Any help with this word, please...
This is an extract from a letter from 9/9/1914, written home by a soldier. He was my partner's great uncle, and her father - now 92 and very much an RAF man with his only job being as a navigator - wants to see all the letters in a book, which I am making for him. I have transcribed all the 15 or so letters but there is this one word I can't make out, underlined in red. We have settled on "watch", but I don't think it is that really. The sentence is "If I see Mrs F I will send my watch back." It makes sense, but that isn't how he wrote W, as you can see from the "We" underlined in blue. I also thought there might be a B, or a P, but those too seem ruled out by "Bathing Parade". Nor does it look his "O". (He capitalised nouns randomly.)
We wonder if he started to write something and then made a correction, but he usually ignored mistakes, but did scrub out a few more completely than the marks at the beginning of this word. Although what we are thinking might be crossing out could be other letters, but it's not "AB", as his "A" was different.
I can post more extensive samples if anyone thinks it might help.
Thank you.
Phillip
