Edward Bond of the "Tin Can People"
I was born at 8.30pm on a Wednesday the 18th of July 1934
In a thunderstorm
An hour before her labor began my mother scrubbed the stairs to her flat to clean them for the midwife to tread on
In the district in which my mother lived medical people were regarded as agents of authority
I was first bombed when I was five
The bombing went on till I was eleven
Later the army taught me ten ways to kill my enemy
And the community taught me a hundred ways to kill my neighbor
I saw there was no justice between one part of the community and another
An injustice is like a pebble dropped in the centre of the ocean
When the ripples reach the shore they have turned into tidal waves that drown cities
Necessity rules our days by the laws of cause-and-effect
Those who govern do not know what a person is
And the governed do not know what a government should be
Instead the evil do evil and because there is no justice the good must also do evil
How else can they govern the prison they live in?
I walked the streets and raged
I wanted the stones in the military cemetery to weep for the dead beneath them
I wanted the skull to dream of justice
And then I remembered the iron kite that flies in the child’s mind
And saw the old touch their white hairs as gently as a sparrow nesting on the side of an iceberg
So at twenty I wrote a play
The law of plays must be cause-and-use
To break necessity and show how there may be justice
Like all who lived at the midpoint of this century or were born later
I am a citizen of Auschwitz and a citizen of Hiroshima
Of the place where the evil did evil and the place where the good did evil
Till there is justice there are no other places on earth: there are only these two places
Bu I am also a citizen of the just world still to be made
