“The winter in Sicily is often exceedingly cold; moreover, the rains have lately been very severe, so that added to all the horrors of shock, loss of homes and destitution, thousands of people are insufficiently clad.
“All parcels (please prepay these, dear friends) sent to me shall be properly and promptly attended to.—I am, etc.,
“(Mrs.) E. Alec Tweedie.”
An innocent enough little letter! Yet how far-reaching in its results.
There stood the parcels, but what they were to go into was the next problem. Each girl friend as she arrived was bundled into a cab, and told to go to shops in the neighbourhood and collect all the packing-cases she could and bring them back. They were brought, but more and more were wanted. Each shop could only produce two or three, and those they gave cheerfully, but as the stacks of packages increased more rapidly than they decreased, it ended at last in our requisitioning huge furniture cases, the sort of thing that holds a cottage piano, a settee, or two or three arm-chairs.
The first fifteen hundred articles were counted. They filled ten crates. After that it was impossible to enumerate, or even to do more than cursorily sort the things, but on the estimate of the first ten cases, I appear to have sent away twenty-seven thousand garments in one hundred and ninety-eight packing-cases. Some of them were so heavy they took four men to lift.
The first twenty thousand left in three days to catch the earliest mail steamers to the stricken centres.
How terrific was the pace may be judged by one incident.
I telephoned on Wednesday morning to my friend Sir Thomas Sutherland, asking that the weekly P. and O. boat might take out twenty cases for delivery in Sicily. By lunch-time that number had swollen to forty, so I telephoned again, and begged he would find room for forty in the Simla.