10 OCTOBER 1958, Page 24

VOLUNTARY WORK Sni,—Is there unpaid work, useful and patriotic, to

be done in England today'?

I have lately retired from my firm in India and I shall be home for good in the spring; still reasonably young and sound in wind and limb. I have no desire to search for new sources of income in the city or to while away idle hours in the country playing desultory golf and missing the infrequent partridges of a rough shoot. Having worked principally for myself these thirty years, what I want to find now is some modest way of helping the land that bred me.

I'm afraid I am insufficiently convinced, politically, of anything to wish to work for a political party; and I am not, alas, the stuff of which devoted wel- fare workers are made. What are the national tasks, unpaid and untrumpeted, which need to be done and which an average man like myself, who seeks no reward and has twenty-four hours a day at his dis- posal, can do?

Perhaps some fellow-reader of the Spectator can advise me?—Yours faithfully,