EUROPE RESTLESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 18, 19 October 1936, Page 15

EUROPE RESTLESS

UNHAPPY OUTLOOK

SYDNEY WOMAN'S VIEWS

On her way home to Sydney, where she is the director of a health and beauty club conducted in conjunction with the magazine "Woman," Mrs. K. Wendell de Merrall was a passenger from Southampton on the lonic, which arrived here on Saturday afternoon. Mrs. de Merrall spent six months visiting England, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany on a combined business and pleasure trip.

To a "Post" reporter she explained that the purpose of her visit was to acquire information on«foreign travel for the women who patronise the club she conducts in Sydney on behalf of Associated Newspapers. In Germany, said Mrs. de Merrall, she saw 6000 children being given physical training as part of the Olympic Games ceremonies, under the direction of a Sydney-born girl, Fraulein Inner, whose grandfather had been Consul-General for Germany in Sydney. In Denmark Mrs. de Merrall had arranged for a private visit by Mr. B. S. Stevens (Premier of New South Wales) to her father.

Denmark, said Mrs. de Merrall (who was born there and had been away from it for fifteen years), was now asplendid country. Everybody was healthy and in comfortable circumstances, there being no rich and no poor. The country was not bothering about spending money on defence, the attitude seeming to be that if the country was attacked it could do nothing to resist. It was the "pantry of the world," and all it could do would be to leave the door open to the world. Everywhere in England and in Europe was a fear of war. Germany was not a place, she would choose to live in. The middle-aged and elderly people seemed resigned to the system, while the rising generation, though of marvellous physique, were absolutely apart from, their parents in ideas, and not individuals but merely parts of a machine. They were not beautiful, but crude, and there - was an uncomfortable feeh'ng throughout the country. In England, Mrs. de Merrall noticed, an atmosphere of almost reckless gaiety, cocktail parties, and ..other activities of the social round. When women found time for that and men provided the money for it, in one of the most conservative countries in the world, she thought there was something wrong. The attitude seemed to bo: "Let's have a fling, because we may not be able v to have it for very long." At least, that was her opinion. Mrs. de Merrall will leave for Sydney by the Wanganella next week.