"Now's The Day"
HE most memorable thing said by Mr. Duff Cooper in New Zealand was that danger is not really alarming when it comes. It is alarming in advance, but there is too much to do when it actually arrives to allow our imaginations to torture us. So the people of Britain discovered, and already we are beginning in New Zealand to realise why. We are compelled at last to be busy. The war has reached our shores. Every man and every woman has duties and responsibilities. And the relief is greater than the alarm. Morbid fears and dismal forebodings have now no place to grow. There may or may not be time remaining for all the things we know we should do, but no more time will be lost. Those who are young enough are arming. Those who are too young or too old to carry rifles are taking the places of those who have put on uniform. Women are being mobilised. Work is being planned. Waste is being eliminated. Extravagance is beginning to be made shameful. We are forgetting whether we are Right or Left, radical, reactionary, or middle of the road. Our weekends are spent digging trenches; our evenings blacking out our windows; our walks in studying the country and thinking out defence problems. The best sellers in the bookshops are manuals of military instruction. The most popular films in the theatres are land, sea, or air documentaries of war. We are running a race with destiny, and we are exhilarated. Nor does any of this mean that we do not know what we are facing. We do. That is why we are exhilarated. It is the first time that the New Zealand scene-our homes, our farms, our factories and our shops-have come right into the track of an invader. New Zealand soldiers have stood in the hottest corners of the world’s hottest battlefields, twice in one generation. Now the battlefield may be the streets we walk to work, the paddocks where our cows graze, the beaches on which we had intended to spend our holidays. It is gravely serious, and the gravity of it stimulates and braces us. We don’t like to say it, but we have resolved that "they shall not pass."
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 131, 26 December 1941, Page 4
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378"Now's The Day" New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 131, 26 December 1941, Page 4
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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