“Mamà, there’s a boy in my class who told me that World War III is about to start!”

Hmm. “And why does he think that?”

“Oh you know, because of that thing that happened in Paris, you know… that thing. He said that now they will start attacking everywhere, even Malta!”

Hmm.

“And he said that we have to start training!”

“Training?”

“Yes, like jumping steps quickly and most especially he said it’s important to know how to do cartwheels.”

“Why cartwheels?”

“To be able to run away quickly. I don’t know how to do cartwheels! But I told him that we’re children and we cannot fight because we are not soldiers. But he said, ‘Well, I won’t be clinging to my mummy’s arm when they come here,’ and I said, ‘Yes that’s what I’ll do, I’ll cling to my mummy’s arm really, really tight’. Mamà, do we have to train?”

Over the weekend, the world had to digest the horror of the Paris attacks that killed at least 129 people and injured another 300. Parents also had to figure out what to say to their children. News media, from Time magazine, to the New York Times, BBC and CNN, ran whole articles for parents, giving tips on the best ways to break it to children.

Maltese children too, needed to be told. Like all the other children in the world, news seeps down to them, and in their little heads they make their own thing out of it. And this was not some far flung place like Syria, which does not exist in a child’s mind map of the world. This is Paris, home to Eurodisney.

I told my daughter about Paris on Sunday morning. In actual fact, I was having major difficulty in wrapping my head around what happened – I was in shock myself and had spent almost all night up following the coverage of the carnage.

I told her, because the chances of her not hearing about it at school the next day were nil, and judging by the cartwheel conversation, I was right. The times when, in the past, I tried to keep tragic world news away from her always proved worse, because the version she then came home with was always an inconsolable Hollywoodian-cum-games-console version.

In very practical terms, apart from advice to parents, some news media, like the BBC and The Telegraph, even ran lengthy explanations for children. The simplest was La Libération’s. The French paper dedicated its junior newspaper, Le P’tit Libé, to a graphical ‘what’s going on’ for its young readers.

It explained that there are violent people who are full of hate and want everyone to see the world the way they see it and they wanted to do that by scaring people.

“Everyone’s talking about the Paris attacks because that’s what people do when they are shocked. It’s natural. The French government wants to keep people safe, so for a few days, it wants to encourage people to stay at home and not go to school or the library. Some people will claim that all Muslims are bad but, of course, that is not true. Everyone wants to remember the people who died, so that’s why we had the minute’s silence, and we lit a candle in their memory,” said Le P’tit Libé.

“But,” it went on. “Attacks like this are very rare. The terrorists want to frighten people into changing the way we live and the best way to fight them is to behave normally. That includes being frightened.”

I thought it was such a clear way of dealing with the matter at hand that it even made me feel like everything was under control (although I was fully aware that it was not, not really). So we found photos of how the French were ‘fighting’ terrorists by behaving normally: they were taking pictures of themselves in coffee shops and dining at restaurants and posting them online – they did not crawl into a hole and hide.

We watched the man who played John Lennon’s Imagine on a piano in Paris. And then we watched a single violinist playing a moving tribute in Trafalgar Square. And we watched the England fans sing La Marseillaise at Wembley stadium, which made tears well up. “This is why we are European,” I told her, hopefully radiating calm, “because although we’re all different, we stick up for each other.”

But even as I was saying it, I was no longer sure of it. I was devastated when it was confirmed that the IS terrorists were coming in with migrants through the Greek Islands. I watched a heart-wrenching interview of a French father and his anxious five-year-old son: the father was telling the son how they will fight back with flowers and candles. That won’t really get us anywhere with these bullies, I said to myself.

I am very concerned that, no matter how much we stick together through music and football, this will be the start of the end of a European Union. Will we all start building walls again? So when my daughter then asked me the inevitable question: Is it true that World War III is starting? I tried to allay her fears, but I was not very convincing. So I resorted to a deviation: “Let’s try a cartwheel!”

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti