HELP FOR POOR FAMILIES
Sut,—We hear little of the unemployed now but many of them have not yet found work and there are tens of thousands who can never even hope to, on account of physical disabilities or of illness, aggravated by privation.
The rise in prices hits them very hard. It has never been easy to live on 3s. 6d. or 4s. a head a week for food and clothing (and, year in, year out, few have had more than that and I have seen hundreds of budgets where there was much less). It has been almost impossible to keep fit and often enough children have died who would not have died if they had had nourishing food and warm clothing. Those who have found 8s. 6d. a week too little to provide for an evacuated child will understand this.
But now those few shillings buy much less. At the end of the week there is nothing left, even for bread.
I want once more to ask readers of The Spectator to befriend one of these families, or a single lonely woman or man, or one of the old couples for whom life is so straightened and dreary. It is not necessary to send much material help to make a real difference. Some have never received a parcel in their lives. Children's outgrown clothes not only save these children from chills but relieve the anxiety of their mothers. Old toys are as good as new ones, if you never have any. But above all it is the outside interest that counts. I had a letter from Cumberland this week which said: " It is not the fact that they are getting something for nothing, it is the fact that some- one is interested in them that works such a difference in their lives," and I have heard that from literally hundreds of people, in almost the same words.
I am in touch with 3o or 4o organisations and individual social workers in all the distressed areas, from Cumberland to South Wales, and they send me details of the people who are most urgently in need of help. It is hard to know which cases are the most pitiful—the families with children who suffer so much from illness and want and have so little fun, or the old people dragging out their last years with nothing to hope for. However, anyone who will be good enough to help, who will write to me, can choose just the kind of family, or single person, large or small, to whom what he or she can send will be of the utmost benefit.—Yours, &c.,
BEATRICE LEIGH CLARE.
Longshot, The Ridgeway, Guildford, Surrey.
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