LOST BEAUTY

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 168, 18 July 1942, Page 4

LOST BEAUTY

WAR'S SHABBINESS

GRACIOUSNESS OF PEACE

(By 8.U.H.)

War is ugly in horror and destruction but it is ugly also in another way, a shabby, grey, untidy war. War takes away from everyday things brightness, beauty, glamour and gaiety. The only beauty war brings is an abstract beauty, of courage and kindliness, heroism and humour.

War uproots gardens and parks, it boards up windows and heaps sandbags against buildings, it makes our clothes shabby (or does its best to), and it shrouds everything with the blackout.

It is hard to remember now what Auckland looked like with all her lights shining . . . And yet, if we think hard enough, a picture will come of the harbour at night fringed with lights, in some places clustered like a brooch, showing where a street was, set off here and there by a brilliant red or blue light. We may remember looking down over the city from a hill watching the lights twinkle on in the houses, like eyes blinking awake, incredibly lovely in the blue hazy dusk . . . And the picture from the top of Queen Street, too, was enchanting, a miniature Great White Way beckoning to pleasure seekers. Remember how the Town Hall used to be strung with tiny fairy lights for special occasions, and the railway station was often floodlit in red at night. I had forgotten, hadn't you? But then the war came and the lights were snuffed out by the thick curtain of the blackout . . . Not Flowers. But Vegetables Then our parks and gardens. Trenches have churned up the sweeping lawns, flinging back the raw brown and yellow earth on each side, while boards have been nailed across them ... so utilitarian (ugly word itself), grim and untidy.

Front gardens which used to be ablaze with flowers or smooth with lawns are planted in vegetables, and though there may be beauty from the point of good food in these methodical rows and healthy green leaves, they can hardly be said to possess aesthetic charm. A front garden looks definitely "sudden" planted in vegetables, as though one has come upon the back before one's seen the front, and the passer-by has a feeling of being cheated when he looks over the fence expecting to see flowers!

War scamps things, making substitutes and petty economies necessary. You might say it had the effect of a hand-me-down garment, always cutting and reducing! We have to write on the backs of envelopes, use up scraps of paper instead of attractive stationery. There are few material graces left in daily living, for we are all so geared to the need for being practical and economical.

Beautiful china, dress materials, linen, crystal, all these adornments of civilisation have been taken from us by war. Perhaps they are not essential to our lives, but they add grace and charm. Beauty of Spirit As for the ugliness and desolation of bombing, that needs no mention here. Yet when the buildings of a bombed city have been pulled down or patched and no longer stand brokenly against the sky they leave another kind of ugliness behind them. London to-day may be dear because she is scarred, but even those who love her do not deny that she is shabby. Dirty sandbags propped against lamp posts and buildings, chipped and cracked masonry, window panes boarded up . . . Her people may see an implied beauty in this, the beauty of heroism and endurance, but she will be lovelier in her triumph when her lights shine once more and her buildings rise clean and proud and at peace again. Nevertheless, there is that abstract beauty of courage and kindliness and humour that the war has fanned into flame. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that when peace comes we shall continue to hold on to these qualities, that we shall discover that material things are not the only things that matter and that the greed and selfishness that cause war have no place in a beautiful world.