Passing Pageant

Radio Record, Volume XIII, Issue 11, 21 August 1939, Page 10

Passing

Pageant

bu

Trevor

Lane

* HE other day I wrote about parents’ attitudes to their children, and now someone sends me an atrticle from an English paper. It’s by Ethel Mannin, and headed, ‘‘There’s A Lot Of Sloppy Sentiment Talked About. Mothers."’ Some of her remarks concur absolutely with mine. She says, for imstance: ‘‘Strictly speaking, parents have no right to expect gratitude for what we feel impelled to do for our children, since what we do we do for our own satisfaction fundamentally, and our virtue must be its own reward. "T’ve been a good mother to you all these years,’ is always unfair, even when true. It is a kind of emotional blackmail.’ * | FTHEL MANNIN has other interesting things to say on the same subject: ‘*Most of the sentimentalising about mothers to-day is done by effeminate young men, in print and out of it. As soon as a young man starts ‘adoring’ his mother all over the place, there is something wrong with him: he is mother-bound. I am not for a moment suggesting that a man should not love his mother. A reasonable amount of filial devotion is good: for one thing, good sons make good husbands. **But the old adage that ‘a boy’s best friend is his mother’ is-outrageously untrue. All things being equal, a boy’s best friend will always be the girl who sincerely loves him and who is loved by him. The perfect

friendship will always be that between the happilymarried husband and wife. * "COMPLETE understanding between mothers and sons is impossible; they are of different generations, and the fiesh-and-blood tie makes it impossible for them to be subjective about each other. ‘A mother can be a very good friend to her son, within the limits of their relationship, but it is all too fatally easy for the mother who has her son’s interests at heart to overdo her solicitude and endanger both his material happiness and psychological well-being. * THEN we gct mother-bound men. Hither they never "marry because they cannot think of woman’s love except in terms of mother-love, or they marry women a great deal older than themselves as mother substitutes; or, if they make a normal marriage, they continue to put their mothers first in their lives, to the neglect and ultimate resent-

ment of their wives. "Tt is not uncommon for daughters to be similarly mother-bound. Hither they do not marry because they cannot bear to leave their mothers, or, tf they marry, nust have their mothers everlastingly around-to the tirritation of their husbands and consequent domestic friction. * "MOTHERS can be a real menace as well as a great comfort. They are menaces when they keep the relationship between themselves and, their children on a perpetually emotional plane. *‘T would say, without hesitation, that the worst mothers are to be found in the middle and upper classes. The working-class mother: is necessarily a, good deal more matter of fact; she hasn't the time for being anything much else. . ‘The mother-darling stuff is cut out in the lower-class home; there is almost a horror of family demonstrativeness; the family affection is there all right, but it is casual, undemonstrative ... and all the better for being so. Higher in the social scale. the mother has leisure in which to brood on her

family, dwell on her emotions. * "THE young people stay at school longer, and so remain longer under her influence. They grow up more slowly, and only belatedly come into contact with realities.

*‘Consider those overgrown schoolboys, undergraduates, young menaccording to their physical development, but mere children so far as their emo-

| tional development is concern- } ed, The working-class lad is off | with a girl at 15 or 16, and com- | pletely independent of his | mother for affection-he would think it ‘soppy’ to be hanging round his mother, ‘adoring’ her to the exclusion of interest in the opposite sex. ‘Tt is all very much healthier. The mother who is proud of the fact that her son ‘never looks at a woman’ but is content to stay home with her, is the unfortunate man’s worst enemy, her love a poison in his blood. * "BUr the harm of ‘smother love’ is not merely confine edto sons. There are mothers who cling so close to their — daughters that the poor girls never get a chance to turn round and look about for husbands for themselves.. These mothers are fond of insisting on what ‘tremendous pals’ they and their daughters are -‘more like sisters than mother and daughter,’ they like to assert. **Té is a lie, of course; @ mother and daughter can never be like two sisters, no matter how much the mother may ‘kid’ herself-there must always be the difference of their generations, and the biological fact of théir relationship, with its influence on the reactions of each to the other.

aA "‘Mother-love, in short, is not all that it’s cracked up to bel? * VERY time I men- [- tion the Oxford Group I get a lot of letters defending: the movement or denouncing it. The other evening I decided to look up the history of the movement and its instigator, Dr. (‘‘Call me Frank’’) Buchman. Lately, the Oxford Group has been back in the news with its plan for moral rearmament. * p®.- BUCHMAN appeals for peace with the proposition that God alone can change human nature. Logically follows the changed nation, the changed world. Moral rearmament claims to have no sectional political colour, no planned economic — basis, no formal social out- . line, no currency theories. _ While the world’s poli- — are going blind watching each other over a new proposed share-out of raw

materials, Buchman thunders that we have not yet tapped _the great creative sources in the mind of God. *‘Gcd has a plan,’’ he insists, * OOD-LOOKING tennis player ‘*‘Bunny’’ Austin is merely one of the many streamlined young athletes who have attached themselves to the Oxford Group Movement since 1921, when the quick-eyed, spectacled crusader from Pennsylvania hooked up with Loudon Hamilton at Christ Church, Oxford, and decided to run the moral vacuum-cleaner over wundergraduates. House-party evangelism brought many young men to God. Despite a lot of sniping from s¢eptics, supporters of formal religion, abundant proof exists that the lives of many young men were drastically changed for the better-that the cash registers of Oxford public--houses indicated slumps, that a lot of local girls lost their boyfriends. * TANG to be remembered is that, unlike really primitive Christianity-from that

associated with the downtrodden who scratched the fish symbol on Roman caves to General William Booth’s Salvation Army-Dr. Buchman aimed to convert, in the first place, the wealthy and secure. Maybe there is spiritual depth here as well as polttical acumen. Critics say that ~it is exclusive, offering salvation only to those with the right social background. Oxford Groupers themselves -and they ought to knowsay that the charge of exclusiveness its unjust, that there is room for the dustman as well as the Premier in the Group Movement. * O be a good Grouper, it is only _ neeessary, apparently, to be a good man. There is no body of theological law to be mastered and interpreted. More, Buchmanism is claimed to be so inclusive that it embraces all formal religions and revitalises their secular strength. Slogan on this point: Oxford Groupism is not a new denomination, but a new determination. While there is ample evidence that Dr. Buchman does not seek to upset the social status quo, the movement claims to be revolutionary.

ROUPER teams have carried the attack into 57 countries, using many of the high-pressure publicity expedients of the present day. Canada, it is said, was impressed when, in 1932, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, introducing Dr. Buchman’s spiritual storm troops to his Cabinet, declared: .

‘Speaking as a statesman, it is my conviction that the forces you so powerfully represent are the only ones that can save the world."’ * NORWAY concurred in 1934, when a Norwegian publicist declared that ‘‘the mental outlook of the whole country is definitely changed,’’ four Oslo professors adding: ‘"The coming of the Oxford Group will prove a turning-

point in Norwegian history.’’ Britain, it is claimed, was one of the first countries to show interest. Betweén 1926 and 1935, attendance at the Oxford International House Parties grew from 50 to 10,000, representing more than 40 countries. * RECENT squabble in Britain about the incorporation of the Oxford Group like any other company in merchandise ended by the commercial affairs of the movement being put on something like a regular legal basis, and an outburst by humorist A. P, Herbert in the House of Commons, In Parliament, however, no fewer than 250 M.P.’s supported Dr. Buchman, apparently convinced that he has got something worth their nods. * MONG. the ‘‘antis’? is the famous American ethical writer, Dr. Remhold Neibuhr, who has indicted the movement for tapping the, as yet, unplumbed human well of ignorance and superstition; Professor Julian Huxley, who laughs at its philosophy; the Bishop of

Durham, who has denounced it for ‘‘its naivete, adolescence, its meagre and limited conception of Christianity, its tendency towards mysticism, and its Biblical literalness.’’ Others accuse Dr. Buchman of using religion as a cloak for

political aims of a malodorously low order, such as _ strikebreaking, industrial spying, supplying the middle class with & weapon to sanctify the business of finding salvation and still making 100 per cent.

Auckland, I had a letter the other day, from a woman who said: "The July 31 Passing Pageant interested me, for I had just been thinking about 1914 and the years since. "T was a little older than you when war broke out, and my dad was on the Permanent Staff-had been during the Boer War, too. How excited everyone got when war was declared! What an example of mob psychology! * "GOING back over it in my mind, I remember snatches of conversation. How glad were some of the wives who were too cowardly to face the publicity of a divorce-the war had arrived and saved their faces for a while, but to-day they, like many loving, faithful wives and sweethearts, are just unpaid nurses to war-torn men, year after year, husbands whose minds, bodies and spirits were erushed. It wasn’t such a glorious war after all! ‘*T visit many of these men, F ROM. Titirangi, near

ss and I know.. My own dad 1s a war invalid, and an unele of mine only regained his memory twice in 19 years, and then did not remember the girl he was engaged to. When he died, what was left for her after wasted years? Too old to start again -many girls of 1914 have faced just this! "now I remember the troopships leaving-the agonised look on my mother’s face as I clung to her skirts, watch~ ing my dad march by with his men, his face weary and sad, his greatcoat weighed down with the pouring rain, "Child as I was, I could feel the dumb agony of it all. I’ve never forgotten it. So many of my male relatives went, all who could-and some did not return-but more blessed are those who died in glory than are most who have. returned to exist tm purn. * | WAS at an afternoon not long ago, and one young woman said she would wait 10 years for her husband if he was sent to jail, but if he joined the army of his own free will she’d divoree him and look about for another husband while still young enough to do so. ‘*T agree with her; we have seen too much of what our mothers have lost, too much of suffering men, *‘t tackled an old army major about it, and he said that old war-horses like hima self would fight because war was in their blood, but he added, ‘You young folk won’t let the war bug’ bite you, and I am beginning ta think you are right.’ ’’