Evening star., 1941-03-16


This stirring picture OF the lUorld'S
largest city as it apaits the spring
and the threatened inuaSion BY Adolf
Hitler 1Uds tUritten by Phyllis Bot
tome, an English author 1CeH knotDn
in the United States through her
books, 1Chich include such best sellers
as Mortal Storm" and danger Sig
ndi.' The toitol0tng is an excerpt
from Miss Bottome'S latest book,
Mansion House OF Liberty" Which
1oiH be published this lUeek by Little,
BroUn &, Co.
T ONDONERS are a highly specialized
IL and individual people and though
the young especially adjust rapidly to
new conditions, country life is as strange
to them as Jersey City would be to the
natives of Central Africa.
i like it down here" one small Lon
doner told his Cornish foster parents,
there's heaps wot I've never 'ad before
but there don't seem to be no great
towns-ave they been bombed off it
like?'
Another, taken to church on Sunday,
where incense was used as part Of its
worship, instantly pulled on his gas
mask, crying aloud to his er-mother:
Ere, we must git aht of this plice
quick. That's gas sent over by the 'Uns
to do us in!'
Country darkness and silence, outdoor
water closets at the further end of pitch
black gardens are fearful portents to
the London child. One wept pitifully
because he was put to sleep in a bed
instead of being taken down to shelter.
In the upheaved districts of Dock
side (the east end of London), welfare
workers and officials belonging to the
Women's Institute work all day long to
help in readjusting the oddly shattered
lives of those who cannot or will not be
evacuated.
Tribute Paid to Teachers.
They help to get Anderson shelters in
tiny back yards, moderately comfortable
for the inmates. They start cooking
schools and give lessons in hygiene in the
town halls. Perhaps those who do most
to help their poorer and less educated
sisters in their homes of disaster are the
London teachers. Whether they go with
the children into unknown country
schools billeted upon strangers, dependent
upon flustered committees for an ad-
vance of delayed salaries, rooms and the
wherewithal to help their children, or
whether they remain in the bombed areas
with their routine work torn to shredS,
and death in every hideous form at their
heels. they behave with the same almost
incredible courage and patience. They
have become maids OF all work to hu
manity. Perhaps the cat with nine lives
has whispered his precious secret into
their ready hearts
The London County Council had
brilliant idea when it turned its slum-
feeding problems into the hands of the
teachers who remained at their London
posts and whose schools were taken
from them. Five hundred London
schools have had to be closed; and $4,000
children-at the moment of w1iting-re-
main in London uneducated, except in
the nerve-shattering task of escaping
death at intervals.
1t is not the least of the London
teachers trials that they have to see
their material for the future, ruined and
broken before their very eyes. Yet there
are no cut-and- dried solutions for this
problem.
Willing to Chance 1t.
Those who have lost all their material
possessions cannot bear to give UP their
children, even though the child life and
education are at stake. The very virtues
of the London poor, their haphazard
courage, their unending fortitude, and
the dry cynicism of their outlook on life,
make them always willing to take
chances for their children as we'll as
for themselves.
The writer once lifted a 3-day-old
baby from slum mothers arm. Don't
you be too keerful of 'er, Miss" the
mother said indulgently, shes got to
learn to rough it!"
Londoners learn fast, but not always
what you may expect them to learn. I
do not think should have expected the
little shops, east or west, to show quite
such stubborn defiance, in the face of
their particular trials. They have no
protection for their property either from