FRIENDLY WELCOME

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 May 1943, Page 4

FRIENDLY WELCOME

GIVEN TO ALLIED TROOPS IN NORTH AFRICA.

ATTITUDE OF THE RESIDENT

POPULATION. The 8.8. C. has received an interesting letter from a member of the staff now serving as an Aircraftman in the R.A.F., on the reception given to the British troops on their landing in North Africa. “I use the word ‘natives’,” he says, “in its widest sense, to include all the permanent inhabitants, among whom, of course, there is a very high percentage of Frenchmen. I have experienced a general friendliness from nearly all the French —at the worst indifference, never animosity. I had a very lengthy talk with one ‘native' —a Frenchman driving a horse and trap, who gave me a lift. He told me that the French were overjoyed at our arrival; had been expecting it and hoping for it for two years. He owned a radio shop and said that for a long time past he had been secretly tuning into the 8.8.C.'s North African Service, and to other programmes, and had had all the neighbours in, clustered round the radio, to hear our news. So, he assured me, he had been quite up-to-date oh current events . He was, he said, an ardent de Gaullist. Whenever General de Gaulle broadcast he listened. He had never seen him, but thought him a fine speaker .. . ” The writer of the letter goes on to describe an Englishwoman he met in “the town.” Though aged about 75, she is described as very sprightly, and has been teaching English to private pupils for about twenty years. She asked him. to have a cup of tea, and when he said he would like one, insisted upon his having three cups, a fried egg, bread and margarine, cheese, dates and tangerines. To his protests, all she said was that had he come a fortnight sooner she would not have been able to give him even one cup of tea. The local people had been half-starving for over two years. “But,” she told him,’ “your arival has changed all that, and we can never be grateful enough.” She, too, told him that the Allies had been long expected, and that the French,

population warmly welcomed their coming. She would return to England after the war, she declared, even if she had to “sweep back” across the sea.