Woman’s Work in Many Spheres

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 140, 3 September 1927, Page 8

Woman’s Work in Many Spheres

No.l. Mrs. H. M. Marler

“JF those who have health and two sixpences to rub together could only imagine themselves in the position of those who haven’t.”

That is the prayer of the Auckland Women’s Hospital Auxiliary. Suffering and poverty, those twin curses, fall twice as heavily on women and children. The auxiliary has gathered the services of all those who have the leisure and feel the call of compassionate work—providing the little hospital comforts that mean so much when spirits are low; giving the little extra help in the home and, not least of all, motoring to their homes those who are too poor to take a taxi and too feeble to walk.

One of the inspired motive forces in this work is Mrs. H. fti. Marler, a lady whose rare, quick sympathies go out so unreservedly to the sick poor that it has been said by those w'ho know something of her work that she feels a sisterhood with them all. For many years Mrs. Marler has “stood by” with her car every morning awaiting calls from St. Helens and the hospital to carry to their homes convalescent patients who need assistance.

“And what a home-coming it often is.” said Mrs. Marler to an interviewer. “Bare, squalid, over-crowded houses—you could push your arm through the walls. Often, too often, they bring home nothing but their own weary bodies and perhaps ah

extra little mouth to feed. No one can understand the sheer down-and-out despondency of some of the poor invalids. “They are poor in most cases through no fault of their own. Everybody can t be born rich or become wealthy through their own efforts. But when health goes, that is the last prized possession of the poor. We who have enough and to spare owe to those who haven’t some of those comforting little things that they are able to appreciate better than we. It’s not possible to leave everything to those cold, distant folk, the ratepayers. They can’t be expected to provide the little finer pleasures. Only personal help can do that. And that is the way we work. You see it in some of the women’s wards where poor patients usually have nothing but the ordinary coarse hospital garments to wear. Give them something with a little bow on it or a bright riband or something just a little cosier and softer to the touch and it regenerates their drooping spirits wonderfully. They feel wonderfully bucked about it. You see, we women are all the same.” Mrs. Marler has been greeted in her work with the usual suspicion and distrust that social workers have so often to contend against, buc she appreciates the large number of firm and thankful friends she has won among those whom she and the Hospital Auxiliary have been able to help. “It’s all in the little comforts and the way they are given.” Though she does not doubt the great truth that it is “the poor that helps the poor,” Mrs. Marler felt she must pay a tribute to those workers who, though they are dismissed as the “idle rich,” often devoted their time unreservedly to furthering such movements as the Hospital Auxiliary. In a garden-girt house overlooking the harbour from London Street, Ponsonby, lives the Marler family. But the flowers from that garden go to the public hospitals. Some women love their golf, or their bridge, or their social coterie, but Mrs. Marler devotes her energies to her Samaritan labours and everything else must take a subordinate place. Everyone can help the work of the Auxiliary, she says, and everyone would help if, as Henry Lawson expressed it, their windows were all level with the faces of the poor.