Margaret Box, my Great Aunt, trained as a nurse, and went out to serve in Serbia with the Elsie Inglis Unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. She had been working near Skopje, but at the time of writing this letter she was on her way to Sarajevo.
Dec 16th 18
My Dear Dad,
Our 3 days trip has lasted 10 days & have have had a most enjoyable voyage. The weather has been & still is perfect & so warm. We have appreciated the complete change of living too for a little while &now we are going back to our old style ! The last 2 days have been very gay. I think we have had our Xmas festivities. We have been out to tea & lunch on other boats & yesterday we went ashore & climbed a bit of mountain.
We expect to leave by train tomorrow morning & I suppose we shall soon arrive at our destination & it will be quite strange to start nursing again & I wonder how long we shall stay there !
This country is wonderfully beautiful. We picked huge snowdrops yesterday & ferns of all varieties. I saw lots of different leaves such as cyclamen, columbine etc & in the spring the flowers must be lovely.
I hope you got my letter with post cards safely. We reckoned it ought to take about 10 days to get home. We have not the least idea how or where we shall get letters here. I should think it will be a good many weeks. I hope in about 2 months to send you another newsy letter as I think some of the Sisters are going home then. Their time will be up & they have promised to take anything home for me.
This afternoon we have been ashore & had a glorious walk thro’ orchards & woods to such a pretty town. Oranges grow there now & roses & large blue campanulas wild . It has been a perfect day, very warm & the water is like a pond. It was very windy when we arrived on Saturday morning & the sea was quite choppy.
We are to get up at about 5 o’clock tomorrow morning & start off on our travels again. They say we are going through gorgeous scenery, but I have seen so much already my brain is overflowing with it, and the sunrises & sunsets are so brilliant & so many colours you would not believe it was possible. I will write later & tell you about some of the people we have met on board, their departures & destination we mentioned in one of the daily papers, but they did not mention us !
Please tell mother not to bother about the tartan tie as I hear they are very difficult to get so I will write to Miss Willis for one.
I am wondering what you will be doing at Xmas. I suppose the family will be very scattered. It is most unXmaslike out here. We were told it would be frightfully cold & snowy, but evidently it has not begun yet. I find I like the sea so much & we find the Navy life so well that several of us are thinking of joining it !!
It is very strange that the ships Dr. on one ship we visited here was a student at Guy’s when I was there. I did not recognise him as he has shaved his moustache off, but he remembered me. Of course we talked Guy’s but neither of us had much news of the old place.
Very much love to all
Your loving daugher
Margaret
Notes
Her father’s notes say ‘arrived 24/12/18’ and ‘answered 29/12/18’
Margaret had asked her mother for a Gordon Tartan Tie on her letter of the 3rd of December.