THIS IS ENGLAND

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1943, Page 5

THIS IS ENGLAND

LAND OF SOLIDITY AIRMAN’S IMPRESSIONS. A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRYSIDE. “The photographs, the paintings, the postcards, all the things pertaining to England that you ever saw or heard of or read about are true,” writes Sergeant H. R. Falloon. who is serving with the R.A.F. in Britain, in a letter to his parents. Mr and Mrs A. H. FaL loon, Wangaehu, Masterton. “What did Shakespeare call it? ‘This precious stone set in the silver sea.’ He’s right. One oculdn’t be nearer home when one is so far away anywhere else but here. Even attempting to describe it to you makes me feel sort of wistful, and I hope that when your wandering son returns you’ll hop the first boat over here. ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s here.’ Yes, come in April. This is no country of extremes. This is a land of solidarity, of respectability, of quiet strength. This is England. I have never been so proud to be British as I am now. We walked yesterday around one of the suburbs, and the homes and gardens are more beautiful than any I have yet seen. And to think that they were probably only occupied for three months in the year, for this is a seaside resort' . . .

“In London we were seeing places of which we have read and heard since we could read—Charing Cross, Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Park, Lane, Mayfair, Regent’s Park, Waterloo, Paddington—we’ve seen them all ... . We have seen several old churches. We paid a visit to a country town, a place called Wimbourne, and after afternoon tea in a fourteenth century ‘Tea Shoppe’ we went to an old church. The first date on the list of rectors' abesses, etc., was 725. quite old and very beautifully mellowed.”

In a later letter Sergeant Falloon writes: “I found we had enough food to have a really good feed last night, so we sat down to it. The Ritz would have been proud of the menu and I got a kick out of seeing the faces of the Englishmen who haven’t seen such food for four years. It’s the best part of giving. Anyway we started off with oysters, then tongues, and then peaches and pears and cream, finally finishing with biscuits. It was grand and just went comfortably round five of us. I have had bags of letters and things this end are going fine. “The Stirlings are as big and safe as houses. Big is not the word: they are colossal. I can walk from one end to the other without having to bend my head, except where the wings pass through the fuselage. The tires even come up to my shoulders when I stand beside them. Unfortunately I cannot tell you anything more about them. We have several weeks here and then at long last we will be allowed to take some of the taxpayers’ money on the long trek. “One year four days ago I left the native shores to see- what was on the other side of the door. I have seen a little, I suppose, but one could spend a lifetime wandering around this country alone and find something.charming and interesting every day. To see the world one needs ten lifetimes or everlasting life and money unlimited. There are things I will not forget, though. That first view of America ; . . The five-minute wait in the Rockies by a lake with gaunt trees surrounding it and a dusky haze settling over all; the unending and monotonous miles of Canadian prairie under snow; Christmas in Portage, Montreal, New York. And now this country. We have been engaged lately in that delightful R.A.F. institution known as circuits and bumps and I have spent my time up there sitting and just looking. . . . You sec all the hedges and fields and they are so minute that the whole countryside looks fragile. As far as you can see it is the same, broken maybe in one corner or another by a church spire or just a little collection of thatched roofs. I like it best in the late • evenings when a purple shroud falls over it. One wonders from up there how man could desecrate such a country by so much as walking on it. And then you come back to earth with a bump and you are in the middle of a nation at war. War may explain why I think that the country is too good for the people. They are hard, all of them. It may be the poverty, too, for you will find streets and streets of houses which no words of mine could describe. They are solid, wellbuilt houses, but they have no room between one house and the next, and they are grim, forbidding and dirty and drab. One knows that people who live in those houses don’t know what a home is. They have a shelter and a bed and maybe a crust for their tea.”