CALM ACCEPTANCE

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 112, 5 February 1941, Page 5

CALM ACCEPTANCE

London Woman Writes Of Air Raids Another example of the calm and phlegmatic acceptance of German raids over London is contained in the following extracts from letters received in- Wellington by a Karori resident. They are from a sister, a middle-aged woman who, with a brother who is an air raid warden and two servants, lives in the southern outskirts of Ixmdon. The matter-of-fact tone of the letters is interesting, the receiver comments, specially as the writer has always been known as nervous aud highly strung. “I am sitting alone in the drawingroom,” the letter states. ‘‘lt is B.’s night, out, and a German, after circling round for three-quarters of an hour, has dropped a bomb (Edna says it nearly knocked a basin out of her hand!) and departed. We are having a doing today and yesterday. They started up at 7.50 this morning—(there he is again) I don’t mind much when there are two of us, but it’s not amusing alone —(there goes a whistler, and I and the servants met in the hall!) “At about nine they dropped six or seven bombs fairly close. . . . For the first time I joined the ‘fall-flat’ party, and you would have laughed to see us. . . . Its is queer how we

can still see the funny side of it all. We all crowded there, grinning at each other, and saying: ‘Here comes anDther,’ ‘Here we go again.’ . . .

“As our wireless is always impossible, when the evening sirens have gone, I have turned on to Home and got some quite good choral singing. It Is much more comfortable when you can't hear Jerry. Funny to think of Rome consoling us. . . .”

In a later letter she writes thus: — “Last time I wrote the air raid noises were beginning to worry me, rather, on my evenings alone, but I quite cured that by turning on the wireless. I thought it would be rather uncomfortable not hearing things coming in time to duck, but. I found as soon as I could not hear planes and guns, or only faintly, I forgot all about them and spent a very pleasant, evening.”

At. the end of the letter a postscript has been added, saying: “All night in bed! The first time for 5G nights, they say—it did feel heavenly.”

Yes” By Cable..

A war romance of interest to New Zealanders is the engagement arnjounced of Miss Marjorie Wingate, of rhe "Sunday Sun" editorial staff, fourth daughter of Mrs. Wingate. PalmerMon North, and the late Mr. J. E. Wingate, Pohangina Valley, to Lieutenant James S. Forrest, A.1.F., who is now with the Middle East Tactical School in Egypt. Both are New Zealanders and they met in Sydney on New Year’s Day, 1940. Miss Wingate said

■yes” by cable to her fiance. Lieut. Forrest is the second son of Mr. and Mrs. A. C. Forrest, Oamaru.