In a letter to Country Life magazine January 13, 1912, Beatrix Potter described the noise of Waterbird’s propeller as resembling ‘millions of blue-bottles plus a steam threshing machine’, adding that testing should be over the sea. She also stated ’The noise is confined by the hills: “echoes redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild”’. [An extract from a poem by William Wordsworth.]
However, her views changed dramatically and in a letter to an American friend in May 1942 she wrote ‘I have so often thought of those lines [from her ’The Lonely Hills’ essay, the title and moral of which came from another Wordsworth poem], since ‘the silence of the starry sky’ has been interrupted by aeroplanes, which at first we detested; but since the war we delight to see them.’