WONDERFUL HOMES

Taranaki Daily News, 17 August 1935, Page 18 (Supplement)

WONDERFUL HOMES

HUNGARY AND ENGLAND. HELP BY UNEMPLOYED, Some wonderful homes are now to be found in Hungary, where small children are kept well and happy while their parents seek for work. Every morning at 7.30 the small people begin to arrive, eged from three to six. They leave behind them homes that are too often filled with the anxiety of unemployment and empty of good food and joys of all kinds, and come into the happy, carefree atmosphere that should always be theirs. They must arrive clean and tidy, and must hang up their hats and coats in the cloakroom, where each one has his toothbrush and towel, both marked with some picture—a bird, a beast or a flower. Then they lay the table for breakfast and sit down and enjoy it and clear away. Lessons follow throughout the morning, then dinner, when they take turns to wait at table and serve the food, doing it extremely well though they may be only four years old. After they have cleared away there is a time for sleep, a time foi- play, tea-time, and at five o’clock their parents come to take them home again. These homes are due to the loving devotion of Mademoiselle Vajkai, head of the Hungarian branch of the Save-the-Children International Union. Parents were rather shy of them atfirst, but they soon found that children who knew how to set tables and clear them away, who had learned to be neat and orderly, and who had been kept happily occupied throughout the day, were much bettor than those who had not.

Hungary is not the only country where such homes may be found, however, for Britain has them too, set up specially for Unemployed families. Just a year ago two such nursery schools were opened at Newcastle and North Shields, and much the same programme is followed. Particularly interesting is the way in which they came into being. In North Shields it was the young men of a Bible class whose kind hearts set them about the job of building and a girls’ class who found the equipment. In Byker, a crowded area of Newcastle, it was an unemployed men’s club associated with the Presbyterians that was willing to do the work—not easy work, for it included a deep excavation across a street which had to be guarded throughout cold frosty nights by watchmen who gave their services freely. Gardens, too, were made by unemployed men, who brought soil to the sites, laid out the turf, and made a wilderness blossom like a rose,