WAR SHADOW

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 14, 29 September 1939, Page 12

WAR SHADOW

ECAUSE we are so engrossed with our fears and our apprehensions we are apt to forget that our children, too, walk in the war-shadow-grope and fumble in their immature minds to find a sense in our statements, in the words that drift to them as they play, in radioed warnings, as real for them as for us. They may say nothing at all but the very gravity of the voice that comes through to them restricts the joy and seems to threaten the security of the more sensitive ones. The other day I met a small girl, crying. She was on her way to school, she said, but the radio had said the mothers must come with tickets, and she had suddenly remembered that her mother hadn’t been listeningin, hadn’t understood, and now perhaps there would be no ticket and she would never be called for.... Poor small creature. It was all a Daventry instruction, and it was a voice fourteen thousand miles across the sea, intended for little Londoners. It was a voice grave and kind, but-for I myself heard it-it was a voice that broke, suddenly, on the last word.

For me, all that had been said was nothing beside that welling of emotion that could not, suddenly and at the end, be controlled. And it had sent a tiny girl in far away New Zealand stumbling up the road to school with the same sob caught in her throat.... * * * A weekly journal here in this country of ours stated to me that they had been running, for some months past, a competition popular with our children. The week before war broke the response had been 372 entrants. War broke, and that week the figures dropped to 25. Do you see what it means? It means that 347 childish imaginations were busy withWar. We'll have to take special care-special care to be gentle, to be discreet in our utterances, not to appear preoccupied, and, above all, to provide diversion, active play that will free the strained little mind and, by bedtime, weary the body for healthy and dream-

less sleep.

Ann

Slade