Little Women

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 517, 20 May 1949, Page 10

Little Women

] NOTICE that all the heroes Of 41\ 5 Torth of Freedom have one thing in common, a good loyal little woman in the background who accepts with equanimity such instructions as "Pack me a bag, lass, I’m driving back to London to-night" (this is 1805) and is the very last person to grow apprehensive when night after night armed thugs, ‘hired by the forces of reaction, leave her husband’s senseless body on the doorstep. No, the gallant little woman accepts it all as the inevitable price of having married an idealist. Heroes harassed by nagging wives and demanding children fortunately are not encouraged in the series, afd one would like to think that those whom their contemporaries persecuted (even if history vindicated them) were at all events exempt from the annoyances of a divided hearth and of the acerbity~of the curtain lecture. Torch of Freedom is good drama but distorted history. Its dialogue is script-writer’s esprit d’escalier rather than plain man’s prose, but for alf its faults of over-emphasis the programme meets a need in providing listeners with some facts (artificially flavoured but nevertheless facts) about those who carried the torch of freedom.