His Father

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 228, 5 November 1943, Page 6

His Father

MAN’S son is a man’s life, When his son dies, something that was strong dies too, and what is left is women’s sympathy and women’s tears. EFORE his birth they used to say You'll want a son. I'd say It doesn’t matter, girls are nice. A son, they'd say, To carry on the Name. The name is Johnson, There are many more.

7 One more or less won’t count. All this small talk-inheritance-someone to carry on when I am goneit’s out of date, I told them. Sentimentality run riot. Relic of the primitive, when man was needed by the tribe to run, trap, hunt, fish, kill. Tradition-minded maniacs I called them saying, what will it matter to the world at lerge if I beget a son? A LITTLE girl, I thought. A little girl. Fair, perhaps, with curls and a ribbon, and a skipping rope, hopping up and down the street waiting for me to come home chattering nineteen to the dozen, of her little day’s big doings. UT a son came, and in the end I knew they had been right. A man’s son is his life. Beyond the limitations of the individual, behind the barriers we all erect too soon a man can share his son’s thoughts, part-share his doubts, know all his growing pains. He can, for good or ill, relive his own lite as it once came while he yet savours the waning flavours of his own. HAVE wept once in manhood. I wept when he was born. Now that he’s dead I have no tears but I can feel with Saul who in his agony called out My son! My Son! a * *