Wars always make marriages but this one promises to be a record. Figures just issued show in the first 12 months of the war, there were 492,907 marriages in England and Wales, against 393.627 in the previous twelvemonth. December. 1939. showed the highest figures with 136.827 mar-nages, compared with only 90.760 in the same month in 1938. Yet there appear to be plenty of girls who, just Because war service has offered them so large a choice of men. are more dainty in their decisions and are in ho haste to tie up. At least so I gather from an account of life in the A.T.S. One thing shown is that war work has proved a positive boon to many Yonely or bored women. They have ¢ome from small. "groove-y" existence. where they met but few people and did the same thing day after day. Now they are continually in a huge mob of human beings. continually on the jump. ordered about, liable to punishments if their work dwelling country-lovers. she used to think that farm work was gloriously arious. Now she knows differently.
Hardly any farm work is done in day: most of it just goes on and on There is scarcely one job which she has not liked, nor one of which she has not grown heartily sick and tired.
And yet (she reflects) when it comes found again next season one foes at it with zest. T think it is Sense of continuity that exalts one A curious, fascinating, fatal, enduring exaltation which does much te explain Why farmers so seldom give up the life' despite all their grumbling. most of which is so throughly justified Is not that applicable to the state of mind produced in most of us by the war? Time flies with extraor nary speed and sameness. It seems ages since that terrible Saturday and Sunday when we were wondering whether Mr, Chamberlain would fulfil the pledge to Poland or would even now try "appeasement" again. Yet we can hardly say how the time has fled. Like the farmer's battle with Nature, the war "just goes on and on." In retrospect we can hardly realize the appalling dangers we have gone through, and in contrast have arrived at the exaltation born of undeniable triumphs. which will be enduring. But while the war remains the background of all our thoughts, life can be little more than shovelling the heavy clay of daily duties and scraping it off our boots lest it clog us altogether, like the land girl
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.