Europe's Children

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 515, 6 May 1949, Page 10

Europe's Children

N hour is a very long time to keep on the beam a programme aimed directly at the listener’s heart, an organ vulnerable to a first appeal but increasingly resistant to any increase in the emotional pressure, and though the milk of human kindness flows freely* enough at brief applications of the vox humana any prolonged pulling on the stop is apt to promote cynicism. Even the profound emotional probity of the subject could not have saved Children of Europe from the embarrassment of failure if the commentators, Edward Ward and Marjorie Banks, had even once allowed their sense of pity to push them over the bounds of artistic propriety. The usual method of keeping pathos within bounds is to adopt the’ technique of restraint and understatement so characteristic of British documentaries. In this case the commentators used a more positive ap-proach-they saw, and took full advantage of the fact, that the exuberance of the afflicted child, its vitality, is as much a part of it as the pathos of its neglect, that a child’s misery is all the more a reproach to the adult world when we are made to realise how little it takes to make it happy. Hearing blind Vittorio singing we do not forget that he is blind, and when Erik remarks proudly that "he eats well, he had soup twice yesterday" we do not forget that a child should have more in a day than two bowls of soup. It is now some days since I heard the programme, but I feel I shall always remember with tears the cheerfulness of children ‘who have so little.