LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
THE WAR IN CALIFORNIA Snt,—Through three happy decades my father and, later, my husband were constant subscribers to The Spectator. For the past year it has been a joy we have had to do without, but I am venturing, neverthe- less, to write you to tell you that we in California are not the unnerved and hysterical people a broadcast from London describes.
I grant you that we were stunned by the first news-flash from the White House on Sunday noon. I myself was driving over a lonely desert road with my dog to meet some friends for a picnic-luncheon. It was a mild, glorious desert day, and all along the road were families sitting in the sand with their sandwiches and thermos bottles in their midst, and generally a circle of dogs on the edges with their eyes fixed hopefully on each bite. I thought how wonderful it was, and how good it would be to hear the Beethoven Seventh Symphony. I turned on my radio, and instead of music got that brief flash of the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Since then the danger has come near and we are going through what England knows so well: the wonder if those droning planes overhead are friend or foe, the sudden shriek of sirens, the black-outs that came on us with so little warning that we have yet to get our curtains. ' We are a community in the midst of the danger-zone, not seasoned to hardships, unless the three shattering earthquakes of the past twelve years have somewhat hardened us. But no one is hysterical, and most of my neighbours and friends here and in the larger nearby towns are setting sturdily to work to do their bit and wasting no time in protests and complaints.
Yesterday I had to go back to the desert house, a trip of more than a hundred miles. I was warned by the officer in charge of that district that I must get home before dark, but halfway home was caught by a cloudburst in a narrow canyon, and had to fight the sudden rush of water across the highway. Darkness found me still thirty miles from home in wind and rain. Then came the warning. Other cars caught like me were crawling along with dimmed lights, and once when deep water stopped us for a bit there was the most neighbourly interchange of help. No one even complained, of diffi- culties, and when we reached home to spend a long evening in the dark we found unexpected rewards in picking each others' brains on every subject under the sun. There will always be the rumour- mongers and hysterical in any group of human beings. But I don't think we have by any means gone to pieces under this first taste of war. I trust darker hours that may be in store for us here will find us
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