ENGLISH WINTER

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 157, 29 March 1941, Page 14

ENGLISH WINTER

N.Z. Airman’s Comments

A New Zealand pilot officer serving in England, comments in a recent letter on the severity of the winter. “In the last few days we have had ■two heavy falls of snow, and the roads and footpaths are covered in halffrozen slwsh,” he writes. “I can look out of the window on to a field once fresh and green with new grass, and flanked with rustling poplars, but now under, a foot of snow. The poplars stand up stark anti straight against the heavy, purple sky, their lower branches bent with snow. Every sound is muffled by this enveloping blanket of intense white. As lam writing, a German aircraft throbs overhead, very high up, and I feel absurdly secure, or perhaps I am too cold to worry. “This fen country is very foggy, and as long as I have been here I have not seen a really clear day, with a 30-inile visibility, as we had in Wellington. Even in summer the ground was covered with a slight haze or mist, which, however, gave the country a peculiarly charming, mellow • atmosphere. The grass is an intense green colour, not a yellowish-green as in New Zealand, and the sheep are so white they look like picture-book sheep. “It is very flat here, ajniost monotonously so. On moderately clear days we can see the church tower of Ely, above the trees, about eight miles away. Ely is a typical English small town, and might have been built, or anyhow, planned, hundreds of years ago. ‘‘This England is a very j beautiful place: more like a garden, or a big park, than the open country we know, and it will not be easy to leave. The climate, however, specially in winter, is in my opinion, diabolical, and makes one of Wellington’s southerly busters look silly.”