Songs of Innocence (17 page)

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 have 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
reported
¹²
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