FAMILY LIFE IS PASSING

Hokitika Guardian, 4 February 1926, Page 1

FAMILY LIFE IS PASSING

I recently heard an Edwardian complacently 'tell some foreigners m Vienna that “English family life” was like no other in the world, says Ella Dixon in the London “Daily Mail.” Ami, indeed, it is not, though net in the sense which the speaker intended to convey. For a.s a matter of fact English family life disappeared with the adoption of the flat, and nothing seems likely to resuscitate it. This disintegration had begun before war, which helped to complete tlie de-

bacle. Mothers and daughters alike went their ways upon their war-liko missions, the hoys were swept into the Army, and oven old fogies found themselves in Athens, in Seville, in Baghdad, occupied in vague intelligence work which took them away from

home. Few of those British homes have been set up again in. their pristine dullness. For that they were dull in every class, particularly in the evenings, no one can seriously deny. A distinguished Frenchman has left an unforgettable account of a quiet visit to Hatfield in the reign of the great Lord Salisbury, and of that exceptionally clever woman, his wife. After dinner, he records, there was absolutely none of that interchange of ideas which makes Parisian society so agreeable, Everyone, without exception, read the evening paper. The entry of women into business and the Civil Service has naturally much to do with the passing of tho once famous English family life. Where are those imposing homos which contained ton children and an equal number of servants: /the enormous dinner-parties, tho weekly visit to the theatre in winter, with at least half a dozen stalls duly booked? They simply do not exist. Tho girls are out working, tho hoys are in the Dominions. Bow then, can an honest Briton and his wife contrive to collect his progeny under his own rooftree, or, rather in liis exiguous flat? The thing is impossible. It is not that English people arc really careless of

family ties, hut that they often like each other better when they arc apart. Often they have violent likes or dislikes. which would not- he visible, say, in a French family, where, though they live in hordes, even-tiling goes smoothly—on the surface and by dint of exercising a formidable courtesy. But in France the family is as sacred as it is in Chinn.