Some fragments from John Sandilands’ letters to Dermot Purgavie, then the Daily Mail bureau chief in New York.

I have examined you letter carefully for any signs of genuine information or even the sort of second hand gossip you seem to be able to get away with in the Daily Mail now that dear old Don Iddon’s been inched out by what I call the new chaps. The USA certainly seems to have quietened down a lot since you got there although old Al Cooke is still turning the stuff up good as ever. I sometimes wonder how the wife and I would manage without the wireless

I managed to get hold of a paperback on how to open a vein so I’m fairly cheerful at the moment, although I can’t pretend the work has been going all that well. But, after possibly the worst year since I started the business with just a couple of rooms in the East End, I have come into contact with a thrustful young publisher who has put a thrustful young book subject my way. I’m a bit rusty after such a long lay off but I’ve been running in the morning in ammunition boots and copying out chapters from Dombey and Son, and some of the old reflexes are coming back.. If it happens as planned, I would probably come to States at the end of March so I would have something to put on the dust jacket.

Sometimes in the evenings I take a paper and pencil and make up an England XI to play the Rest of the World but I just end up in a temper again. Somehow you can’t imagine Wilf Mannion sitting down and writing out lists of great feature writers who could have saved the Saturday Evening Post.

Everyone in England now has to work a 3-day week, which has put a big strain on me because it means I have less time to myself. All the street lights have been switched off so you can’t see who you’re accosting at night and there are bombs going off all the time. They gave the docks a pasting the other night. We take some blankets and a flask of tea down the Hammersmith Tube, although the wife wants us to move to somewhere nicer on the Central Line. It’s all extremely miserable, what with the TV going off at 10.30 and although I tell a few jokes and mime to records I think everybody misses the commercials

I am writing this at 33,000 feet over the Congo because my office is an awful mess as usual. I am going to Johannesburg to see Gary Player for one of the papers and if they like the interview they’re going to put my name on the top. I know you find that sort of thing exciting. I’m on an airline called UTA and we have been issued with a customs declaration, a disembarkation card and a will form. Two highjackers got off at the last stop to wait for the next flight. We have all been invited to help ourselves to the duty frees and there’s an Irish priest doing confessions at five quid a time.

I must close now in order to catch the postman. I find the best way to do it is to wait until he’s in the middle of undressing the woman downstairs. I hope you don’t mind paying for the stamp