Songs of Innocence

by Abrams, Fran

  But all that was in the future as dawn broke on 1 September 1939. At 11.07 a.m. on the previous day an order had been issued from Whitehall: ‘Evacuate forthwith.’ And education authorities around the country, which had been making detailed preparations for such an event for some time, swung into action. The scale of the evacuation was breathtaking. In total, around three million people, most of them schoolchildren, would be parcelled up, labelled – quite literally, with brown tags and string – and shipped out from the cities to the ‘reception areas’ in the countryside. In practical terms, the organization of this unprecedented mass relocation of the population was astonishingly well executed: ‘Party after party was marched to its proper train, safely bestowed in the carriages and dispatched without confusion and fuss,’ noted the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent, who watched the scene at the city’s Victoria Station as no fewer than 50,000 children were moved by train and bus. ‘The early parties looked rather tired, as if they had been wakened too early. One marching column made the subway ring with the strains of the “Lambeth Walk”. A coin-in-the-slot chocolate machine caused a little dislocation of one party, but discipline was easily restored.’

  The scheme had been under development for years by this time. Discussions had been taking place since the early 1930s about the principle of removing vulnerable populations from areas where aerial bombing was likely to be intense, and in the summer of 1938 the Anderson Committee – which also introduced the Anderson shelter – set out the details. Evacuation would not be compulsory, though billeting would be, and schoolchildren would be moved with their schools. In London2 and elsewhere, the need to prioritize the evacuation of children and pregnant women was quickly established. The phrase ‘women and children first’ had sprung from the sinking of HMS Birkenhead off South Africa in 1852 – as a result of an order from the captain, all the women and children on board were saved, while most of the men perished. And the notion that women and children were somehow uniquely delicate and precious went back much further. But in relation to children in particular this notion had gained a new poignancy, a new urgency, in the first few decades of the twentieth century, as the debate about the future of the nation – its health, its empire – had become more intense.

  Some of the most shocking events of World War One, in particular the bombing of North Street School in Poplar, must have influenced the debate on how children should be made safe in the future, too. And while the worst horrors in the last war had been experienced abroad by adult men, there was a feeling that advances in military aviation were bound to bring the next one much closer to home. Yet while the plans made for children’s physical safety were meticulous, no one even came close to predicting the social and psychological effect this mass movement of people would have. The evening of 1 September 1939 found the thirteen-year-old Bernard Kops, veteran of the battle of Cable Street, transplanted with his young sister Rose into an alien environment: ‘I found myself in Buckinghamshire, in a church hall at that. I thought we had travelled to the other end of the earth. Friday night, when we should have been having lockshen soup, waiting to be billeted on a family who wanted us about as much as we wanted them.’3

  The whole of the Stepney Green Jewish School had been grafted on to the small village of Denham. Both the village and its new residents were going to have to make major adjustments: ‘Everything was so clean in the room. We were even given flannels, and toothbrushes. We’d never cleaned our teeth up till then. And hot water came from the tap. And there was a lavatory upstairs. And carpets. This was all very odd. And rather scaring.’

  Yet from a growing boy’s point of view, the upheaval was not all bad: ‘We never had breakfast in Stepney Green, just a cup of tea and a slice of bread. There we were, in a shining little room that smelled of polish, and a table all set out with knives and forks and marmalade. And we were eating soft-boiled eggs. Well, if this was evacuation I was all for it.’

  Everything here was unfamiliar. Bernard and his sister had never before eaten a real meal at a table laid with knives and forks. After a time, they did begin to settle in – though he said later that he never got used to the place. ‘I was getting a little tired of all the gentility. And there was no life in the streets of Denham, people curled up and died at seven o’clock every evening.’4

  Bernard Kops and his sister were lucky – the family that took them in were kind, and tried their best to help them feel at home. There were presents at Christmas: ‘They didn’t seem to understand that Christmas wasn’t our festival. “Don’t tell ’em,” I said to my sister.’ And an East End boy with an unfulfilled literary bent suddenly found himself with access to Shakespeare’s sonnets and the poetry of Blake and Burns: ‘There was one poem in particular: “My mother bore me in the southern wild and I am black but O my soul is white . . .”’

  Some children were not so lucky. Michael Bird had already had a disrupted childhood – he had been in care for several years before war broke out – but he remembered his time as an evacuee with particular distress.5 Billeted with a family of cattle-slaughterers in Staffordshire, the seven-year-old found himself treated as little more than an unpaid servant: ‘As a seven-year-old I had to fetch all our water requirements from an open spring well down the fields where the cows drank. Whether it was morning or night, you couldn’t have a cup of tea until you’d chopped the sticks, broken and got the coal in, filled and lit the kerosene oil lamp, built and lit a fire, fetched the water from down the fields, and boiled the kettle.’

  He was not alone. One local authority issued a memorandum about the work to which its evacuee children had been put: ‘19 June 1940. Following instructions, inquiries were made at the farms in the neighbourhood whether children can help with the work in the fields. One farmer accepted and a dozen older children went this morning to weed . . . 20 June 1940: 10 children worked in the garden of Buckland Vicarage weeding. . .’6 Children were meant to be in school, but in fact many were not. In the cities, schools closed because their pupils had gone away, and in the countryside, many were without accommodation or had to share with existing local schools, working a ‘double-shift’ system. For the first year of the war, half the children in London did not receive full-time education. In April 1941, it was estimated that the total number not in school was almost 300,000.

  Such concerns were mere logistical problems in the midst of a war which was threatening the country’s very existence. But the response of the countryside to finding itself suddenly face to face with the social conditions that had existed for years in the towns was telling, and significant. Having seen children arriving, dirty, ragged and hungry, in their midst, it was hard to continue to feel that the problems of the inner city could stay in the inner city. The population of the slums had already begun to move out of the city centres just before the war, as outer-ring estates began to be built. But now evacuation brought the life of the slums right to the well-blacked hearthstones of Middle England.

  Within weeks, the papers were full of complaint from those upon whom the children had been billeted. In Darwen, Lancashire, a third of the children shipped out from Manchester were found to be ‘verminous’, it was reported. And similar stories were to be heard all over the country. The Women’s Institute, many of whose members were among the aggrieved, took up the cudgels in a report on the problems they had faced.7

  ‘It was a real shock to them to find that many of the guests arrived in a condition and with modes of life or habits which were startlingly less civilized than those they had accepted for a life-time,’ the report said, reproducing snippets of the responses it had received. ‘In practically every batch of children there were some who suffered from head lice, skin diseases and bed-wetting . . . Some had never slept in beds, and had no training whatsoever . . . One boy, very thin, had never had a bath before, his ribs looked as if black-leaded, suffered from head lice . . . The school had to be fumigated after the reception . . . Except for a small number the children were filthy and in this district we hav
e never seen so many verminous children lacking any knowledge of clean and hygienic habits. Furthermore, it appeared they were unbathed for months.’

  Among the evacuees were children suffering from scabies, whooping cough, impetigo and chickenpox, the respondees complained. And their personal habits were terrible: ‘The play meadow by the end of the first week was worse than any stock yard,’ remarked one member whose village had received children from Bethnal Green, in London.

  ‘A large number, even from apparently well-off homes, were quite unused to sitting down to table or to using knives and forks. They were used to having their food handed to them to take out, or eat anywhere. Some of the children had been sewn into their clothes, which were in such a state that they had to be burnt at once and fresh provided. There are some cases of the children being sent sweets and comics but no clothes, although the parents were quite well to-do. Clothing was often sent dirty and in need of repair.’

  Children arriving in the countryside from Liverpool often had only the clothes they were wearing, held together by string and tape, with no soles at all on their boots. Not surprisingly, the children’s parents came in for the worst opprobrium – especially in cases where they were accompanied by their mothers: ‘A distressing proportion were feckless and ignorant . . . The children simply sat down in the house anywhere to relieve themselves and actually one woman who was given the guest room always sat the baby in the bed for this purpose . . . The appalling apathy of the mothers was terrible to see. “Pictures” and cheap novelettes were their one desire. Had no wish to knit, sew or cook.’ The mothers fell into two groups, the WI reported: the ‘frankly dirty and shiftless’, and the ‘indolent, bored or incompetent’.

  One hostess from Westmorland wrote to the Guardian that the evacuees were so small and underdeveloped that they appeared eighteen months younger than local children their own age. But they had settled in quickly and begun to thrive. The main problem a few months on, she reported, was that their families had a tendency to want to visit them: ‘The main curse has been the weekly motor trip from Tyneside, bringing hordes of assorted relatives every Sunday. These . . . have invaded billets, expecting their meals but not to pay for them, stuffing the children with sweets all day, fomenting trouble between hosts and evacuated children. If the children were undisciplined and bad settlers to begin with, as children from such homes often are, the temporary parents got, and get, no chance to establish authority,’ she wrote.8

  To its credit, the Women’s Institute did more than simply vent its anger against feckless parents and their dirty children before moving on. Its leadership and members recognized the gaping social chasm that had opened up before them. The message from its membership should be heard not so much during the war as after, it said: ‘The material, it was felt, would be mainly useful not as regards the wartime aspect of evacuation, but in the solution of the long term social problems which have been so strikingly laid bare by recent events. It was in a constructive spirit and not with a sense of grievance that we set about the task.’ Prompted by a resolution from the WI’s annual conference, the Women’s Group on Public Welfare set up a committee to investigate further, chaired by Margaret Bondfield, who had been Ramsay MacDonald’s Minister of Labour and the first woman cabinet minister.

  ‘The effect of the evacuation was to flood the dark places with light,’ its report declared. The ‘submerged tenth’ of families described half a century earlier by Charles Booth – the family that lacked both the material and the spiritual resources to keep its head above water – was still with us, it added: ‘Like a hidden sore, poor, dirty, and crude in its habits, an intolerable and degrading burden to decent people forced by poverty to neighbour with it.’9

  This report became known for introducing the ‘problem family’ to the public arena: ‘Always on the edge of pauperism and crime, riddled with mental and physical defects, in and out of court for child neglect, a menace to the community, of which the gravity is out of all proportion to their numbers.’ But its message was broader than that. Its central theme was that the issue of poverty must be tackled on many fronts, and must be tackled as a matter of urgency once the war was over: ‘The campaign for better education, academic, social and moral, must be waged side by side with the battle against poverty and bad material conditions,’ it said. ‘Character, especially if supported by the unmeasured and tremendous force of tradition, can and does triumph astonishingly over both poverty and squalor.’ The report’s recommendations read today like a prototype list for many of the social reforms introduced by the post-war Labour government: better housing, a national health service, family allowances, more parks and playgrounds in towns, a programme to alleviate the disgraceful condition of crumbling Victorian school building stocks.

  Others saw the need for change in more drastic terms. A Mass Observation report on children and the war, published in June 1940,10 remarked that while the women’s organizations had tried to harness their shock to a movement for positive change, most simply felt anger and revulsion: ‘The majority have turned their horror into fear and even hatred, seeing in this level of humanity an animal threat, that vague and horrid revolution which lurks in the dreams of so many supertax payers.’ Whether urban poverty was a source of national shame or a threat to the established order, there was general agreement something had to be done.

  For the children themselves, the experience of being evacuated was much more mixed. Some, like Michael Bird, were desperately unhappy. But for most, there was a strange confluence of emotions. For Bernard Kops, there was a strong sense of dislocation, of fear and of homesickness: ‘Over tea, I tried to tell them about my family in Amsterdam. Told them that to be Jewish meant to be persecuted. Mrs Thompson sliced up a tomato, put some salt on it and said: “Don’t you worry your head about that.”’ On the other hand, the sight of open countryside was revelatory: ‘All at once I saw life in a different way. For now I realized that the world was an open place of light, air and clouds . . . Doubt entered my mind that sunny day. Doubt and conflict . . . I was part of that world, and I knew that I would soon tire of this one.’11

  Ultimately, then, the experience of evacuation was bound to be a negative one for most children, even if they were well treated. The major revelation for many of them would be to recognize the strength of their family bonds, the importance of their familiar environments in forming their identities. ‘The family came to visit us and brought us Yiddisher food. The Thompsons said, when the family had departed, that they were delighted to find they were nice people. We were very pleased,’ Kops wrote later, acknowledging the sense of responsibility a child can feel when introducing his or her family to other acquaintances.

  Kops, who left Denham in the early months of 1940 to take up a place at a catering college in Brighton, soon got homesick and took himself back to Stepney Green. And he was not alone. With not much happening in the early months of the war, thousands had made their way – alone, or accompanied by their parents – back home. The Guardian reported12 that by January 1940, more than half the million or so children who had been evacuated were back home with their parents.

  If Bernard Kops’ account is typical, the feeling that families should stay together was mutual: ‘When I got home my parents said: “What on earth are you doing here?” I said my school had been bombed, and two children had been killed. They just accepted that. I said Rose was fine,’ he said.13

  Across Britain, 43,000 people died in German bombings between September 1940 and May 1941, and it was estimated one in ten were children.14 For Kops, the Blitz meant the discovery of a new world: the London Underground. The Kops family would spend night after night on the tube system, pushed along the Central Line from east to west until they could find a little bit of platform to call their own. Then Bernard would ride backwards and forwards on the trains, looking at the population of London sheltering from the bombs: ‘The children of London were adapting themselves to the times, inventing new games, playing hopscotch while the
ir mothers shyly suckled young babies on the concrete.’15 Eventually, Bernard, his mother and sisters left London, first for East Anglia and later for Yorkshire, to get away from the bombing. Other families would stay in the cities, but increasingly children’s lives would be dislocated from those of their parents.

  From 1941, all women between the ages of eighteen and sixty had to register for war work, and although those with young children were exempted at first, by 1943 eight out of ten married women were engaged in work connected with the war effort. The Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, had promised to subsidize nursery places for their children, and as the war went on, tens of thousands of these places were taken up. Much has been said about the changing social attitudes brought about by the wartime opportunities for married women, yet less has been said about the corresponding effect of this policy on children. In 1940, there were just fourteen day nurseries in England and Wales; by 1943 there were more than 1,300.16

  Again, this brought children – often younger children of families which lived in the inner city, where the demand for women to work in munitions factories was strong – into a different, more regulated environment. And again, those drafted in to look after them – often young women doing their own ‘war work’ – had their eyes opened to the different social conditions around them. Dorothy Brown and Eileen Adey both worked as teenagers at such a nursery on the Castlefield housing estate in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. They recalled later a life dominated by routine: ‘Monday mornings were set aside for de-lousing – a row of basins, a row of children, the appropriate soap and comb of the time, and a competition (unknown to Matron) on the number of lice retrieved from a single head. We believe 40 was the highest score,’ they would write later.17