TROPIC LIFE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 39, 15 January 1943, Page 7

TROPIC LIFE

Official War Correspondent An advanced Pacific Base, Dec. Ki. When .semi-tropical rain puttered down to-day through tlie tinder-dry bush in which a unit of the Royal New Zealand Air Force at this Pacific base has built its camp, men looked at one another with a gleam of satisfaction in their eyes. "This will be good for the garden," they said. And they were thinking not of home, but of the neat, carefully tended little vegetable plots that are bursting into healthy green growth alongside almost everj r tent, in the camp. Here, where boredom in leisure hours can be the. biggest enemy of all and where, almost, the only diversions are those that the men make for themselves, gardening has bccome a universal hobby. And so: now, when it rains, the gloomy prospect of sticky red mud and. wet boots is tempered by the certainty of fresh life, among the beans and tomato plants. Packets of seed were specially ordered from New Zealand, plots of earth were dug and sifted, and watered and screened from the hot sun and the birds. Air crews in frgin their long patrols and the ground back from another day's work on -the dusty airfield nursed their young shoots with absorbing care. Quickly growing vegetables like beans and peas, which will bring freshness to meals noAV almost completed prepared from tinned, and preserved rations, experiments, too, in the form of. tomato ami onion plants raised from seed in boxes of fine soil. Gardening is. at: least a partial answer to the problem, favoured everywhere by New Zealande.rs serving in the Pacific, what to do, in their spare time. Recreation huts have been established here where officers and men may read, write etters and play indoor games in the evenings. Occasionally they sec motion pictures at. a neighbouring American station or stage their own "campfire concerts,'" and it has been possible to send small leave parties away for a three-day break in a greener and more pleasant part of the island. The facilities for leave and recreation, however, are inevitably limited. Cricket teaj.ns arc to lie organised, and the unit has set up its own canteen.

Mail from home is 1 probably ihc biggest factor in morale, and a great deal depends, on the regular arrival of letters and parcels. There is a frequent service by air to New Zealand. At this station the New Zealanders have devoted a great deal of their leisure time 1 to improving their living conditions and, considering the difficulties they faced, they have readied a remarkable degree of confort. Officers and men alike—there are no batmen here —are making the best of tent, life by building "bush furniture" out of packing cases and odd scraps of timber, wooden flooring and walls, trellis fences and shingle paths-