Songs of Innocence (18 page)

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 their 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

The wide world comes to Britain

At Dartington Hall School, many of the staff had been dispersed – a few into the forces, some simply scattered, one living on a remote island to avoid being called up
– and replaced by refugees from Germany, Spain and other parts of mainland Europe. Unsurprisingly, the presence of foreigners at the school soon began to attract attention. And this time,
there was good reason – theoretically, at least – for the security service to be interested. In May 1940, MI5 filed a note from a C. A. Carrington,
¹⁸
who had been seized by outrage while attending a performance of Handel’s
Rodelinda
at the Old Vic, staged
by the Dartington Hall arts
department. ‘The great majority of the audience consisted of German-speaking people, who were conversing all the evening in German,’ she wrote. ‘Certainly the curriculum of the
school of art was or is founded on Nazi or German methods.’ A note was added by an officer of the security agency in August of that year: ‘We have nothing to add to our previous
minutes. A number of reports have reached us which appeared, on investigation, to have little foundation and it seems probable that these are no more than can be expected about a progressive
institution in circles which are not perhaps very advanced politically.’

Scandalous gossip would continue to surround these progressive schools. As the war progressed and Dartington’s headmaster, Bill Curry, continued to campaign for peace, there were even
allegations of devil-worship in the school chapel: there had been, according to one anonymous letter-writer to the Home Office, ‘certain rites of black magic’ which ‘have to be
performed on sanctified ground . . . in this room certain boys of the school saw a ceremony conducted by men and women wearing masks of animals’.

And while MI5 seemed increasingly irritated by its correspondents’ efforts, its officers were concerned enough by the political activities at the school to intercept wartime mail in which
it was mentioned. Thus did a letter to a friend from an apparently dissatisfied parent, a Mrs Dorothy de Witt, find its way into the National Archives: ‘The school was not very suitable . . .
in fact the whole place was a perfect sink of a rather middle class immorality,’ she wrote. ‘The headmaster was running an irregular ménage and had a pornographic library famous
throughout the district, and the whole place was a centre of some rather sinister form of politics. The instruction was very good but Dorian was turning into an unkempt young savage.’

Mrs de Witt recounted how, on boarding a boat to return home to Ireland, her son was searched by CID and relieved of two radical
magazines named
Social Credit
:
‘I thought we would miss the boat as they . . . questioned us most closely about Dartington etc, and finally let us go but kept the papers.’

Dartington, with its rather cosmopolitan attitudes, had always been a place where different nationalities met, and where children came into contact with people they would never otherwise have
encountered. But for the average child, it took a war to make this happen. Even for those children who were not evacuated, war brought a life populated by a much greater variety of people.

Michael Foreman, born in 1938 in Pakefield, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, barely knew in his early years that war was not the normal way for life to be. But looking back he could see his
mother’s village shop, situated by the bus terminus, filled with a rich cast of characters: ‘What I remember is the bustle in the shop, from 7.30 a.m. until 7.45 p.m. I was in the shop
all the time and that’s the memory, of crawling in between the legs before I could walk and being surrounded by giants in uniforms,’ he said.
¹⁹

There were soldiers stationed near Lowestoft from all over Europe – the Free French, Czechs, Poles. And to a small boy who had never known peacetime, their presence seemed normal, even
humdrum: they were billeted around the village; they went with the fishermen as they clambered past the mines and through the barbed wire on the beach to their boats. Even to a child growing up in
a small village in Suffolk, the world was becoming a bigger place, with more possibilities. But it was the arrival of the Americans that really caught this boy’s imagination: the GIs were
different. They lived miles away on bases, and arrived in Jeeps bearing gifts of nylons and chewing gum. And they were utterly fascinating to a child.

‘It was just the children who held them in that esteem,’ Michael Foreman said. ‘I think some of the older villagers would have thought they came in a bit late, as usual. But
they were
healthy-looking, and had well-cut uniforms. Things like baseball caps – we’d never seen such things. And they would wear them at a cocky, jaunty angle.
They had wonderful flying jackets – everything was just better cut, and it fitted. Nice material, whereas the British Tommy had this old, kind of hairy uniform.’
²⁰
Later, some of Michael’s friends’ older sisters would marry GIs and go away to the United States, and then exciting presents of silver six-shooters with
fake cowhorn handles would arrive in the post. They seemed to be glimpses of a sunnier, more glamorous world: ‘We just thought that was what it was like in America. Whereas in point of fact
one or two of these GI girl brides had a very rough time of it. They found they weren’t going to Hollywood, they were going to a trailer park in the back side of Texas
somewhere.’
²¹

The new faces arriving in Britain were not all adult ones, either. Many thousands of child refugees from Europe had settled in Britain just before the war, some of them with their parents but
many unaccompanied. Most of this last group were the beneficiaries of a decision by the British government in November 1938, just after the ‘Kristallnacht’ series of attacks against
Jews in Nazi Germany, to accept unaccompanied children arriving here. In the ten months before the outbreak of war, 10,000 such children were to be brought to Britain, most of them under the
auspices of the Jewish Refugee Children Movement. Seven hundred were helped by a stockbroker called Nicholas Winton – and among them was a young Czech girl called Hana Kohn from Pilsen.
Neither she nor her twin brother Hans were told the real purpose of their journey – instead, they were told it was an extended holiday, so they could learn English: ‘Of course we were
excited, we’d never seen the sea, never been on a boat,’ she said.
²²
‘We were very aware of the different atmosphere on the
train from Prague which was a third class train with wooden seats and there were German soldiers. We were just told not to laugh or talk too much if they were around.’

Hana and Hans were sent on to south Yorkshire, she to a family in Sheffield and Hans to Rotherham. They only found out many years later that the later train carrying
their elder sister had been turned back. Hana recalled settling in quickly with her new parents, a headmaster and his teacher wife, and learning English rapidly: ‘You had to be prepared for
making faux pas and people laughing. I never minded, because I felt people were laughing with me, not at me.’ Within a year, she had won a place at grammar school: ‘I think I was what
they used to call a goody goody. I was a good learner and very happy and I eventually became deputy head girl for a couple of years.’ Just as they learned from their contacts with English
children, surely those English children must, too, have gained from them a sense of a wider world around them.

For boys, in particular, the war brought opportunities to learn about places they might never otherwise have heard of. A Mass Observation report on children and the war recorded the excitement
with which many were watching the hostilities abroad:
²³
‘There is an increased interest in the weekly periods devoted to current history in
the senior forms. Maps are eagerly consulted . . . They will discuss eagerly the latest news as soon as they hear it,’ the Headmaster of Bembridge grammar school on the Isle of Wight
remarked. The Headmistress of a private school, evacuated to Devon, added that there was rejoicing when the Allies scored a victory – in particular, when the Navy rescued British prisoners
from a German ship off Norway: ‘The boys are much more topical than the girls. They have the
Daily Telegraph
map and always follow the movements of the troops in Norway. They were
thrilled, of course, about the
Altmark
, and the sinking of the destroyers and everything like that. The girls aren’t very interested, but the boys definitely, most of them, would love
to be out there helping.’

Children in the world

The rest of the world was becoming much more real to a far greater number of children than before, and for a variety of reasons: ‘The war had been going for nearly a year
when my parents received the news that my sister Joyce and I had been selected with other children from Bristol to be evacuated to New Zealand,’ Jim Porter would write later. ‘I was not
aware at the time that we had been chosen from “deprived” families. I knew that we were not rich but we did have our own shoes!’
²⁴

Ten-year-old Jim and his twelve-year-old sister had been selected by the Children’s Overseas Reception Board, and were to be among around 2,700 children who would be evacuated to
Britain’s overseas territories – in particular, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand – between June and September 1940. Initially, the scheme was intended to go much further.
The first wave of emigration alone was meant to take 20,000 children, and even before it was up and running, huge numbers of families had applied. At its height, the board had more than 200,000
children’s names on its list.

For a boy from a poor area of Bristol, who had spent the early part of 1940 staring through cracked front windows at the remains of a neighbour’s house, avoiding the bombs in a damp
air-raid shelter on bad nights and sharing a bed with the lodger when it was quiet, the opportunity to escape was welcome. Jim had been used to twopence a week pocket money, but now he was given
twelve shillings and sixpence to take with him, along with new – as opposed to secondhand – clothes, and his own toothbrush and toothpaste: ‘I was up to date with the “Sea
Vacs” serial in my weekly comic so I knew exactly what to expect. There would be fun and games and I would be the hero who sighted the U-boat periscope and saved the convoy!’

The CORB scheme, as it was known, would come to a tragic end in the early hours of 18 September 1940, when the SS
City of Benares
,
a ship carrying ninety child
evacuees and their escorts to Canada, was torpedoed and sunk 250 miles north-west of Rockall. In total, seventy-seven of the children were killed, along with 171 of the adults who were aboard. With
the whole nation in shock, the overseas board was immediately disbanded. While some children did continue to be sent abroad privately – about 14,000 in total – the official programme
was no more.

By then, though, Jim and Joyce Porter were in the Pacific and well on their way to New Zealand. Their ship, the
Rangitata
, had also come under torpedo fire in the Atlantic, and another
ship in their convoy, the
Volendam
, was hit: ‘I was suddenly woken to thumping noises and the sound of the alarm bells. We put on our lifebelts and stumbled our way to the boat
stations on the first class deck, on the way sighting the
Volendam
, brightly lit and apparently on fire, falling astern of us. Someone said that a lookout on the front of the ship had
actually seen the torpedo passing just a yard ahead of the
Rangitata
before it hit the unfortunate ship. We heard that the convoy had been ordered to scatter and felt the engines below
vibrating as the ship picked up speed.’