NEW ZEALAND SPIRIT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 255, 28 October 1942, Page 2

NEW ZEALAND SPIRIT

OUR AIRMEN IN ENGLAND

"So many Australians and New Zealanders tell me that they are not happy in England," writes Hector Bolitho in his published "notebook," concerning his war experiences in London. "It is partly their own fault. We have so many chips on our shoulders and we are casual. These two ills prevent us from enjoying all the amenities of English life. I have lived here long enough for my chips to fall off . . . This feeling of difference must be broken down somehow. It is bad for both of us— and both of us are to blame."

There are many references to New Zealanders, mostly airmen, in this book. Mr. Bolitho, who works at the Air Ministry, with the rank of squadron leader, has some vivid stories to tell of his own and other people's relations to danger during the bombing of London, but his reflections are even more interesting —at least to New Zealanders. He affirms that the greatest lesson of his life has been "that nothing I have gathered unto myself in the old world is as fine as the ideal which burned within me as- a boy, when I tramped the hills on the fringe of the Manukau harbour, or dug my fingers into the sand of Cheltenham Beach. I thought that I had improved on that ideal—eradicated it with achievement. But I was wrong. I have never felt myself to be such a thorough New Zealander in my life." Some months after he wrote the foregoing, he learned that his consciousness of New Zealand was fully shared by others. In the Savoy Hotel two New Zealand pilots challenged him. "You were born in New Zealand, weren't you? . . . Are you ashamed of it?" He answered. "Of course not, why?" "Well, why haven't you got New Zealand flashes on your uniform?" He said it had never occurred to him that he could, or should, wear them. Next morning the pilots arrived with two "New Zealand" flashes and insisted that he have them sown on. He did. Mr. Bolitho tells some excellent stories of the Royal Air Force and the men in it, and his admiration for it and them is a continual theme in his notebook. But nothing in it is finer than his tribute to the character of the late "Jimmy" Ward, V.C., whose quality of "inherent goodness" made so deep an impression on all who met him. •War in the Strand, By Hector Bolitho, Eyre and Spottiswoode.