A Baby Case Visitor.
Yet, in spite of all the efforts of sympathy, suffering, in camp and out, grows ever greater as the war continues. Here are two short stories of February, 1915, as reported to the Committee on this side. If, for a moment we can forget our passions, the sufferings of these, our fellows, must touch our hearts. Nearly four more years have passed and we know that greater loneliness and sorrow must have come to these hearts, as to so many more.
Our first call is in a horrid little street off Tottenham Court Road. Four knocks on a very shaky door brings Bertha, the wife of a German, a ships’ cook, who has never been long enough on shore to become a naturalised Englishman. Bertha was a servant for many years before she married, and had collected many precious possessions, and she and Friedrich had a comfortable home with plenty of furniture and full of all the useless and hideous knicknack which apparently make so many people happy. Only a few remain, for nearly all have “had to go”—the term we know so well to mean that they are now in pawn, and that it will probably never be possible to redeem them. When first we visited them they were living in a basement room where rats made it difficult for them to sleep, and where, on the many unexpected calls I paid, I never once found a fire.
“We are not people wot feel the cold like some, Miss,” they told me; “and the room’s so small it likely wouldn’t be ’ealthy to have a fire all day” so the “bit of washing” used to hang on a string for days and days before it dried, and they did their “bit of cooking” on a small gas ring. One day I called and found Friedrich still in bed; he was quite well, he said, “but we take turns to stay in bed, Miss, for it’s warmer there and you don’t seem to feel so hungry in bed as when you’re up.”
They were trying to save something out of a weekly 12s. 6d., after 6s. had been paid for rent, for the time when Bertha would have to go into hospital, and to buy some clothes that her little babe would need. Then you sent me, and let me tell her you would remember her when that time came, and you sent her flannel and wool to make the little clothes: after that a shilling a week could be spent on coals, and each time I went they sent you thanks and blessed you for your love.
We say good-bye here and go north to Camden Town where we call on Ludwig and Marie and their five children, the eldest of whom is six. He is Austrian and she is Irish, and they live in two rooms for which they pay 8s. 6d. a week. He was a waiter for thirteen years in a well known London restaurant, and his master has told him many times he would take him back if only the public or the newspapers would let him. But they won’t. So Ludwig had nothing to do, and tells me he thinks he shall go out of his mind sitting in idleness in his miserable surroundings. Marie has been in hospital, too, and then Ludwig had plenty to do looking after his four little children alone for two weeks, and says it was the hardest work he ever had to do, and is glad his lot in life is not to be a woman!
The doctor in the hospital told Marie she must have plenty of milk every day, and we smiled together, for we knew their weekly income left no margin for milk for her—the children must be fed first. So you are helping, and Marie has her milk each day, and she and her babe are growing strong and well again.
The work done by the Friends’ Emergency Committee, Dr. K. E. Markel and others on this side, and by Dr. Rotten, Siegmund Schulze, Prof. Stange and their fellows on the other, is indeed as “a clear flame of truth in a dark and haunted night.”