Senior Service Wife

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 653, 11 January 1952, Page 7

Senior Service Wife

OWADAYS a naval wife, if she’s lucky, can meet her sailor in nearly every port. It involves, of course, a certain amount of travelling with the risk that when she arrives he will have sailed for another part of the world, but naval wives, having married the Navy as well as their husbands, learn to accept such things philosophically. Most of them accept as well the business of bringing up a family single-handed, looking after the garden, settling accounts, and occasionally packing up the entire home and moving off to another corner of the earth. They find it makes for a full life. For Margot Campbell it wasn’t full enough. She felt that, as she was constantly being abandoned, she, ought to find something stable and positive to do. Consequently she began to write. At first, with her mother, Harriet Campbell (a writer of thrillers) she collaborated on two or three plays. Then she started work on a novel of her own. It was published at the end of the war. The second was also published, and the third is at the publisher’s now. Mrs. Campbell, who has come to New Zealand with her husband for two years,

has made a slight deviation from being a novelist, and has written and recorded for the Commercial service a series of four talks on the trials of Senior-Service wives. Her talks, under the title of "Paddling Your Own Canoe," will be heard weekly in Women’s Hour, beginning from 4ZB and 3ZB on January 18, 2ZA and 1XH on February 22, and 2ZB and 1ZB on March 21.