THE EVEN TENOR OF OUR WAY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 8, Issue 68, 27 April 1945, Page 4

THE EVEN TENOR OF OUR WAY

WHEN the first joy of reunion and homewarming had passed, the men returning in the recent drafts, from overseas have unanimously expressed their amazement at the unaltered way of life which greets them on all sides. Scenes of peaceful community life conducted in much the same mariner as in pre-war days have made the past four years of unsettled occupation, strife, danger, ruined towns, and military control and all the experiences of modern warfare, seem, as one man called it, like a dream, unreal and unbelievable. He has of course missed the days of the 'black-out'; of the Home Guard; and the E.P.S. but never- • theless his impression serves only too well to remind us that we are one of the few privileged peoples to remain living in a land of plenty, in comparative comfort and away from the possibilities of invasion and total war. The men who return home have for the past three or four years been living in the midst of war and all its horrors. In their turn, home: and all its simplicity and peacefulness must have appeared like a dream in the midst of the material actualities and suffering they have witnessed on all sides. War has not touched us as a people to any great degree. We find it in the rationing of essentials, and in Governmental control, but when we hear the expressions of agreeable surprise from our boys returning home, and realise that to them there appears to have been little or no change, we can appreciate the fact still more, that on the whole we have mighty little to grumble about.