Exiles from the War

by Jean Little

  The other reward, the big surprise, is that she has planned a whole day in Toronto with me. The two of us are to go down in the train and have lunch at Eaton’s and go to a matinee and visit Britnell’s. It is a famous bookstore, one filled with just books. Here, the bookstores sell stationery and games and jigsaws. She will buy me whatever book I choose. We will not come home until after supper. It sounds so grown-up!

  But did I myself change in this past year? Eleanor said I would. I thought at first that I had not, but I read the whole diary over to see, and I am different. I can’t explain exactly how.

  But I understand things I missed when I was just beginning this year. Part of it is because of all the sadness which has come to us. Missing George, and the bombs, and the sinking of the City of Benares, and the War going on and on.

  I remember that I used to be sad mostly for myself, but I think I know now how it feels to hurt for other people. I was so frightened about George and worried over Bertie. And I think more about how other people feel, like Jane and the rest.

  I am taller, of course, and my body is changing. But that is private.

  And I have maybe learned how to be a good big sister.

  Now to begin the fourteenth year in the life of Charlotte Mary Twiss!

  The End

  P.S.

  Wednesday, June 18, 1941

  The cable, to Sam and Jane both, came at breakfast time.

  Jane was so good. She waited until we got Sam before she let us open it. It was their Baby, of course. it said, WILLIAM CHARLES BORN AT TWO THIS MORNING STOP SEVEN POUNDS STOP MOTHER AND CHILD FINE STOP LOVE DAD.

  Sam cheered but Jane looked as though she was not sure whether to laugh or cry.

  “If only he had come yesterday,” she said. “Then he would have been born on Charlotte’s birthday.”

  Then my clever father told her that he WAS born on my birthday, because at 2 a.m. in England, here it was still YESTERDAY. Clever Dad. Well done, William!

  See you in Volume Two, dear Diary. Now I am a teenager. Who knows what will happen next.

  Epilogue

  While people are involved in fighting a war, it seems that once peace is declared, the world will not only return to normal, but be filled with joy and laughter. The Twiss family and the Browning children certainly celebrated on VE (Victory in Europe) Day in May 1945, when the war in Europe ended, and on VJ (Victory over Japan) Day in August 1945, when Japan surrendered. But when the cheering stopped, it was time for Sam and Jane and Pixie to go home to England.

  Sam and Charlotte were about to begin their second-last year in high school. Jane was thirteen and had finished Grade Nine. Pixie, who was only five when she left home, was ten, and barely remembered her British family. Everyone was pulled in two directions, longing to go and wanting to stay.

  Once he reached home, Sam completed the courses he needed to enable him to return to Guelph to attend the Ontario Veterinary College and become a veterinarian. After graduating, he went back home to Britain to treat large animals, among which were the work horses he had grown to love as a boy. He also took flying lessons and joined with some friends in buying a small plane.

  Jane missed Charlotte and the rest of the Twiss family, but was comforted by Skip’s obvious delight at her return. She also loved being a big sister to her new brother Will, who thought she was wonderful. When Jane grew up, she became a children’s librarian and collected dogs in need of a loving home. She often brought one with her to work, which delighted the boys and girls who counted on her to find them just the right book.

  Pixie fought to stay in Canada but finally had to go home. She remained miserable until she visited the Brownings in England and discovered she had not left all her new friends on the other side of the Atlantic. She married when she was nineteen and had a large family. Luckily, she lived close to Jane, who was a great help in raising Pixie’s boisterous youngsters.

  When George came home to Canada after the war, he brought a young Scottish wife with him. They lived in Toronto, where he got a job working for a newspaper. Eventually he made a name for himself as a cartoonist and illustrator.

  Bertie’s injuries were too severe for him to live a normal life after the war. He spent close to three years in a convalescent hospital in England, and then was sent home, where he lived for the rest of his life.

  Eleanor grieved for him and sympathized with his situation even more when, in 1947 while working for her masters degree in social work, she contracted polio. She recovered slowly, but never regained full use of her left side. After months of treatment, she grew able to walk again, although she had to wear a leg brace and use a cane for balance.

  When Charlotte was allowed to visit her sister in hospital, she grew interested in helping with Eleanor’s physiotherapy. She ended up becoming a qualified occupational and physiotherapist in Toronto, working with disabled children.

  At that time, it was difficult for a woman with a disability like Eleanor’s to find a fulfilling job. Finally she began to tutor high school students who were in danger of failing, and she did so well at it that she soon had a waiting list of pupils. She continued to live at home but, through the church and her pupils’ families, she made many good friends and had an active social life. When she and a friend visited England one summer, Sam took her for a ride in his plane.

  After Mrs. Twiss died, Charlotte realized that both her sister and her father needed her help, so she came home to live. At thirty-four, she surprised all her friends and relatives, except her father, by marrying his doctor. Two years later she give birth to a baby boy whom she called Charles after her father and Richard after her husband.

  Although everyone but Bertie seemed to flourish after the war ended, each of them was left with scars. The tug-of-war had given them an uncertainty about the future, and a fear of what calamity might beset them next. The memory of Bertie’s suffering remained with both George and Charlotte, and Eleanor’s illness made them aware that even in peacetime, heartache is never far away.

  Yet joy was there too. Whenever two or more of them came together, the memories of what Charlotte called the War Guest Years were brought out and laughed over and Charlotte’s diary was often consulted and enjoyed.

  “You know what, Charlotte? You weren’t the only one who matured that year,” Sam said on one visit. “We all did.”

  And it was true.

  Historical Note

  Charlotte Twiss, the main character in this book, begins her journal ten months after the outbreak of World War II and ends it a year later. It is not until six months after her journal ends that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the Americans into the war. The worldwide conflict went on for three and a half years after that.

  Before Canada declared war on Germany in September 1939, Germany had invaded Austria and taken over much of Czechoslovakia. When the Germans marched into Poland and swiftly conquered it, the British, who had struggled to negotiate a binding peace treaty with Hitler, finally declared war. Canada followed suit a week later. This delay was because our prime minister wanted to show that Canada was no longer merely a British colony, but an independent nation.

  The following spring, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium fell before Hitler’s troops. In late May–early June 1940 the British could not hold out against the German advance and were forced to retreat to France’s west coast at Dunkirk. Thousands of British soldiers were trapped on the beach and would have been massacred but for hundreds of British civilians who sailed across the English Channel time after time to rescue them. While three hundred thousand Allied soldiers were ferried to safety by the Navy ships and the civilian boats, the RAF kept up a covering fire to hold the Germans at bay. Although many thousands were saved, thousands of others, both soldiers and rescuers, were killed. Very shortly after the men were rescued from the beaches at Dunkirk, France was occupied by German troops and forced to surrender.

  During 1939, British families had begun to send a few children overseas to ensure t
heir safety. As the English heard news of German tanks, backed by highly trained troops, overrunning and defeating one country after another, they were thankful that the English Channel separated them from the rest of Europe. Yet this age-old barrier to invasion was no longer the defence it had once been. Soon, Britons were sure, German planes would target English cities for bombing raids. Hundreds of thousands of children were evacuated to rural areas. The government arranged for those who had no families in remote British villages to place their children in the homes of strangers.

  Thousands of parents even chose to send their boys and girls halfway around the world to keep them safe. After all, in May of 1940 the Germans had launched their blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) on Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium and France. In August 1940 the German Luftwaffe began attacks on Royal Air Force radar stations and airfields. It was clear to all that British cities such as Plymouth, Coventry, Bristol, Liverpool and London would be slated for air raids.

  No bombs fell at first. During August and early September 1940, the German Luftwaffe and the RAF battled in the skies above England and the English Channel. This was known as the Battle of Britain. Both sides suffered heavy losses of planes and pilots.

  Then the German command shifted to bombing British cities, partly hoping to destroy the war effort, partly to try to break down the staunch morale of the British people. On September 7, 1940, wave after wave of German planes filled the skies over London, pounding the city with thousands of bombs. Fires set off by the first attack lit the way for the swarm of planes that followed. The deafening noise struck terror into the bravest hearts. The Blitz had begun, and for the next fifty-seven days bombs kept raining down on London. Houses toppled, fires raged and people were buried in rubble. Of the forty thousand people in Britain who died in the Blitz, over half were in London itself.

  Before these bombing raids actually began, children had been issued with gas masks. During air raids, sirens would sound, alerting city dwellers that approaching aircraft had been sighted. People would hurry to places of safety. Some took refuge in homemade air-raid shelters they had dug in their back gardens. Others headed for the nearest Underground station. (Canadians call this the subway.)

  The children who had been sent away to safe havens agonized as the radio broadcasts and newspapers told the harrowing story. They were safe … but what was happening to their parents?

  Many of these evacuees have told about their experiences during WWII and the Blitz. Several good novels about those times have also been written. Goodnight, Mr. Tom by Michele Magorian is one of the best of these. It is the story of a small sad boy who is taken to live with an old man who does not want a child foisted on him. The story of how both of them are changed as they learn to love each other is great, but the book also shows what happened to a village when a bunch of children from London descend upon it. Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden is based upon the writer’s own experiences when she and her brother were sent to live in a village in Wales.

  Many girls and boys were placed in settings completely unlike those they had always known. The host families also had a difficult time struggling to understand this influx of unhappy youngsters. For some it was an enriching and ultimately happy experience. For others it was a bitter struggle. They differed in so many ways — how they spoke, the food they ate, the games they played, their way of settling quarrels, their ideas about courage, their manners. Many felt fiercely loyal to their own families too, and saw any request to alter their behaviour as an attack on their home values.

  It was not easy for the host families in Britain either, with many men away fighting, and with such an influx of newcomers causing overcrowding in schools and straining already-stressed resources as the country continued to wage war.

  But at least the children evacuated within Britain knew that they were still in the same land as their own families. Although phoning home was not taken for granted in those days, and not everyone had a phone, it was possible to stay in touch to some extent via letters, postcards and even occasional visits.

  War guests like Sam and Jane had all of the problems faced by those evacuees, made worse by being shipped across a great ocean. The trip itself was dangerous, and some children returned to England after the ship they were on was badly damaged by a German attack.

  Although some of the evacuees who reached Canada had been sent to live with relatives, or were kept together with others from their private schools, many children were taken in by Canadian families whose hearts had been touched by their plight, but whom the war guests did not even know. Kit Pearson, in her Guests of War trilogy beginning with The Sky Is Falling, vividly recounts the experiences of two such fictional children.

  Most of the war guests in Canada came in 1940. Some “private” evacuees were sent to live with relatives in Canada, or to stay at a private schools such as Toronto’s Bishop Strachan School and Branksome Hall. Several thousand were sent by Britain’s Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB), a government agency set up to handle the evacuee situation.

  Although there is no sure tally of the total number of children who came to Canada, they definitely numbered in the thousands. Thousands more children were expected, but on September 17, 1940, a large ship packed with war guest children, the City of Benares, was torpedoed and sunk. Seventy-seven children and over half the crew were killed. Panicked parents in England realized that in trying to send their children to safety, they might be sending them to their death. Most withdrew their children from the evacuee program, and even though some still wished to send their children overseas, the British government sent no further children to Canada.

  Thousands of boys and girls were already here by then, and here most of them stayed for five years, until the war was over. Some war guests initially had difficulties fitting in, and even had to be moved to different host families. But on the whole they grew to feel they belonged. They were spared some of the problems faced by evacuees who remained in Britain — they were not so close to home and they did not expect Canadian adults to behave as their parents would, so the differences actually made the transition easier for some of them. They had to adjust. Besides, they could not easily plan to run away, not with an ocean between them and their families.

  Some of the war guests were so young that they had no understanding of the length of time they might be away. When they had been in Canada for three or four years, many found writing letters home difficult. How could they keep their love alive when the people to whom they were supposed to write had become, in some instances, distant strangers? They had grown close to the people who had given them a home in Canada, often coming to consider these their parents, and their own parents more like aunts and uncles.

  When the war ended and the war guests could return to their homes in Britain, it was exciting for some and terribly hard for others. Some also had to face the scorn felt for them by children who had spent the war years in England — although the war guests did not come to Canada of their own choice but because their parents had sent them, some children in Britain called them cowards for running away when their country was in trouble. The evacuees had not suffered the severe food rationing, the blackouts, the bombing raids or the fear experienced by those who stayed behind, either. It often took some time for the returning children to readjust and find their feet again. Some managed this; others never felt quite “at home” again.

  Throughout Charlotte’s diary, her friend Barbara Steiner tells of her anxiety about her Jewish relatives in Europe. The Steiners tried to get them out of danger, but could not. The Nazis’ systematic persecution of Jews began when the party was formed in 1920. This escalated until it ended in the Holocaust, when six million Jews were killed. Unless they themselves were Jewish, Canadian children were largely unaware of this situation until the Allied troops that liberated the concentration camps discovered the gas chambers and the mass graves, as well as the remaining prisoners, who had been starved until they resembled skeletons. Though Canadian Jews tried to ge
t Jewish children in Europe out of danger, only a handful were rescued.

  As I did research for this story, I discovered that many war guests later emigrated to the countries which had taken them in: Australia, the United States or Canada. Many Canadian children today are descended from someone who once was a lonesome war guest. Those ancestors would never have thought that they would settle in this strange and frightening land, a land that eventually become their heart’s home.

  British Expressions and What They Mean

  biscuit: cookie

  candy floss: cotton candy

  dinner: lunch

  frock: dress

  ha’penny: coin worth half a British penny

  headmaster: principal

  ice lolly: popsicle

  jersey: a long-sleeved pullover shirt

  joint: roast

  jumper: pullover sweater

  knickers: girls’ underpants

  the loo: the toilet

  lorry: truck

  mackintosh or mack: raincoat

  maize: corn

  to paddle: to wade

  Patience: Solitaire

  plaster or sticking plaster: bandage

  plimsolls: running shoes

  pudding: any dessert

  shilling: British coin worth 12 pence

  tea: late afternoon meal (like North American supper)

  torch: flashlight

  treacle: syrup

  tuppence: British coin worth 2 pence

  vest: undershirt

  wellies or Wellingtons: rubber boots

  A list of clothing that government-sponsored children were required to take with them: