COLD-SHOULDERING EVACUEES
Sta,—I would like to thank you for Mr. Kenneth Lindsay's excellent article entitled "London Defiant! " It is as true that Londoners are bearing their hardships with courage and an incomparable spirit as it is that it depends on government plans and organisation to make their example constitute " a proud and defiant challenge* to the enemy " instead of " an impediment to the main war effort."
But having recently arrived in this district I am shocked by the reception the reports of these trials get here. Naturally there is much sympathy and distress expressed for those who have been thus bruised and bereaved, but there is also a conspicuous lack of co-operation. This may be as much due to the inability to understand the standards necessitated by war conditions such as this country has never before experienced as it is to unwillingness to accept these standards, but may I give one example of the sort of spirit which seems to me to be deplorable?
A few miles from where I write is an important town which in peace time had to,000 inhabitants. The landlord who owns parts of the town has an estate on the edge of it, the house alone having over thirty bedrooms. It was recently estimated that this town had taken in 800 evacuees and since the Blitzkrieg has been intensified the number is still higher. The important point, however, is that the town is so full that it was almost impossible to find one night's accommo- dation for some half-dozen evacuees who had been detained on their journey and were unable to go to their new homes, a few miles away, till the morrow. Yet the landlord and his lady still live alone with their servants, and it may not be a totally irrelevant detail to add that this same man has refused to give up his fox-hound kennels for the use of the army.
This may be rather an extreme example of lack of elementary decency, but there are several big estates in this part of the country which could provide much-needed accommodation and yet are still only inhabited by their owners. Moreover, there are still far too many people who regard it rather as a nuisance than a privilege to provide new homes for those who arc, after all, in the front line of the battle, and there is an unnecessary element of snobbery and dis- trust displayed if these happen to be working-class people.
Is it not time that the agonies of our own people were no longer re- garded in the same apathetic light as were the bombing outrages in China, Abyssinia, and Spain? That more of us realised that we are all in this struggle together, and consequently the more we practise this Christian charity and tolerance we are so fond of preaching about, the more pleasant and easy it will be for all those concerned.—Yours
faithfully, A PROVINCIAL READER.
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