More than any other service, it has attracted the women of wealthy families who have never worked before. Driving a car was the only thing they could do really well. But the majority of. drivers are young married women with occasionally a teacher or an office worker. They are most of them young—the average age for the whole service is 27, Everybody had, of course, to be a competent driver before she was accepted. But on top of that each one badgering and neglect that in overcrowded dwellings is their usual lot. For most of them, more important, than school was the chance to learn how to employ leisure: to read, to play, to make things, to be useful. Surely the Spanish children, with their passionate temperaments and half-savage lives, were not better material than our own!
It is true that in Spain there was a great advantage. The rich had left their villas, their hotels, and their castles, and as the Republic thought that nothing was too good for its children it was these that were turned into colonies. It is infamous to put our children into depressing sur-Toundings. They must have pretty places to live in, clean and light and brightly painted, surrounded with gardens and fields, but if we have no castles to. give them in poor England, it is possible to make huts and holiday camps gay and attractive with a little imagination in the planning. Could not we start this war with something on the credit side? Could not it be as it was in Spain, however awful, a grand time for the slum children?
Continual Stand By At the beginning of September, many women who'had volunteered were away on holiday. One girl hurried back from Norway a few days before the declaration of war to take up duty. The difficulty of contacting absent volunteers made the work harder for those on the spot.
Since then there has been time to organize things. Every station now has some kind of canteen arrangement. The hastily commandeered lorries are being rapidly replaced by ambulances. The stations themselves have settled down into a routine.
Girls work in eight-hour shifts and every station is fully manned for the whole 24 hours. The rule is six days on and óne off. But so that everyone will get a fair share of Sundays they sometimes do seven days one week and five another. The drivers
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.