Let's make the most of our peace

Luky and Elly

Luky
YEARS AGO WE HEARD A LOT ABOUT DÉTENTE, and we all hoped for peaceful solutions to be found for the ills that beset countries.
It's all very well to criticise leadership. People are always doing it, but how would you like to be in charge of a country? You cannot wipe out injustice of centuries in five minutes even though some seem to advise just that. There are many people all over the world who feel that the only way to combat injustice is by violence, but I disagree with them. No mother wants to raise her sons for cannon fodder.
  I was born in Amsterdam near the time our petrol harbour was set alight, and until I was about to celebrate my fifth birthday my country remained under occupation. My father did not go away to fight, so we were more fortunate than most of the other children in the street, yet I remember those years with dread and horror.
  Whenever you heard the older people talking they'd begin with the words: "Before the war . . ." and then tell some fairylike story. Little girls got dolls and little boys motor cars. You could buy some delicacy called lollipops that tasted so good you couldn't believe it. There was some delicious white stuff called sugar that you could put in your tea, and while we're on the subject, what's tea?
  One morning my sister woke me, brimming with excitement.
  "The war is over . . . peace has come."
  "Peace?" I asked unbelievingly.
  Like people who cannot understand that God had no beginning because all earthly creatures have  beginning, I never having known peace, could not believe in its existence. 
  My sister laughed. "Look outside!"
  I put my head out of the window and saw then the flags, red, white and blue, some orange in honour of our royal house. Where had they come from in that impoverished country where we had thought that every spare centimetre of material had been used to cover its inhabitants over the past five years, and the very trees in the street had been chopped down for firewood by fathers of families, moving out stealthily at night? 

  What a day that was.
  Small though I was, I still remember the joy on people's faces. And then I made my first mistake: So that, I thought, is what i was like before the war.
  Of course, things soon changed back to normal. People loved and hated, started moaning again about prices, the weather, the neighbours - you know how it is. But to me the absence of war remains a glorious miracle.
  The author Beverley Nichols once wrote that for him, one vital ingredient of happiness is the absence of pain. How well I understand him, because for me one vital ingredient of happiness is the absence of war.
  Some time ago a young man remarked: "What this world needs is a third world war." And although he was not speaking to me, I broke the rules and interrupted, saying: "Oh please don't say that, don't!" 
  He stared at me in amazement, for never having experienced war, he never could understand its horrors.
  Let's make the most of peace. Now is the time to make friends with each other, and rather than pointing out injustices ad nauseam, let us pray and work that they  may be wiped out peacefully.