THE YOUNGEST GENERATION.
"What shall he have that killed the deer?" someone asks somebody else in As You Like It. But there is a better question than that, and it is this—"What shall they have that preserve the little dears?" and the answer (if I can do anything to influence it) is—honour and support; for there can be no doubt that in these critical times, when the life of the best and bravest and strongest is so cheap, no duty is more important than the cherishing of infancy.
At a Crêche in Notting Hill I watched, the other day, some of this cherishing in progress, and it was a pleasant and stimulating sight. The institution was in existence in a small way before the War, but it has recently been enlarged and made scientific, to meet the greater needs which the War has set up, and it is now able to act as foster mother to seventy mites, from the age of one month to four years, whose real mothers are for the most part engaged in war work. That is a good piece of citizenship, is it not? And to watch it in being is an education in those wonderful things to the eye of man—the solicitude and patience and capability of woman. The noise alone, whether of joy or of transitory grief, would drive most men frantic; but these devoted souls, knowing that it is all part of the game, proceed with an unearthly composure through it all—undressing their charges, dressing them, washing them, feeding them, beguiling them; in a word, tending them, from morning till evening.
The children begin to arrive, brought either by their mothers, their "Little Mothers" (I mean sisters) or their brothers, between 8 and 9—some in arms and some in perambulators and some in go-carts; and then they are immediately divested of their home clothes, popped into warm baths three or four at a time, and dressed in the clothes belonging to the Crêche. For the rest of the day they wear these clothes and sleep, eat, play and, when it amuses them more to do so, cry, until the time comes to be put back into their own garments and be taken away. By some strange instinct their relations, I am informed, know them again, and very few mistakes occur; and so gradually, in the neighbourhood of seven o'clock, peace descends on this corner of Notting Hill once more.
The place is sheer Lilliputia: for everything is on a reduced scale. Scores of little beds round the walls, with little pillows and little coverlets; scores of little chairs; a long table so low that it seems to be the footstool of a giant's wife, with little benches beside it for their little meals. In the centre of the room are two little pounds, with railings so close together as not to be crawled through, where the more adventurous ones can be kept out of mischief in the company of woolly toys; and outside is a loggia place with little cradles for the babies who want more air to sleep in.
Such is the Stoneleigh Street Crêche, and in order to realise what admirable and desirable functions it fulfils—principally by voluntary aid, for the capitation fee of half-a-crown a week is, of course, quite insufficient to maintain it—one has only to imagine what the lot of these helpless little creatures would be if they were left in their motherless homes. Not only would they be far less happy but far less healthy; and it is upon healthy babies that England's future must be founded. If any reader of Punch, then, should be in doubt as to what to do with a little surplus money, let the little requirements of these little people be remembered. The address to which donations should be sent is: The Secretary, Notting Hill Day Nursery, Stoneleigh Street, Notting Hill, W.