Borkum, once famous “as the only spot on earth without a Jew,” is now a great German naval base. In 1900 it was little more than a sandhill, with a few lodging-houses and bathing-machines, and ourselves the only English folk. Icebound in winter, it was the home of millions of wild fowl in summer. Every evening before going to bed the visitors and residents sang their anti-Jewish anthem. Though strong in fortification, Borkum is not great in size, being only six miles long and half a mile wide.
Public charity is no doubt an excellent thing. The world could not get on without it. But private charity seems to me of infinitely more value. If every one of us always had some particular case in hand for someone less blessed than ourselves, what a much happier place the world would be. Individual charity means so much. There is nothing easier than for a rich person to write a cheque and send it to some institution, where a large percentage is swallowed up in paying rates, rent, and taxes, clerks, and the rest of it, but it means a great deal for a person to give up their private time, to expend their own energy, in looking after some individual case. We all know people we can help, not singly, but in multitudes, if we choose to take the trouble, and for the greater part of my life I have found it a good thing to have one big job in hand at a time and to work at it till completed. Procuring public or private pensions for the genteel poor, getting cripples into homes, invalids into hospitals, or people recovering from illnesses into convalescent homes; starting young people in life; enquiring into emigration cases and helping them; finding young women places in bonnet shops, even securing employment in orchestras.
In fact, there is generally a niche for every case if one only takes the trouble to find it. The niche is not always procurable by the persons themselves, as they have not the world-wide knowledge and influence to secure it; but with a little capacity, a little work, and a little thought one is often able to help young people to start, to help to educate children, and do hundreds of little individual kindnesses which may keep the whole family together, or mean the future success of the individual.
Poverty is always relative. It means possessing less than we have been accustomed to. Having been both rich and poor, I am perhaps an impartial critic.
The domestic experiences of those married years were, later, as so much garnered grain to the writer. My luxurious, happy home was—without my knowledge—affording me training which afterwards proved invaluable in my writing. The responsibilities of motherhood gave me insight into the workings and imaginations of children’s minds. The household wisdom learnt as mistress of a fairly large establishment has been of infinite use in writing on practical subjects of domestic interest—especially those of interest to women.
Men must really cease to think women find fun in ordering cabbages.
As every book we read leaves some sort of an impression, so every scene or incident we live leaves its mark.