Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

By WALTER DOWDING DESPITE the fact that the sun has gone down, leaving a greyness on the originally white cinema, the summer-dark sycamores, the shabby shops and houses, the Square looks very alert and vital to-night. Saturday night. Manwork is finished and housewifery suspended. All, for a few hours, are free and the subconscious willing of six days, nights, makes even the cinema queue sparkle. The people walk about urgent. Among them a sprinkling of soldiers and airmen on leave. Only the Indian and English soldiers, come up from the valley town and with, as yet, no local connections, dawdle. Two crows fly over hurried and eager. Odd this appearance of life. I suppose, in fact, any Hitler-clamped square in a continental town is more alive. There, because people have seen their enemies, and liberty has been visibly snatched from them, awareness is actual and freedom matters. They have been deprived of everything except responsibility. Here the crows that sail the treetops are not less responsible than the people. Hardly one per cent, it can be wagered, is conscious of responsibility for present tragedy, and present and future opportunity. For the leader-led mentality is not confined to Axis peoples. See Cummings lick Churchill's boots and communists Harry Pollitt's. Wherever is mass government, mass organisation of social, industrial life, are over- reliance on leaders and withering of individual initiative. If the thought pattern of the Square could be made manifest it would be a map of the Waste Land; or an illustration of the maggot in the Corpse of Society. This death in the midst of life is clear on the Square. Not so clear to our Olympians, the planners. How the Editors, Reviewers, Special Correspondents seem to see life singly and see it whole If they were really seeing modem life they would hold their noses-they would recognise it for the putrefacting mass it is, with hardly a germ of wholeness in it. In the big towns it is easy to be persuaded that people are thinking. A small proportion of the population of any big city will make a whole series of meetings seem -important. In the little towns and in the country it is easier to see all the people all the time and know how few are remotely interested beyond the moment and the self. Bar to our Beveridge is not the Pru, Market Square