We can’t let jihadis kill off youthful free spirit

BEFORE my first child was born, a colleague with a family of his own told me her arrival would mean: ‘You’ll never sleep the same way again.’

I thought I knew what he was getting at in those first months when the baby howled in the night (and yes, the heaviest burden fell to my wife).

I also thought I knew what he meant when I traipsed home at 4.30am, dead-beat after a late shift. I found my wide-awake toddler, all Shirley Temple curls and smiles, arms outstretched, declaring: ‘Let’s play!’

But what he really meant was that even when you go from wondering if they’ll ever sleep to whether they’ll ever emerge from their bedrooms before noon, it’s gnawing worry that keeps you awake.

It’s the end of the school year again, and there’s that pre-holiday delight, of course. But there’s a terrorist shadow over everything now that adds to that parental angst.

Sickening atrocities in Manchester and London are the ‘every parent’s nightmare’ cliché brought to horrifying life. We can all grasp the scenario. Excited youngsters heading for a concert; older children off for a fun night in a lively part of town.

We fret over what drives jihadis to murder, but it’s a pointless exercise.

A bare ankle; a girl’s ponytail swinging free in the breeze; a band striking up a tune – trivia is enough to trigger mediaeval savagery. And we must beware those who relativise. Yes, civilians have died as a result of Western foreign policy, and that is horrific, but innocents are never our intended targets. A US Navy SEAL – a man who knows a thing or two about ‘soldiers of the caliphate’ and their liking for soft targets – once passed on a nautical quote that stays with me: ‘A ship is safe in the harbour, but that is not what ships are for.’

That ship is our precious children, vessels for all our hopes, laden with energy and spirit and boundless potential.

Wanting to spare them life’s storms, its uncharted reefs, its pirates, is the most basic of human instincts.

Yet we must let them go out on that angry or glimmering sea; vanish over that horizon to seek places we have never been and will never see.

The harbour adage came to me again at my youngest’s ‘farewell to junior school’ prize-giving this week, where oblique reference was made to the new terror threat. The school trip has been switched from Paris to York over safety concerns. First World problems, yes. But also the new reality.

POLITICIANS said: ‘We will not be cowed’ after both the Manchester atrocity and the London Bridge slayings. It reminds me of Churchill’s defiant ‘London can take it!’ message amid the rubble of the Blitz. Legend has it some Cockney sparrow interjected: ‘It’s us wot can take it!’

For it is we, the public, who are in the front line against an inhuman terrorist enemy. Barack Obama was right when he said: ‘It is important to understand that we cannot have 100 per cent security and then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make choices as a society.’ And one of the choices we parents will still have to take is as old as humanity.

We must weigh the risks and decide when the time is right to let our children go off in cars, on nights out to pubs and clubs and to concerts.

Our little ships must still set sail and most will enjoy fabulous voyages, arriving safe one day on some distant shore.

That’s the vision that will, in time, best an ideology that seeks only death for our children and for its own.