As a result of the smaller numbers presenting themselves for evacuation, schedules were brought forward right from the first day. Then, due to an understandable desire to avoid congestion at the main line stations, groups from many different points of origin were embarked on one train: and some groups were split between two or more trains. As a result, many reception areas were sent both numbers and kinds of evacuees they had not made arrangements to accept. Added to the incomplete preparation already mentioned, a state of affairs approaching chaos was inevitable in some areas.
Allocation to billets at random by reception officers, or free choice (either in a hall or in the streets) allowed to foster-parents, were the two most usual ways of settling accommodation for evacuees. Though few of the contributors to this book can remember much about their journeys (which would seem to be evidence of their state of bewilderment, or even of shock), many of them have very eloquent memories of these auction sales of children.
Again to quote Titmuss:
To be torn up from the roots of home life and to be sent away from the family circle, in most instances for the first time in the child’s life, was a painful event. This was no social experiment; it was a surgical rent only to be contemplated as a last resort. The whole of the child’s life, its hopes and fears, its dependence for affection and social development on the checks and balances of home life, and all the deep emotional ties that bound it to its parents, were suddenly disrupted. From the first day of September, 1939, evacuation ceased to be a problem of administrative planning. It became instead a multitude of problems in human relationships.
A great deal of sociological research was subsequently carried out into these problems, but this is no place to give a summary of the results (indeed, since the problems were on such a vast and varied scale, the results are in many cases contradictory) [...] It was these problems, however, together with the fact that for about a year there were virtually no air attacks to confirm that evacuation had been necessary, which led to the widespread return of evacuees. By January 1940, only four months later, over half of those evacuated had returned to their homes. Those remaining represented 14% of the figure the government had originally expected to have to evacuate. This figure can be misleading, however, since one-third of the children of both London and Liverpool remained in the country.
Much had been learnt from this first evacuation movement, and the result was a virtually complete reversal of policy for the future. Instead of removing evacuees before possible air attacks, it was now decided to evacuate only when bombing had commenced. Furthermore, only limited and gradual movements, rather than mass ones, would be attempted, and mothers with young children under five were now excluded as being impracticable to accommodate. This left only the schoolchildren.
There were of course numerous improvements in detail to these later plans, and in spring 1940 the government made a large-scale attempt, with much publicity, to induce parents to register their children for the new scheme to be put into effect when bombing actually started. But it was a failure: in London less than 10% of schoolchildren were registered, and in the reception areas only 2% of households were voluntarily prepared to state they would accept evacuees. The previous experience, on both sides, had been enough for most people to want to have nothing more to do with evacuation, and it took the impetus of actual bombing, which began in September 1940, to involve them in it again.
The second wave of official evacuees was somewhat smaller than the first: about 1,250,000 were involved this time. A number of these were, of course, being evacuated for the second time. Daily or weekly parties from various bombed districts of London were sent to specific areas of safety. The arrangements this time were at once more careful and more complicated. The bombing was far more widespread than had for some reason been expected, and reception areas were fewer and in some cases different from those chosen in the previous year. Furthermore, evacuees were now competing for houseroom with workers from the new wartime industries which had been started mainly in the safer and less traditionally industrial zones.
This evacuation was a distinctly different experience for those children involved in it. This time they were selected over a period of time and in small groups, and usually they went without their schoolfriends. On the first evacuation, all the children had participated in what, at least at the beginning, was like an outing with their friends. Many children on the second evacuation must have been most likely to feel their parents’ action as rejection, or even as betrayal. Their experience may be compared (perhaps even favourably) with that of those unprivileged seven-year-olds still sent away to boarding schools where they usually know no one at all. Several of the evacuees writing in this book declare they would never send a child of theirs away in this manner.
A similar statistical pattern of return to the cities was followed: in February 1941 there were 1,340,000 people evacuated under the government scheme, but a year later, when the Blitz was over, the figure was down to 738,000.
During the next two years, though there was little call for it and considerable pressure to end it from the reception areas, the government kept the evacuation scheme intact and when the first flying-bomb fell on London during the night of 12 June 1944 it was still functioning. Mothers and children were evacuated within a matter of weeks from that segment of the south-east whose apex was London: ‘buzzbomb alley’.
The third wave of evacuation lasted only about two months, and was again different in character in that some reception areas previously considered to be safe were now threatened, and the evacuation authorities in them found their duties reversed. The flying-bomb attacks petered out, but were replaced by V2 rocket attacks which went on throughout the autumn and winter of 1944. Yet again there was the phenomenon of a constant stream of evacuees returning within weeks of their arrival, and the numbers were largest during the first three months of the rocket attacks.
But for areas outside London and the south-east the end of evacuation had come: from September 1944 progressive arrangements delivered the evacuated children back to their homes in much the same manner as they had been taken from them. By March 1945 there were only about 400,000 left evacuated: and they were chiefly Londoners. With the cessation of rocket attacks, and the end of the war obviously in sight, most of these came home without bothering to wait for the government to bring them. When the end of the war did come, only 54,000 availed themselves of the official return scheme.
Three months after the end of the war there were still 76,000 evacuees. They were there mainly because there were no homes for them to return to, or their homes were either too full or equipped with insufficient bedding and so on. A very few, no doubt, were still there because their parents had disappeared or had decided to abandon them for one reason or another. Within six months the figure had been halved, and then the remainder were reclassified with the other homeless and became the responsibility of the local authorities.
For many of the children the return was evacuation all over again. They came back to a mother whom they probably remembered, but she was sleeping with a stranger who insisted he was their father. In some cases they came from a comfortable middle-class home to a crowded flat in slum or near-slum conditions; from friends, again, to an alien society where they had to make friends all over again; from a situation in which they had perhaps been neglected, had learnt independence, to one in which they were petted, fondled, embraced with a devotion perhaps guiltily over-compensating for the deprivations of the earlier years.
. . . they got us involved in something we knew nothing about, a game we weren’t ready for. We played but we were too young to fight and we didn’t know what they were fighting for — we thought they just wanted to win. The fighting stopped and the game went on and they didn’t tell us the new set of rules. I’m glad they won but I’d like to know where we were wrong. . . . I’d like to know why they brought me back when I wanted to go on fighting — brought me back safely, I suppose. That’s the whole point of being a
n evacuee. You’re hidden away and saved, that’s what to evacuate means — ‘to withdraw’. I wonder what they saved me for. . . .24
It may be objected that the evacuation of British children was a mild experience compared with that of those in Europe who suffered, say, machine-gunning and dive-bombing by Stukas on the roads of France, or the concentration camps, or even with that of those children who stayed behind to face the bombing of London and other cities. Nothing, certainly, can have been worse than the concentration camps; but it is possible to compare a sudden and relatively short outburst of violence, experienced corporately within the security of the family group, with what happened slowly and over more than five years in many cases, and conclude that the psychological effects of evacuation would in fact be more severe. Even for those who were evacuated with their mothers it was not the same: the mothers, taken from their environments, friends, work, and husbands, were as lost as their children, were different persons.
Nothing can overtake these firsts, and the miracle that you know its a revelation at the moment, knowing nails you to the spot almost crushing the wind.25
The effects of maternal deprivation were the subject of certain discoveries in psychological research before the war, but in 1939 they were not widely known and certainly not accepted if they were known by those politicians and educationalists responsible for the evacuation policy. Ironically enough, it was the evacuees who provided most of the raw material for the great amount of further investigation during and after the war by sociologists and psychologists into the importance of security in the early years for the subsequent development of a child’s personality. Enough is now known for unaccompanied evacuation to be condemned outright as a way of safeguarding civilian populations. Not that, as I said at the beginning, it will be necessary: you cannot evacuate anyone very far in four minutes — or is it eight we have now?
. . . a kind of chameleonism that. . . made it possible to sense what would please, what would make us acceptable, what would dilute our outsiderness, what would not alienate or offend, what would not violate the way of living into which we had been transplanted, or, by being different, imply criticism. In other social contexts such attributes are often akin to insincerity and hypocrisy. Here they were a necessary adjunct to emotional survival.26
I thank God I was evacuated: not because I avoided danger. . . but because it changed my way of thinking, it made me love the country: I could never live in town again. . . I found a refuge, quiet and peaceful, after an unhappy home life: I found another family whom I really loved, and still do.27
We missed everything. We felt none of the unity that comes from participation and hardship; sentimental songs and snatched weekends were no part of our life. If we were spared the worst grief and anxiety we had none of the wartime thrills, either, and when it was over and we became adults the country was restricted, spent and poor.28
The accounts which follow are by way of being an interim report concerning the effects of evacuation on what is virtually a random sample of those children experiencing it. All but four of the contributors are between thirty and forty-five now (the others were teachers, and a parent). Some can be measured up against the public achievements of their first years of adulthood; others are unknown to the general public, but the way evacuation affected them is overtly or implicitly evident from what they write. Short biographies are provided as some little indication of what all have since become.
Above all, these are personal accounts: as such, they are more valuable and meaningful, in my opinion, than the impersonality and generalization of sociology: solipsistically, in the face of something as huge and important as this, all you can rely on is the personal, all you are ultimately left with is the subjective. It is a truism that anyone can write well about their childhood: when that childhood included evacuation, the quality of writing from people who do not primarily consider themselves writers can be very high indeed, as several of the pieces in this book confirm.
Most of the contributors were children during the war, but the three teachers included have their own important experiences of evacuation to relate; and one mother, who surely speaks for all the parents in her conviction that she was doing the right thing at the time, that she acted for what she imagined to be the best.
Evacuation undoubtedly did result in the saving of life. The figure of 60,595 civilians who died in the bombing of British cities would certainly have been increased without it. Whether the number of lives saved was worth the psychological damage to several million schoolchildren is one of those unanswerable questions of balance which war throws up. The full cost of this evacuated generation’s suffering has yet to be counted: we have not yet come fully to power, and the next thirty years will be ours. Those who ordered our saving and suffering are already dead or dying.
The Professional Viewpoint
Published (abridged) in 20th Century Studies, November 196929
‘Incidentally, I doubt if the act of love, with its permutations, has ever been described with such detailed freedom in a modern novel.’
It is the date of this pre-publication trade reference to my first novel Travelling People which brings to my attention how much and how remarkably quickly the situation has changed: it was as recent as 1963.
I have already written30 of how an attempt was made by the printer to censor this novel, and re-reading the passages in question for the purposes of this article I am still unable to understand how anyone (unless psychologically unstable) could have found them objectionable. Technically, the problem with writing about the sex/love correlate in Travelling People was the old and basic one of vocabulary: whether to use clinical, Latinised English or Anglo-Saxon derivatives compromised by use as expletives. I cannot at this point remember how much trouble the passages cost me, but I do recall being very pleased with them when I had finished: that is to say, they said all I wished to say in the way I wanted to say it. I avoided the naming of private parts, and I excluded euphemism and the sentimental velleities of flatulent imagery: the only images used are (if I may be permitted) organic to the situations. The result seems to me, some eight years after writing Travelling People, rather too careful and studied: I avoided the obvious traps only at some loss of precision and explicitness.
Albert Angelo had little about sex in it: but the point of breakdown between fiction and truth which I came to and dramatised in my second novel very much influenced the treatment of sex in the third, Trawl. Since I was trying to write absolute (that is, solipsistically absolute) truth within the novel form, explicitness and completeness were necessary as much for sex as for any other part of the material. The chief problem here was the embarrassment first of facing the truth and then of writing it down, exposing it for other to see. This was particularly acute in the sexual passages, and re-reading them today I still feel the same embarrassment (amounting to pain) nearly as much as when I wrote them.
The problem of vocabulary was not as difficult in Trawl, since the whole novel was an interior monologue and it was appropriate for the nearest word to hand, so to speak, to come tumbling out. Where necessary, two or more alternative words for the same thing could be used successively as the mind strove for accuracy. Attitudes towards sex in a particular situation were also distinguishable by use of either the cant or the clinical word, cunt or pudenda, John Thomas or penis.
It has always seemed important to me to mention contraception, or lack of it, in descriptions of heterosexual lovemaking: and in Trawl I took this concern so far as to mention branded products.
The Unfortunates (completed 1967, published 1969) was similarly an interior monologue, but there was (like Albert Angelo) comparatively little about sex in it. What there is seems to me as successfully written as I could wish it to be given its own terms of reference. And it is a source of some relief to me that I can now write about similar material far less self-consciously than in Travelling People, though I of course recognise that I am nearer to The Unfortunates than to my first novel. But
there is still for me the problem of self-consciousness in writing about onanism: and this I am facing at the moment in writing a short story provisionally entitled ‘Instructions for the Use of Women’.
At the age of the nineteen I was lent (by what I now know to have been a poodle-loving lesbian of indeterminate years and motive) the four limp volumes of Frank Harris’s My Lives and Loves in the Obelisk Press edition. It is to that library borrowing that I trace my interest in trying to write down everything, my whole truth: and I particularly remember his observation that one-third of anyone’s life is passed in the bedroom but is ignored by unbalanced novelists. That Harris was himself a great liar in print I discovered only much later, when I was both too far committed and had moved on anyway.
The present freedom of expression, which from my point of view is absolute (that word again) in that I feel there is nothing to stop me publishing about anything I choose, is really the only part of my youthful concept of what the future would be that has actually been realised. More objectively, I see such freedom as being for nothing but good for the novel form: since at the very least no other medium has such freedom at the present time.
Soho Square31 [On British Cinema]
Published in Film and Television Technician, August 1971
One day very soon (next Wednesday?) it will become possible for the definitive history of British cinema to be written. It will become possible because British cinema will have ceased to exist in any meaningful sense.
Well Done God! Page 37