recitation.  Finally, we all strolled home up the hill singing loudly and pleasantly, very exhilarated, in sure and certain belief we had spent the best of all possible evenings.