BLINDNESS REMAINS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 November 1938, Page 2

BLINDNESS REMAINS

ST DUNSTAN’S MUST GO ON. •

In a personal article, Captain Sir lan Fraser, the war-blinded Chairman of St Dunstan’s, writes: “Wars end wounds heal, but blindness remains—that is why St Dunstan’s must go 0n.... “When the first depression was passed and it began to dawn upon us that our brains were intact, that our ears could hear, our hands feel, and above all that our spirit was unbroken, we begah to learn to be blind.... “What wonderful things hands were. We did not know before how wonderful. We were young, adaptable, and now we were beginning to feel well. The spirit of St Dunstan’s was entering into us and we were doing things for ourselves. We joked about bumping into a door, lighting the cork end of a cigarette, kissing the wrong girl, and a thousand and one errors

and foolishnesses which we committed but we learned in the hard school of experience not to do them again. “Over twenty years have passed; we are scattered all over the country and the Empire; we take our part—' perhaps a modest part—in the life of the world; we enjoy living. “Now there are added to our ranks each year men who have gone blind in middle age. There is no glamour for them. They have not the resiliency of youth. Who shall say whether it is better to be blinded on the battlefield when you are eighteen, or to lose your sight slowly when you are forty as the result of a splash of mustard gas twenty years before? All I know is that the young men of the War years conquered blindness and that the older ones coming now to St Dunstan’s are making a good show. They, too, must have a chance, the best chance we can give them, of refashioning their lives.... “Some of the older people who helped us in earlier years have pass-

ed on —many of them have remembered us in their wills. I want to build up a new list of subscribers for a few years yet to make sure that my blinded soldier friends are not forgotten. If it lies in your power to help me I hope you will.”