English Children Of Valour

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 109, 10 May 1941, Page 2 (Supplement)

English Children Of Valour

BESIEGED England to-day is providing the world with one of the great exhibitions of courage. Not only men and women but children are rising to new heights of character in the face of bitter and incessant attack. Somehow we expect men and women to stand up under fire, but when endless examples of child courage confront us we sense a new and deeper value in the human spirit. We stand a little in awe before it. A bomb comes ripping through a London roof and a house collapses into rubble. In one corner of the wreckage six-year-old Frederick Harrison wriggles from beneath a fa'den wardrobe, wipes the plaster dust from his eyes and digs out his three-year-old sister, who is buried under a shower of bricks. Together they find the place where their baby brother was sleeping, pull away the bricks and rubble and rescue him. Then they search the ruins for their mot her. A torpedo rips into the hull of an evacuee ship and men. women and children are killed, injured, left adrift in lifeboats. Edward Richardson, who is only 11, helps get the injured into the boats, keeps his own nerve, rests the head of a dying woman in his lap and tries to ease her last hours by assuring her that rescue ships are at hand. But rescue does not come for days. The cables bring the story: "Edward Colin Ryder Richardson, passenger S.S. City of Benares, formally commended for bravery." Joked With Rescuers We also hear by cable about 13-year-old Peggy Byng, buried under fallen timbers and debris which killed her mother, sister and two brothers. We hear that Peggy "kidded" the rescuers as they worked twelve hours to get her out. though we don't hear what Peggy's "cracks" were. We don't hear anything individually of the injured children awaiting their turn for treatment, but a first-aid worker says: "They're wonderful! Never a whimper out of them."

Amcrioan newspapers have been singing the praises of Britishers under fire, but especially they have delighted in the extreme courage of Britain's youngsters while under attack from Hitler's ghouls of the air. Here is what one of these writers has to say.

By C. M. Dunlop

But even the restrained British reports suggest chapters of heroism in the lives of bombed-out but undismayed small fry—a line about a solemn-faced little boy helping an old granny many miles along the road out of shattered Coventry, a word about the comment of a "five-year-old boy inspecting a bomb crater in the dooryard: "Coo, that one nearly got us that time"; a taut little voice asking each rescue worker in turn. •'Please, sir, have vou seen Billy?" And the patient aside of a four-year-old girl taking charge of a motherless brood: "Ah, all right, Georgie. shut up." It isn't news that in England now boys and girls are told off to spot enemy planes and hustle younger children into family shelters; that 10-year-olds are among the youngsters enlisted to keep curbs "gleaming white for the blackout; that Johnny, aged 9. evacuated from London's East End. is a cool hand at putting out incendiary bombs, and a help around the ambulance. Behaved Manfully So many 'teen age messenger boys have behaved manfully, fourteen hours at a stretch, in London's bombed areas—holding fire hose at dock fires until relieved by firemen; carrying drinking water to men at their posts—that Ronnie Sanderson rates only the briefest mention as one of three lads recommended for the award of the George Cross. "He went in among the debris," one adult told, "and saw horrible sights which might have shaken a man. But this 14-year-old lad never wavered." Surprised that a news photographer wanted to take a picture of him, Ronnie said, "I didn't do anything special."

Harry, aged 13. writing a dutiful letter to his American aunt and bovlike racking his brain to fill up the page, winds up with this: ''A few weeks ago I found an unexploded incendiary bomb which seu; mother into a fright; I took it to the wardens, who put it outside and put a sandbag on it. Well, here I must close." We call this courage, though valour might be a better 4 .crm in its literal meaning. Or that homelv word "spunk." V" tover we call it, there it is and we all admire it.

There is a definite relatio between a child's fears and those c his mother. Observers of Hritis children report that the reaction of the young under bombardmen are definitely related to the behi viour of the parents. The child of a dockside fathc who stands on a heap of fresh rubbl in the street and shakes his ris defiantly at the Nazi raiders in th skies will not be a child who hide in a corner terror-stricken when th first roar of a bomber is heard over head.

"TF I were to die now, I would 1 not mind, for life can hold nothing equal to this moment." So said an Abyssinian chieftain the other day, when the flag of his country was hoisted again over his capital. The emotion of the Abyssinian can be shared even at this distance of time and circumstance. Only the entirely unimaginative could fail to feel what was in his heart.

By Cyrano

All through history there have been moment? like these, when, after disaster, life reached a plane of triumph well-nigh too overwhelming to he home, and when it seemed to the sou! that if death came, it would find life a mission completely fulfilled and ready for dismissal. To many, however. - an immediate parallel to this cry from Ethiopia will be found, not in the national fulfilments of history, but in a moment of personal felicity described by a poet. This chieftain's words are Othello's, when he joins Desdemona in Cyprus. If I were asked to choose a dozen pas>ages in Shakespeare that most royally transcend the common level of writing, and even his own accustomed uplands, this would be one ■:' them: If it ***ere nox to die, 'Tr,cre to be most happy; for, I fear, My so-.;', hath her content to absolute Tha: r.ot ar.o:her comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate. The passage, which ranks among the worid's greatest love poetry,