Youth Begins at Thirty-nine

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 3, 14 July 1939, Page 12

Youth Begins at Thirty-nine

Madeleine Kent is an English woman who married a German and went to live in Dresden twelve years’ ago. The Nazi revolution ended her domestic security, but she seems to possess a faculty for looking on the bright side, for she says: "You can’t live through a revolution and then go on taking your own life as seriously as before. I no longer notice petty annoyances over which I should have brooded as a girl. And I also find that, now I no longer expect life to be smooth, any trifling stroke of good luck is something to marvel at, Another thing you learn when you have been as thoroughly uprooted as I have been, is that every change of fortune has its compensations. I no longer have a home of my own, but, on the other hand, for the first time since I was in my ’teens, I am not responsible for a household nor am I tied to any one place. Since I came back to England two years ago I have lived with various friends and my few personal belongings are now strewn over several counties. € I put on a summer coat in Hampshire and then — realise that the bag which goes with it is in a suitcase left in Essex. But this vagabond life is so free that I often feel like getting rid of still more of my possessions and starting life again at thirty-nine with only a typewriter and a tooth brush. It may be true that a rolling stone gathers no moss, but moss is a sign of the age. Having been overgrown with it at twenty, as girls often are if they take life seriously, I am enjoying the youth that I missed then and shall be very chary of losing it again just for the sake of security."