Monday Morning

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 480, 3 September 1948, Page 12

Monday Morning

MONDAY morning talks from 2YA "seem to be selected on the Lucky Dip principle, and-thase strong feminists who object to the W. certificate were possibly gratified by the inclusion (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) in the lucky bag of Cyril Belshaw’s Melanesian Shell Ornaments or the recent Principles of the United Nations Organisation, both of which were heterosexual enough, if not lively enough, for inclusion in the evening programmes. But I, like the Good Queen, dislike being addressed as if 1 were a public meeting, and I tend to prefer those Monday mornings when Joan Airey’s delightful "Letter from Britain" comes to hand. Since, however, Miss Airey continues to be an erratic correspondent I find myself filling in with items such as "The Story of Mary Jane" (August 23), wherein an anonymous speaker chronicled the life of a pseudonymous heroine of the recent war. This could, end should, have been warmly human and deeply moving, but the reader’s attempt to ram home the moral, the tendency to preach rather than let the story speak for itself ("Mary Jane says that if all women banded together they could prevent another war’) made me almost. nostalgic for the cultured impersonality of Mr. Belshaw.