[6 January 1926] Baghdad Jan 6. My dearest Mother. What a very different letter this is from the last one I wrote to you! I've just been writing to Hugo for by the time my letter gets home I think he ought to be well enough to be allowed to have it. Oh dearest, isn't that a terrible nightmare moved out of the way. I can still scarcely believe it has gone. How wonderful Frances has been, and so have you, judging by your letters - this last one breathes such a sigh of relief. But there, you see, it is going to come right. Tell me how long Hugo will be an invalid. What an unspeakable journey, worse really for Frances and you and Father than for him, since he was fortunately unconscious for so much of it.
I do love to think of you now with Elsa and Moll and Frances and all the children, with this long strain of anxiety relaxed at last.

I've been having a little quiet illness of my own but it's nearly gone. I was quite bad for a day or two, but now they are all saying that they really wouldn't have bothered if they had known the kind of person they were dealing with and that unless I get run over or drowned or something I shall certainly live to be an undred [sic] - but not soon, I hope!

For three nights I had the most preposterous sort of nightmares, mostly about 'Iraq and the treaty and so on, but I'm pleased to remember that one was about flints, which I've been learning about lately. You'll scarcely believe me but someone (in the nightmare) gave me a flint which had a fossil shell in it and I was so fearfully angry at anyone being such an idiot as to think that a flint could have a fossil shell in it, that I had to wake myself up and say what I thought about it. I found myself saying it and afterwards thought that, mutatis mutandis, it was just the kind of thing that Father would do when he was ill.

Now I'm writing complete nonsense, but really I feel so light hearted about Hugo that it's difficult to write anything else. Your very affectionate daughter Gertrude.