The War And Our Children

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 78, 20 December 1940, Page 4

The War And Our Children

F there is a tougher job than saying somei thing sensible at a wedding, it is saying something useful to boys and girls leaving school. Few in fact attempt it, most of the oratory on such occasions being directed to the parents of the scholars and not to the scholars themselves. This year, however, the speakers can be forgiven. What are we to say to boys and girls who know as well as we do that civilisation has collapsed? We certainly can’t fob them off with platitudes about the use of time. We can’t tell them that the future, with all its Ppossibilities, lies ahead of them. They know that bombs have no more respect for them than for their fathers and mothers, that the future is for these who are not yet born, and that the living have yet to determine its shape. They know too, many of them, that they are leaving school, not because their education has been completed (if it ever could be), but because they are wanted at home or in industry. They hear us every day whistling to keep up our courage; listen to our appeals for men and money; watch us scanning the newspapers or sitting in silence before the radio-see and hear all this and know what most of it means. To tell them anything but the truth is to make fools of ourselves without making happier beings of them. Well, not many of us try it. The break-up speeches this year have been laboured but they have usually been honest. We have said what we could say without being absurd, and having said it we already feel better. Certainly our boys and girls feel better. The war does not mean to them everything that it means to us, but it means enough to them to bring them near to us if we wili have them. And they like being near in that partnership sense. Although our instinct is to shut them out from our troubles circumstances have let them in, and they feel for the first time that they are people.