Books as an Antidote

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23839, 14 December 1940, Page 6 (Supplement)

Books as an Antidote

Happy Avenues of Escape from War's Tragedy

By S.M.J.

IN a fashion satisfactory to myself at least I have solved the problem, "To Give Or Not To Give," discussed in a recent .supplement. My solution is to give books — at any rate, to the children, so far . as my purse allows it. Never w as it more necessary than now to help the present growing generation to form right habits of thinking and acting as far as we can ; and the books of our own language,, which breathe in every line, though sometimes unconsciously, our great traditions of freedom and democracy, are the very best mediums to choose. But tiiis year I have another end in new as well: i intend to give niv child friends, what I call "counteractive' books—books that will turn their minds away from the tragedy of war. which it grows daily more impossible to keep from them; travel books. autobiographies of great and good men, adventure books, school stories, and n !1!1 ~ sense books, the last especially il it means Alice, "Alice in Wonderland or in "Looking-Glass Land." Each year I give an "Alice" to some child in "the hope it will give to him oilier the supreme thrill of discovery and pleasure that it gave to me, and .1 am not often disappointed. How well I remember my first introduction to Alice, though it is more years ago than I care to count. It was a Sunday school prize, and as such not very enthusiastically welcomed by a small girl. Its predecessors, "No Gains Without Pains," "Links in lichen a's Life," "Melbourne House," had not been exactly childish reading. But Alice was opened surreptitiously at night after the prize-giving, just to get the feel of it. and an hour later i was discovered under the table, hidden by the fringed spread which graced our table in those days, already halfway through Alice, when I should have long since been in bed. Who can says what part such books have had in forming our national character ? I am only sure such airy, sparkling nonsense is of inestimable_ value in this sombre world of war. It pictures a different land, a land where anything might happen, save only such nightmare horrors. They can have no place there, in Alice's Wonderland. I recall that for weeks we threw out hints to grown-ups whenever a birthday was due —there was another book about Alice which we should dearly like to have. The hints had no effect. But on a rainy, miserable day, when three of us were in bed recovering from measles, the fourth scraped together every penny she could lind from all the money-boxes, without parental permission, and set bravely forth to buy "Through the Looking-Glass," her very first book purchase, the forerunner of so many, but none more dearly prized than that. All through the afternoon which had threatened to be so long, hut which was now all too short, the four of us lived in a magic land, and made friends once and for all with the White Queen and the White King, with Tweedledum and Tweedledce, the Hod Queen and Humpty-Dumpty, the dear old White Knight, and all the rest of

them. Wholesome and wonderful escape into the Land of Pretence, more than ever necessary to-day. Children have a right to "escapist" literature, to escape from the chaos brought about by adult failures and mistakes. "Grimm" is another present I like to make; he reigns in a fairy-tale land where right almost always triumphs, and where cruelty and unkindness are punished. It is not hard to believe that Hitler and his Minister of Education thoroughly despise Grimm and banish him from the lesson-books of all good Nazis, in Krica Mann's book about the schools of Nazi Germany, "School for Barbarians," we are told the sort of reading that is now found in the German child's school text-books, books that have had their part in forming the German national thought; Aesop's fables among others, adapted and perverted to serve the ends of Jewish persecution ! With what, widespread and glowing indignation we should repudiate the teaching of such doctrine to our own young children ! Positive teaching in the good, and belief iu the right is so necessary nowadays, and 1 feel that my book presents, if they help even a little in this way, will not be money wasted or thrown away.