New Zealand Journey [antikvár]

Introduction The British Isles were a sheet of ice surrounded by a froth of frozen sea. Shivering people slid along the city pavements in high fur boots. It was mid-winter. In New Zealand, twelve thousand miles and a day and a half away, it was mid-summer. There the svin blazed down on a turquoise-green sea dotted with tiny yachts. Jungly vegetation covered much of the land and the people, still speaking English, driving on the left, and calling a shilling a 'bob' were going on picnics, lazing on beaches ia open white shirts and the briefest shorts. It was January in both places and these two scenes, looked down on dispassionately from the Qantas plane, told a story of nostalgia. From England, for the imagined warmth, peace and easy relaxation of New Zealand, and from the Dominion, for the 'old' country, the imagined home for remarkably most of them even if they had never been there. What is it like in New Zealand ? The cold in London had been almost a pain. Huddled mechanics worked machines to melt the ice from the wings of the jet plane. A thin sun glittered on the frozen runway and, as we rose in the crusted air, all the land showed as a vast skating rink cracked here and there by frozen hedgerows. Ice pounded the sides of the Bristol Channel and the Irish Sea. Eire was under a grey pall of ice, too. Then came the cold Atlantic Ocean and eventually the huge sweep of Cape Cod and the United States of America. Here were sand bars below and marshes, mud-colour instead of England's whiteness, but cold still, very cold. The unexpectedly long Long Island, a hundred and five miles long, dotted with communities of same-design houses, looked from the air like shell patterns on a beach. So many islands, so many houses New York. The plane