TEENAGERS VOLUNTEER FOR SOCIAL SERVICE

By Hugh Kay
A few days ago I talked to
its founder, Alec Dickson, who was also the pioneer of Voluntary Service Overseas. With VSO now firmly established, Dickson has turned his attention to the home front.
He describes the move as "a descent from the mountain top to the coal face, or, to put it in biblical terms, from the Transfiguration to the healing of the epileptic". The aim is to turn youth's boredom and indignation to social purpose.
Christian in inspiration, the movement, now two years old, is non-sectarian and brings young people of all creeds and none together in a joint act of service.
As yet there are only a few C•alholic members, But it serves the Cheshire Homes and the work of Ladyeholme, as well as some Anglican parishes, the Salvation and Church Armies. mental hospitals and approved schools.
A boy of 18 has been virtually in charge of 40 adult males in a mental ward, Another lives and works in a Borstal. Girls arc teaching Asian immigrant children in a London suburb.
Boys and girls can be found in slum settlements, institutes for sub-normal children. helping to run a farm training centre. Many are tackling—without reward— jobs of a kind which most of us would shrink from even if paid.
Alec Dickson told me of young volunteers who wash and dress physically deformed idiots. He makes it clear that what he has in mind is "face to face" service without glamour "The real symbol of nursing". he insists, "is not the lamp but the bedpan."
All types
Some volunteers move in as assistant instructors. in one case as a housemaster in an approved school. Others simply live as one of the community, like the gifted former head boy of a public school who secured the respect and even the love of a very tough bunch in a senior approved school in the north,
When he was accidentally drowned, the boys wrote griefstricken letters to his mother. As one of them, fumbling for words, put it: "If there is a heaven, know that Charlie is there."
Most volunteers are about 18. Many are from grammar schools, and they work flat out as volunteers for a few months during the period between leaving school and starting a job or at university. But others are secondary modern products.
Police cadets are specially released for the work for a few months to give them a direct encounter with human needs and a