Corporal Lampen

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 91, 21 March 1941, Page 5

Corporal Lampen

Y ambition is to be a Corporal one of these days for the simple reason that I don’t want my brother in England to be the only one of our family to hold that distinction. Just before the war commenced he was the General Officer commanding the Royal Marines-now he is quite content to be a Corporal in the English equivalent of our Home

Guard. Apart from their many duties, all the leaders in his particular group meet in conference once a week. My brother writes and tells me that his group is a typical one. It is made up of a schoolmaster, a country parson, the village blacksmith, a dentist, an innkeeper, two gamekeepers, a shopkeepey, a lawyer, a gardener, and a taxi driver. The voluntary meetirsts are held

in various places-one week in the gardener’s potting shed, another in the village forge, and yet another might be held at the vicarage, and so on. The main thing is they are all good comrades. Speaking from what I’ve seen for myself in the last few weeks there is no reason why. the same sort of thing shouldn’t take place out here-for every mother’s son of us feels that he is part and parcel of a new enterprise -and as such we want to establish it on firm foundations. To my way of thinking, comradeship is the

corner stone of all such structures as these.-

-(From

" Just Old Comrades," by Major

F. H.

Lampen

2YA,

March 13.)