NATIONAL SERVICE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21821, 26 November 1940, Page 8

NATIONAL SERVICE

LONELINESS BANISHED LONDON, October 22. National service has accidentally brought about a revolution in London that all the campaigning imaginable could not have achieved in peace. It has banished the loneliness of women in suburban homes. This loneliness gave rise to the state of mind that was nicknamed "suburban neurosis.” “Women are finding common interests in the common danger,” said Mrs Glanville Benn, public relations officer to the Women’s Voluntary Services. “We have about 140.000 volunteers for our housewives’ service in London who meet for training and soon get to know one another. The black and yellow card of the service, propped in front windows of every street, is the passport to good-neighbourliness and new friendships.” The Housewives’ Service, tried out in Ilford two years ago, was put into largescale operation by the W.V.S. to assist A.R.P. work. Volunteers remain in their homes during raids to provide hot drinks and hot water in case of need, shelter for children caught away from home, and the care of invalid and elderly people. Trained members are drafted to A.R.P. work, others help in national savings, salvage, and rest and feeding centres. Besides all this the service is bringing women together, broadening their outlook, and helping them to form new friendships. At W.V.S. headquarters in Westminster they find the loneliness of office girls is disappearing, and at night typists and secretaries go in to ask for a job because “it is better than going back to "diggings.” This wave of friendliness sweeping the suburbs means much more to women than men. They now have a dozen or so neighbours to call on and talk or knit with. In a Beckenham road the women have made a communal raid shelter stretching over two back gardens and in Barnet—a suburb where they “do not mix”—neighbours share a stirrup pump and chat amiably after 20 years of frigid reserve.