The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  The process was not always straightforward, for any mother (and they were usually mothers) who wanted her child returned to her had to provide proof that it was hers. Since all children were renamed upon admission, it was common for women to affix a token to the infant for identification, usually an everyday object—coins with distinguishing nicks, buttons or pieces of fabric, rings, bottle tags, a carved ivory fish. Some mothers left tokens that gave voice to their despair—short notes on the backs of playing cards declaiming the “cruel separation,” or engravings on heart-shaped tokens: “You have my heart, though we must part.” The token would be stored away, sealed, only to be opened in the event that a claim was made.

  In 1758 the hospital began providing a receipt for a child who was left in their care, stamped with the full name of the institution at the top—“HOSPITAL for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children.” The form included places to identify the sex of the child and its date of admission (The ______ Day of ________, RECEIVED a ___________ Child), as well as some legalese:

  NOTE.—Let this be carefully kept, that it may be produced whenever an enquiry is made after the Health of the Child (which may be done on Mondays, between the Hours of Ten and Four), and also in the case the Child should be claimed.

  In 1853 Charles Dickens wrote about the receipt in a magazine article titled “Received, A Blank Child,” depicting the Foundling Hospital as a place where what he called “blank children” would be “trained out of their blank state to be useful entities in life.”41 In his eyes, the utilitarian value of the institution was clear. But he did warn the mother who had “previously rung the porter’s bell to obtain . . . admission of her child,” to be “particularly careful in preserving this parchment.”42 For without the receipt, they might never be reunited.

  Dickens frames the parchment in practical terms, but I have to imagine that like me, he was struck by its transactional language.

  The receipt Lena Weston was given was almost indistinguishable from the one Dickens had written about a century before, and heeding his advice, she kept it, preserving it carefully, hoping that someday the piece of paper would enable her to see her child again. But the language on the receipt was disingenuous and misleading—the Foundling Hospital had long since discontinued its practice of encouraging the reunification of foundlings with their mothers. Throughout the nineteenth century, the hospital received petitions from mothers, and sometimes fathers, too, seeking reunification. Most of those requests were denied. The following letter was a typical response:

  It is very natural that you should feel hurt at the decision of the Governors, but you are mistaken as to the grounds of that decision. There is no charge against either your character or that of your husband: the simple matter is this—the Governors think they can provide for the boy’s future welfare better than you can. You should recollect that you have other children, who may for aught we know stand in the way of the Boy; at any rate you ought to feel happy that so great an interest is taken in your son’s well-being. The decision of the committee is final.43

  I wasn’t able to make sense of why the practice changed so dramatically, from an initial encouragement of the notion of reunification to the rejections evidenced in the Foundling Hospital’s files, but I came to suspect that the hubris evident in so many of the hospital’s regulations had something to do with it. Men of great learning, stature, and power, the governors simply considered themselves best positioned to raise a child for the benefit of society. Perhaps over time they’d developed a loyalty to the institution itself, consciously or unconsciously making decisions designed to perpetuate its very existence. Whatever the reason, once admitted as an infant, a foundling would likely never leave the confines of the institution—at least not until he or she had been adequately prepared for a life of service, which during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could occur as early as eight years old.

  The beginning of the 1900s brought a slight shift in attitude, with a 1907 annual report maintaining that the governors “reserved the right” to restore a child to her mother if they were satisfied that she could support the child. But in practice, little changed. Following World War I, the hospital came under pressure to allow parents to reunite with their children. In 1921 the bishop who headed the Church of England diocese in Canterbury gave a sermon acknowledging the importance of the Foundling Hospital in saving the lives of abandoned children, but stated that his belief was so strong “in the parent being the natural and proper teacher about God and Jesus Christ that [he] would never remove from touch with its mother any illegitimate child.”44 No matter how well a child might be cared for, he argued, “the little person will want the sense of someone lovingly interested in its welfare.”45 The same year, Dr. Bruce Low of the Ministry of Health was more forthright, questioning whether the hospital’s methods for raising children were outdated entirely. The children at the hospital have “an institutional appearance and appear dull witted,” he noted. They appear to “behave mechanically and the natural buoyancy of spirits of a young child seem to be totally absent.”46 The governors dug in their heels, vigorously disputing Dr. Low’s account of the foundling experience—still convinced that the care provided by the hospital was superior to that which the parent of an illegitimate child could give.

  That Lena’s request arose during different circumstances may have provided her some hope that the committee might accede to her request. When she penned her plea to the Foundling Hospital eighteen years after the bishop’s opinionated sermon, Europe was on the brink of war with Germany, Hitler’s army was amassing, and the predictions of casualties were dire. The government had already begun stockpiling coffins. Its primary concern was safeguarding Great Britain’s citizens, particularly its children, and a plan to protect them was set in motion. Named Operation Pied Piper, it was to become the largest and most concentrated mass movement of people in the nation’s history. The principle was simple: move children out and away from cities that were likely to become targets of German air strikes and into the countryside.

  And so, on August 31, 1939, the order was issued: “Evacuate forthwith.”

  The evacuation began the following morning. Over the next three days, approximately five hundred thousand children were sent to the countryside, with thousands shipped to Canada, the United States, and Australia. Over the course of the war, millions (mostly children) would be evacuated from Britain’s cities.

  For such a massive undertaking to succeed, the government needed the cooperation of its citizens. Marketing campaigns created by the Ministry of Health targeted mothers nervous about sending their children away. With slogans encouraging them to relinquish their children—“Mothers send them out of London,” “Children are safer in the Country”—the government sent a clear message that cities, particularly London, were deadly places for a child to be.

  In addition to encouraging city-dwelling mothers to give up their children, the British government needed families in the countryside to house the millions who would soon flee the cities. One area considered particularly ideal was Shropshire, the county where Lena Weston happened to live. Located near the Welsh border, the rural area continues to be one of England’s most sparsely populated, with a prewar census showing only 244,000 residents in an area spanning nearly 900,000 acres. In contrast, London, which was less than half the size, housed a population of more than eight million residents at the time. Thinly populated farmlands were of little interest to the Germans as potential targets, and by the end of September 1939, the county of Shropshire had already taken in thousands of evacuees. Before the evacuation, local billeting officers interviewed and selected hosts who were often less than willing, requiring that they take in evacuees or face a fine. On evacuation days, children arriving at the train station would be lined up against a wall or on the stage at the village hall, and hosts were allowed to pick which children they would like to take in.

  Many ended up on farms, like the one where Lena Wes
ton lived. Scores of children arrived in her village, and seeing them would more than likely have stirred her yearnings to have her daughter back, to keep her safe and out of harm’s way. While the Foundling Hospital was now on the outskirts of London, having moved thirty miles north to Berkhamsted a few years earlier, it would remain in the crosshairs of German pilots whose planes could reach speeds of several hundred miles per hour.

  Most of the children evacuated to the countryside as part of Operation Pied Piper were separated from their parents. Their fathers were busy fighting the war, while their mothers stayed behind in the cities to eke out a living. But if Lena’s request were to be granted, there would be no painful separation—only what would hopefully be a welcome reunion.

  Lena’s sought-after reunion would not be granted. On September 6, 1939, less than a week after thousands of children had been evacuated from cities, and just days after Great Britain declared war on Germany, she received her response:

  Dear Madam,

  I received your letter of the 2nd instant and am pleased to inform you that the little girl is quite well.

  You may rest assured that all possible precautions have been taken to ensure her safety at the Schools in the event of air raids and you need have no anxiety as to her care.

  Yours faithfully,

  Secretary

  A war would be fought in the skies above London, the likes of which the world had never seen. And as the battles raged, Lena would have for reassurance only the words of a nameless, faceless man that her little girl would be “quite well.”

  IN A MATTER of months, most of western Europe had fallen to the Germans. Hitler’s forces invaded Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and Denmark surrendered in a matter of hours. The following month Germany launched invasions of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. Within a few weeks all but France had surrendered, and by the end of June, it too had collapsed.

  With much of Europe under his control, Hitler set his sights on Great Britain. Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew what was coming, and tried to prepare an anxious nation:

  I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”47

  Dorothy would never hear these powerful words that soothed a frightened nation as it prepared for war. The children at the Foundling Hospital were not given access to newspapers or radio broadcasts, and the staff never directly discussed the impending war with them. The children knew so little that, well after the war had begun, Dorothy recalled a member of the staff bursting into her classroom shouting, “They’ve sunk the Bismarck! They’ve sunk the Bismarck!” The Bismarck was the Nazi’s “unsinkable” flagship, and a symbol of Hitler’s intention to dominate Allied convoys in the English Channel and starve Britain into submission. Its sinking on May 27, 1941, was a great victory for Allied forces, and the news likely caused cheers to erupt throughout England. The girls at the Foundling Hospital, however, stared at the teacher blankly, having never heard of such a ship.

  Nor were the foundlings likely aware that as the sun rose over England a year earlier, on July 10, 1940, German bombers had struck a shipping convoy in the English Channel, while more had attacked dockyards in South Wales. The Battle of Britain had begun. From July through September, the Luftwaffe bombed convoys, ports, factories, and airfields. Unsatisfied with the results, on September 7, 1940, the Germans changed their tactics, setting a new goal—demoralizing the British people through an intensive and relentless bombing campaign on its major cities. The Blitz (named after the German word for lightning) would leave more than forty-three thousand dead, and tens of thousands more injured.

  Well before the first German plane flew into British airspace, preparations for the inevitable attack had begun: blackouts were underway, thirty-eight million gas masks distributed, four hundred million sandbags stacked around London’s buildings. Landmarks that could draw large numbers of citizens were closed and Londoners were barred from using the city’s famous underground. The London Zoo euthanized its venomous snakes and destroyed its fish as tanks were emptied to conserve resources. Citizens prepared themselves by installing corrugated metal shelters that could be dug into a garden and covered with dirt, or, for those without a yard, a cage-like structure that could double as a dining table.

  The raids were continuous and relentless, with incessant bombing lasting through the night. At one point, London was blitzed continuously for fifty-seven nights. The psychological damage of the raids was well documented—heightened anxiety, with coping behaviors including drinking, excessive bravado masking an underlying fear, even reports of an increased sex drive in women. Although it was rare that anyone sought professional help, priority being given to those with physical injuries, doctors reported increases in stress-related ailments such as peptic ulcers.

  The Ministry of Health was particularly concerned about the psychological impacts on children—going so far as to make psychiatrists and child guidance experts available. The magazine Housewife provided advice on how to keep children safe and comforted during air raids. Ensuring that children received a good night’s sleep was considered essential, and the magazine cautioned that it was “unwise to leave children in the bedroom of a bungalow or upper story of a small house when better shelter is available”48; instead, in areas where continuous raids were expected, shelters should be used as permanent sleeping quarters for any children. A child could not be stable, the article warned, if he was repeatedly woken at night; furthermore, there should always be an adult present, as “even sleeping children must never be left alone during a raid. . . . An extra loud explosion might wake them and they will find much comfort in a sleepy, indifferent murmur from a trusted ‘grown up’ saying that it is only a fight and that the English are winning.”49

  Anna Freud, the daughter of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (who had died from cancer in Hampstead just weeks after the outbreak of the war), agreed that special care should be taken to protect children from the psychological impacts of air raids. Having fled Vienna with her family following the Nazi invasion in 1938, she remained in London during the Blitz, helping to set up housing for children who had not been evacuated or could not stay with their families. The children did not suffer too greatly, she concluded, provided that they were not separated from their mothers—and if they were, that the separation not be too abrupt. Ideally the children would be “in the care of their mothers or a familiar mother-substitute.”50 In looking after children separated from their parents, she kept siblings together, and organized local air raid patrol workers and firemen to take on the roles of mothers and fathers.

  Anna Freud’s conclusions were reinforced by the leading psychology experts of the time—Edward Glover, Melitta Schmideberg, John Bowlby, and Donald Winnicott. The air raids, while terrifying, weren’t as psychologically damaging as separation from parental care.

  At the Foundling Hospital, where the children had already been damaged by such a separation, there were no plans for evacuation. Blackout curtains adorned the windows, and storerooms under the kitchen were transformed into makeshift shelters. Each night, air raid wardens in olive-green uniforms and brimmed metal hats would make the rounds. Checking to make sure that no lights could be seen from the skies above, they would w
ander the grounds, reminding the children of their duty to keep the curtains closed. Dorothy, like many of the foundling girls, lived in fear that one of the children would be careless and cause a German plane to see some sliver of light, blasting them all into smithereens before they could be evacuated to the shelters below.

  As the girls lay in bed in their dormitories on the second floor, they would hear the distant hum of planes, the sounds of air raid sirens wailing, the thumping of bombs growing louder as they moved closer—but no one was allowed to move, not until the school’s alarm bell went off. The wait might be a few minutes, but to Dorothy it felt like an eternity. When the alarm finally rang, each girl would put on her cloak, pick up her gas mask and sling it over her shoulder, grab a blanket and pillow, put on her shoes, and line up in crocodile formation as if she were going to class, following the hospital’s rigid evacuation protocol. Once in formation, the girls would be led by blue light (less visible to the enemy) down the staircase to the lavatories, where each would take turns using the toilets. Only when everyone was done would they proceed, walking, never running, to the air raid shelter. Escorted silently through the expansive corridors past the cloakrooms, Miss Wright’s study, the dining rooms, and the kitchen, they would end their journey in the basement, where they would lie down on mattresses already set on the floor, alongside the host of cockroaches and beetles undeterred by the pink insecticide powder spread around the edges of the room.

  There would be little sleep during the long nights, the mournful sound of the air raid sirens sending shivers down Dorothy’s spine, filling her with fear of what would happen next. Of course, Dorothy couldn’t see the German planes, waves of them, often described as bees buzzing in fury, or as clouds of insects that would blanket the skies, but she could feel their vibrations shaking the building. She soon learned to tell the difference between the chugging sounds of the German planes and the quieter whir of Allied planes. Each night she would hold her breath as the vibrations grew stronger, praying that her dormitory would not be hit. The sound of the bombs could be deafening, the sheer force of a single explosion creating shock waves with a velocity six hundred times that of a hurricane. One night there was a direct hit on the town’s water tower, also knocking out the main water line. The Red Cross supplied the school with boiled water for several days until it was repaired. Dorothy remembered another nearby scare: