A NEW HOME

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23770, 25 September 1940, Page 8

A NEW HOME

ENGLISH CHILDREN GROUP IN AUCKLAND \ AIR RAID EXPERIENCES A group of- English children accompanied by their mothers are in Auckland. Thirty-eight of the children are up to 12 years of age, including five babies in arms, and there are a number of others between 12 and 16 years. Many of the children already know of the horrors of war. Most of them are from London. Showing a wholesome contempt for the efforts of German airmen, one boy of about 10 years said he used to sleep through the raids that occurred over his home in southern England. "Sometimes I got up to tell the family that there was a raid on and then 1 went back to bed," ho added. "One day a bomb fell 25 yards from our school gate just aftor I had left."

This boy and others described how they had heard machine-gunning by enemy aircraft during low-flying raids. They had seen houses and other buildings damaged by bombs and they had picked up shrapnel in the streets. One child from the south of England had often felt the ground shake as the Royal Air Force carried out heavy bombing on the French coast. One boy of seven, when asked how he thought he would like New Zealand, blandly replied: "Oh, I know New Zealand. I have been here 'two times' before."