"IT IS QUIET OUT HERE!"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 124, 7 November 1941, Page 42

"IT IS QUIET OUT HERE!"

RS. TONY LAMPEN, daughter-in-law of the popular radio speaker, Major Lampen, who arrived in .New Zealand from London only two months ago, can’t quite adjust herself yet to the smoothness of our life. "It seems so quiet out here," she told me, when I called on her on behalf of The Listener. "You get so used to hearing airraid sirens that you wonder what is wrong when you don’t hear them. And it seems so strange being able to walk round at night and not having to be prepared to dive into the nearest shelter. "TI was living twenty miles out of London, but I used to come into London fairly often in the evenings to meet my husband, who was at Aldershot. To get from one place to another you have to progress during the lulls. The alert will go, so you'll dive into the nearest shelter. You wait, and as soon as the ‘ All Clear’ sounds you come out and get along as far as you can before you are forced to take cover again. During an air-raid it takes a very long time to get anywhere. Shelter Life "Shelter life in England has now become part of the accepted scheme of things. Many people in much bombed districts never see their homes at all. They go straight from.work to their airraid shelter, and every morning leave the shelter and go straight to work. This communal life is having an efféct upon the English character. The habitual reserve is breaking up, and even the least socially inclined are finding that it’s fun to take part in shelter concerts and to play a rubber of bridge with people whom you wouldn’t have met if there hadn’t been a war on. But there’s a system now whereby people are given season tickets to one particular shelter, and that means that they tend to form a little community of their own. It isn’t so good if you’re ‘ caught out’ by an airtaid warning some distance from your home and have to go to a strange shelter. "My husband and I were planning to hitch-hike to Devon one night, but we found there were no lorries going through till morning, so we decided to spend the night in a shelter and go on at daylight. We felt almost as though we had gatecrashed a rather exclusive party. Everybody else seemed to be calling each other by Christian names and (in the case of men) playing poker, or (in the case of women) swopping anecdotes about births and deaths. We felt quite out of it." Cheap Way To Travel "Isn’t it rather difficult to hitch-hike in. England?" I asked. "Yes, we have to rely on lorries. The petrol rationing means that there are very few private cars on the roads. Before the war I did quite a lot of hitch-hiking in England, Wales, and Scotlahd. It’s much easier in Britain than it is here because there are so many youth hostels throughout the country, and that means that you

can tour the whole country at very little cost. You pay 1/- a night, and you can either buy your meals at the hostel, or, if your prefer, cook your own. But it’s wonderful fun, and you meet such interesting people at the various hostels. There’s a marvellous atmosphere-in the mornings everyone helps with the work and in the evening there is singing round the fire. "It’s amazing the way normal life goes on in England, in spite of the blitz.

Railway lines get bombed, but a gang of men get to work and in a couple of hours the trains are again running to schedule, Shops get bombed out, but they merely shift their stock to an empty * building, and carry on as before. I remember seeing one shop left standing, surrounded by the debris of all the other buildings in that particular block. It bore a notice, ‘We are open during airraids, but in the event a direct hit we will close immediately.’ That’s rather typical of the way Londoners take things. They usually laugh. "One. of the things I like best about life in New Zealand is the fact that you can sleep through the whole night. In England, if you didn’t elect to stay in the shelter all night, you had to be prepared to wake up at any time and bundle yourself out of bed into the nearest shelter. There was very little demand for pyjamas and nightgowns last winter as most girls slept in their slacks. All they had to do then was seize their gasmasks,’? "Are you glad to be away from it all?" "In some ways, yes. I do like getting my eight hours of undisturbed sleep, and I do like being able to eat as much butter as I like and to make as many cakes as I like. Most of the cakes you see in London shops are bright yellow because they’re made with egg powder instead of eggs. But if you have been in the centre of things you do feel rather out of everything when you leave. You get the feeling that history is being made and you’re not helping to make it."