"ADOPTED" SON

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 235, 5 October 1942, Page 4

"ADOPTED" SON

RETURN FROM OVERSEAS ONCE A LONELY SOLDIER (0.C.) NEW PLYMOUTH, this day. Although he has no relatives in New Zealand, Private David B. Bell, a Scotsman invalided back frorri service overseas, received as warm a welcome as any soldiers who have returned, when he arrived to stay with his "adoptive" mother, Mrs. J. M. Bielby, New Plymouth, whom he had never seen.

Mrs. Bielby, who is 78 years of age, in telling of the story of the "adoption," said that as a member of the 27th Machine-gun Club at New Plymouth, she heard two years ago last February that a soldier had written to his mother asking someone to write to two lonely soldiers in his unit. When she learned that one of the men, Private Bell, was born in the same year as her only son, who died in the 1918 epidemic, she immediately volunteered to correspond with him.

Over the past two years letters received from Private Bell have been full of appreciation for the continued interest taken in him by Mrs. Beilby who has written regularly and has supplied him with parcels. His own parents died in Scotland soon after he left for New Zealand. Before to serve with the 2nd N.Z.E.F. Private Bell was engaged in work in the Canterbury district.