INTO THE ROUGH
SIR,-1 think 'the messy playthings which mothers detest' is the real factor in the increasing demand among mothers of all income groups for more nursery schools. It seems unfair that father can spread his manure over his rose beds, and mother can have her successes and failures at sewing and home decoration, but the child must take its blunder- ing efforts at creation elsewhere.
The glossy magazines and home exhibitions, which are the shop windows for those with a new 'higher standard of living,' scarcely acknowledge that child- ren exist. If there is any room left over after the dream living-rooms, dream kitchens and dream bed- rooms have been dealt with, it is seized upon for a utility or rumpus room, a breeding ground for further heavy expenditure in the way of home workshops, ping-pong tables, snooker tables, electric sewing- machines, rowing machines and such things. As one firm told me, quite frankly, to give a child a play- room, where it will, with a second-hand kitchen table, a packing case, and some old toys, 'build with turrets of gold its wonderful castles in Spain,' is a dead loss to trade.
The little Bertrams and Osbornes made their toy theatres and wasted gold paper and paint in their shabby schoolroom nurseries. Little Johnny Winter whittled his wooden armada in his mother's large, undreamlike Yorkshire kitchen. The cult of the dream house is ousting the present-day child out of its home. Father can gloat over his rose garden, mother can take a refreshing peep at her newly decorated room all XYZ plan before she goes to bed, but the creation of the child is put away in the kindergarten cupboard.
Mary Stocks so often wails on some radio pro- gramme, cannot understand why, with the higher standard of living, there is an increase in juvenile delinquency.' I would suggest that the tendency to push the child out of the home—nursery school at three, youth club at fifteen (if neither of these is available, the street as the alternative)—is a factor that should be examined.—Yours faithfully, E. HERBERT 13 Roman Crescent, Old Kilpatrick, Glasgow
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