1944
HE girl on our cover is two years old. When the war ends she may be five or sixcarrying a little bag to school. When the last war ended her parents were at school-a little older than she is to-day but as little able to plumb the future. A grandfather, who is still living, could have served in the South African war, and a grand-uncle did. In short, her background is three wars in forty-three years, two of them involving the whole world. She was born in war, she is growing up in war, and what has happened to her has happened to millions of girls right round the globe. But like her, they are as innocent of their past as of their future. They do not know that military uniform is not normal dress for men and a very recent innovation for women. It has not occurred to them to ask why their fathers are so seldom at home and why their mothers and grandmothers are so often in tears. They are children of the storm, preserved from the knowledge of it by its universality and duration. And even their parents are afraid to tell them — almost afraid to remember-that the world was once a different place and life almost as sunny for grown-ups as their youth and innocence permits it still to be for them. The question is: Can we save the world in time to give them a normal girlhood, and preserve it long enough to guarantee them a normal womanhood? To the first question the answer is now Yes. Victory is on the way; and victory for the United Nations means food and shelter and sunshine and laughter for the girl on our cover. Whether it will continue to mean freedom from want and freedom from tyranny, freedom to marry by her own choice, and a carry-over of all those freedoms to her children, is more obscure. The answer is Yes if we have learnt during the last forty-three years as well as suffered. It is No if we are too dull to learn and too selfish for sacrifice. For we shall not get some of our privileges back-those that were mere luxury and self-centred power-and we shall not recover and retain our liberties unless we pay the price for them,
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 236, 31 December 1943, Page 2
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3861944 New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 236, 31 December 1943, Page 2
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