A BROAD VIEW

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 47, 24 February 1945, Page 12

A BROAD VIEW

POST-WAR FAMILY PROBLEMS

Commending the recent education movement for girls who had married American servicemen, Mrs. H. A. Mitchell, when speaking at the Englishspeaking Union yesterday afternoon, said that New Zealand women married to New Zealand servicemen needed adjustment education just as much in preparation for the time, when they would resume the life that was broken off when the men went away. She quoted the words of one soldier: "It took courage and resolution for the men to go away, and it took courage and reslution for their families to let them go—but it's going to take more than that for their coming back." After the easy, secure, and happy background afforded by the home the Army came as a queer mixture of restraint and freedom from personal decision, said Mrs. Mitchell. Once overseas, life became an uncertain thing. Stripped of the trimmings, it caused them to see things and people as they really were. And they were sharoened, broadened, and perhaps a little coarsened by what they saw. Above all. they saw and took part in tragedy, suffering, and death. Something of which stay-at-homes were quite ignorant was the warm and vital com-, radeship of life in the Services.

PICTURE THAT SOON FADES

Men tended to put a halo around the home once separated from it, she continued. The climax came when they returned. After pent-up emotional strain and reunion, reaction was inevitable. The idealised picture cherished by the returning soldier soon faded with the realisation that life and home had continued without him for three, four, or five years, and had closed over the gap he left. The gap was still there, but he had to find .it again. Feeling strange in the place that was once his setting was a common problem, and he. shai'ed a restlessness to a greater or lesser degree, according to individuality.

Husbands' difficulties increased when they came home to fatherhood and discovered that they must share their bride with a new, and often demanding, person. They were certain to find the children noisy and disobedient, especially if they had held rank in the Services. It was a poor lookout for the father who returned to a home where the children had assumed too much importance. Older ones would resent the new authority and smaller ones would be instinctively distrustful. YOUNG WIFE'S TEMPTATIONS.

Mrs. Mitchell also spoke of other men who were coming back to broken homes and infidelity. She said she was not condoning the behaviour of some women, but she drew attention to the temptations before the young wife who was left behind. A job. money, and freedom, and the influx of charming servicemen were contributory factors. Women had experienced the long, weary strain of waiting for news, and letters were a poor substitute for fellowship. It was not easy, she said, for some girls to settle down with one salary and to life with a man who had been a stranger to them for years and whose faults and irritating ways they had forgotten whilst building up an unreal idealisation of him .during his absence.

HOMES ESSENTIAL,

Mrs. Mitchell recommended selfabnegation, tact, patience, and imagination in dealing with these returned men.

"To be properly rehabilitated it is as essential for these men to have houses, as it was for them to have munitions when they were soldiers," she declared. Many a man dug away bitterness and. restlessness in his own garden, and homes were needed as a safeguard from the interference.of rela- _ tives and friends,- ~- " —-