WOMEN’S NOTES

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 83, 9 March 1925, Page 2

WOMEN’S NOTES

Archdeacon and Mrs Evans, of New Plymouth, will pay a short visit to Oamaru before leaving for England.

Miss Pearce, of the staff of the Taranaki Education Board, who has been an exchange teacher in Vancouver and Montreal, returned to New Plymouth last week. CROQUET. WILSON CUP COMPETITION. Play in the Wilson Cup competition will commence on tho Manawatu Club’s greens to-morrow. Tho cup was donated by Mrs P. J. Wilson for play among Manawatu members only,- and tho competition will take the form of a sectional Yankee tournament. Tho players have been drawn in the following sections: —Section A: Mrs Milton (6), Mrs Fuller (6i), Mrs Briden-Jones (8), Mrs Baxter (4), Mrs MoP*ae (3£). Section B: Mrs H. E. Bennett (8), Mrs Robertson (5), Mrs Spring (5), Mrs Clarke (4£), Mrs Sinclair (8). Section C: Mrs Spinley (6i), Mrs Mansford (6j), Mrs T. Bennett (12), Mrs Corbridge (5 i). Section D : Mrs Innes (4) Mrs Bondall (7), Mrs Campbell (4£), Mrs McGill (7 ).

HEROIC WAR NURSE. SHOT BY SNIPERS. TERRIBLE AFTER EFFECTS. The sad story of the misfortunes of a nurse who played a henoio part during the war is graphically told by a special correspondent of the London Daily Chronicle. Ho writes:— As the light was fading from the sky this evening, obscuring from view the pleasant countryside, I listened to the story, told in pitiful, halting accents by the woman herself, of a nurse’s heroism on the Western Front and of her present plight. Nurse Edith Helen Clutsom lies in a small revolving shelter in the grounds of the Aylsham Poor Law Institution, ten miles from Norwich. She is a victim of those two dread diseases, consumption and cancer. She suffers the greatest of agonies; morphia injections are being constantly made, but on her bed of sickness she is proving herself as great a heroine as on the fields of France. No word of reproach or complaint leaves her lips. PITTED BY BULLETS. Nurse Clutsom is only 30, yet she is one of the few living women who have known war at its worst. Her frail body is marked and pitted by German bullets—honourable wounds sustained while stretcherbearing near the front line. Her memory is now acected by the events of the past terrii lc years. The nurse’s cosy hut is the atmosphere of peace itself, and on the walls are small pictures of happy scenes and a portrait of the Prince of Wales wearing his famous smile. There are books, but, best of all—for that is what brings the stricken nurse consolation—there is a crystal wireless set which was installed by a few friends and individual guardians. Too weak to read and too tired to converse ut any length of time, she can yet lie back on her pillow * and forget her bodily tortures by listening-in to Chelmsford and 2LO. SHOT 'TIRCnGH LUNG. Nurse Clutsom wa3 shot through tho left lung by a German sniper. Her two arms, which she showed me with pride, are pitted by marks of ricocheting bullets, and there is still the scar showing where her left wrist was broken by a bullet which went through the hand. She was a Norfolk girl of 19 when she took to nursing. Then came _ the war, and sho volunteered at Westminster to go to France with the Red Cross in 1915. After six months spent at Boulogne she was sent forward near to the line, attached to the casualty clearing stations. Then there camo a call for nurses would aot as stretoher-bearers. Nurse Clutsom, with others, responded. “We were, perhaps, nearer tho firing line than we should have been,” she explained, “but necessity brooks no delay. I did not think of the danger at the time —no nurse does. We had many escapes from being hit. Bullets from the quick-firers spurted all around, and would plough the ground, coming off suddenly and picking out pieces. “I had been out two year 3 when I got my wound in tho chest. I was at a little place which I always believed to be spelt Tolon. I am not sure of the name properly. 1 was at the rear of the ambulanoe waggons on which we were taking wounded to tho hospital. We were in a railway cutting, and a sniper got me. AT VIMY WOOD. “Wo had to find shelter anywhere. Sometimes it wos a bit of propped-up canvas, a shell-wreoked building, or an overhanging ledge, anywhere where firstaid could be given. “It was terrible at Vimy Wood. The boys kept creeping out for days—wounded, vermin-riddon, famished, some with gangrenous wounds.” Nurse Clutsom was at hospital for a considerable time, und then returned to duty. In 1918 sho left France for England, and spent a holiday in Wales. Then she took up nursing again, and for a time was at an officers’ convalescent home. . She was nursing in London when, just before Christmas, 1922, she was about to leave for Wales, for another holiday, and was taken ill in the streets, and removed to the infirmary. Two severe operations followed, and then she was removed to the Aylsham Institution, whore, for the past 18 months, she has contemplated life from her open-air hut. _ She has had no pension. “I never ask ed for one,” she explained, simply. I gave what service I could, and I have thought nothing of it.”

MODERN GIRLS. ‘‘People often talk disparagingly of the rising generation, especially of the modern girl. Nothing could be more unfortunate or more untrue.” This is the judgment of the Rev. W. G. Pennyman, vicar of St. Mark’s, Northern. Audley street, in “The Collapso of Convention.” “I am thrown a groat deal with the younger generation,” writes Mr Pennyman, ‘‘and while it is true that a small minority of them are very foolish and leave a great deal to be desired, the vast majority are splendid. They are much more independent and self-reliant than the young people of 30 years ago, but it is all to the good. They are straight and fearless, simple and natural. They have strong convictions and ore far harder working. There is a directness about thorn which is sometimes almost embarrassing, but they are the real thing, and they are out to make good. “There are always ‘rotters,’ of course, but they represent a negligible minority, and their influence is so small as to be not worth considering.” ' There is much in the- book about the “nice girl, well brought up,” who finds herself among tiro “fast set,” and soon becomes a regular frequenter of night clubs.

“She hears of some night club, and is persuaded by some friend to go to it,” says Mr Pennyman. “She enjoys herself and goes again. Then the thing becomes a habit, and it is not till too late that she realises that the kind of people who frequent night clubs are not really nice people. ■■■■■> “Before long her freshness and innocence will have become smirched, her moral fibre coarsened, her ideals lowered and her old pure vitality and simplicity will have disappeared.” The Rev. H. R. L. Sheppard, vicar of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, in a forev.-ord, says: “I happen to know a number of people, of all ages and both sexes, who owe a great deal to Mr Pennyman’s teaching and friendship, in Mayfair as elsewhere.”