  In February 1939, Arthur summed up his and Clare’s situation in London: ‘I’m afraid we haven’t acclimatised ourselves to the ways of England’, he wrote: ‘We’ve no desire to be back in N.Z., but there’s a lot over here that it’s hard to stomach’. Worse, war was approaching. During the Munich crisis, in the autumn of the previous year, Clare had watched sandbag air-raid shelters being constructed across London, and she saw long queues everywhere as people waited to get gas masks fitted. She was (she wrote) ‘half-expecting to hear any moment the noise of thunder as planes filled the air’ (Everdean 1938a).