10 FEBRUARY 1939, Page 18

A Village Crew On a recent Saturday afternoon an A.R.P.

Warden, going about the outskirts of a village to deliver cardboard boxes for gas-masks, was approached by two small girls, who asked if they could be of any use. They accompanied the Warden and relieved her of some of her burdens. In the course of the journeyings one of them explained her desires, thus : "We go to school on the weekdays and we go to church on Sundays. On Saturdays we like to help someone. It says so in the Bible, doesn't it." Their natural simplicity and sense of service indicate that Wordsworth's plaint in his most famous sonnet is not even yet justified, and suggests the hope that it never will be, at any rate, in village England.