Songs of Innocence (19 page)

As Jim Porter recognized, the experience was a terrifying one for the older children and the adults who were aboard. But for a boy of ten with an adventurous spirit, it was all part of the
excitement: ‘We lay on the deck just outside the lounge, wrapped in blankets. There was chatter, chaos, hot Bovril and biscuits to see us through until morning. Despite being summer, it was
quite chilly and we were eventually taken under cover and fell asleep on the soft luxurious carpet of the first class lounge.’ The passengers and crew of the
Volendam
, among them 320
child evacuees, were rescued and returned to Scotland. The children who did make it across the Atlantic were not told what had happened to them, and nor were they told about the sinking of the SS
City of Benares
.

Arriving at Auckland, Jim and Joyce were separated – Jim going to a wealthy family in one part of the city, Joyce to a
working-class home in another part. They met
once a fortnight: ‘Looking back, I can understand the culture clash of a back-street boy from Bristol descending on a refined and respected local family. My table manners left a lot to be
desired and it was hard being taught, quite severely at times, how to eat food and behave properly at the table.’

Yet despite all this, and despite having to move on because of illness in the family, Jim thrived in New Zealand, becoming a Scout troop leader, going to grammar school and eventually winning a
scholarship to a college of art.

Preparing for peace

Jim Porter would write later that his world ended the day Germany surrendered. He had no desire at all to return to a United Kingdom which had suffered six years of war. Yet
the overseas resettlement board which had sent him to New Zealand seemed very keen to send him back again – so keen, in fact, that he and his sister were already in the Pacific before Japan,
too, was forced to surrender.

There was little to comfort them when they finally docked: ‘We eventually arrived at a grey, subdued Liverpool, and stayed the night at a horrendous house where all there was to eat was
dark bread and margarine. “There’s been a war, you know!” The following day, we took a train through the most dull, overcrowded and dismal countryside I could ever
remember.’
²⁵

Britain in 1945 did not seem a warm or a welcoming place to a boy who had grown used to bluer skies, a more affluent life and plenty of good food. Yet while Jim and Joyce were now almost grown
up – Jim sixteen and Joyce eighteen – the next generation of children would reap benefits from the lessons learned through the experience of war children like them.

The war had barely run half its course before serious discussions started. The general tenor was this: that having had its eyes opened to the appalling conditions in
which some of its population were living, the nation could not allow the situation to continue. Lord Airlie, speaking in a parliamentary debate in 1943, spoke for many: ‘Who would have
believed that it would have been possible that such bodily conditions and such insanitary behaviour could have existed in a country which calls itself a civilized nation as came to light after the
evacuation took place in this country? The only hope is to deal with it as a national problem at the earliest moment . . . possibly the only solution will lie in trying to teach our children how to
train their children to do those very things which used to be taught in the old days in the home and at the mother’s knee.’

Lord Airlie spoke of cleanliness, discipline and religious adherence, and he spoke of the need to transmit these through family values. Others spoke of better education, better housing, better
food. And the widely accepted solution was that the state should get involved, in a big way. As early as 1940, a committee named the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied
Services had been set up, and within two years it had produced a report with a huge, all-embracing vision: for the building of a better Britain once peace had dawned. It seemed the time was right
for grand designs and all-embracing visions, and the Beveridge Report, as it was known, provided both. There were ‘five giants’ of evil in Britain, it said: squalor, ignorance, want,
idleness and disease. These should be combated through family allowances, a free health service and full employment, and benefits should be paid at subsistence level so that poverty could be
abolished. The public reaction was so ecstatic that Churchill was forced to announce immediate plans for legislation.
²⁶

There were good reasons for making grand plans. First, signs of cynicism, even bitterness, about the future were being detected among troops who had by now been at war for four years. A failure
now to commit to radical action that would lead to improvements in many of their lives might be detrimental to the course of the war, it was felt.
²⁷
Second, if things continued as they had done, there would be serious concern about the future of the race. The press revelations about the state of the inner-city
children who had arrived so badly clothed, filthy and generally unkempt on the doorsteps of their rural hosts bore many of the hallmarks of snobbery, of course. But there were real grounds for
concern. Despite all the recent advances in public health, far too many children were still dying of preventable or curable diseases: in 1940, for example, more civilians died of tuberculosis in
Britain than were killed by enemy action.
²⁸
And far too few were being born. While the middle classes of the early twentieth century had worried
that they would soon be outnumbered because they had discovered contraception while the poor had not, now all sections of the population were having smaller families. The nation desperately needed
more of those children to survive, in all classes, Beveridge had warned: in 1901 there had been five children under fifteen for every pensioner. By 1961 there would be one child for every
pensioner, and by 1971 there would be three pensioners for every schoolchild.
²⁹
‘In the next thirty years, housewives as Mothers have vital
work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race.’

All the political parties were in broad agreement: Britain needed more children. The Conservative election manifesto of 1945 would call for an increase in maternity beds, and for mothers to be
given a special status. Churchill had even used a wartime broadcast in February 1943 to ram home the point: ‘One of the most sombre anxieties which beset those who look thirty, or forty, or
fifty years ahead . . . is the dwindling birth-rate . . . If this country is to keep its high place in the leadership of the world and to survive as a great power that can hold its own against
external pressure, our people must be encouraged by every means to have larger families.’

Most of Beveridge’s proposals were accepted in a 1944 White Paper. The National Health Service and Family Allowances were to come later, after Labour had swept to
power in the 1945 election. There were other measures, too, aimed at building a stronger population: a national milk scheme, a vitamin welfare scheme for under-fives and nursing mothers, more
maternity beds. In fact, the nutritional health of schoolchildren had already begun to improve before the war ended – by 1945 about a third of children were receiving free school meals, and
they were also benefiting from the wartime diet – sweets were hard to come by, and the wartime meal tended to contain less fat, more vegetables and more wholemeal bread than its pre- or
post-war equivalents.

Not that this was fully appreciated by the children of the day, of course. In November 1944,
Time and Tide
magazine printed a letter from a schoolgirl named Phillis Cannell, on the
subject of the school meals which were supposed to be so beneficial to children: ‘As one of these children I venture to protest. Being one of those who have rebelliously partaken of grey
badly-peeled potatoes, an over-abundance of partially cooked parsnips and turnips, and thick cold gristly slabs of meat, I find myself incapable of enthusiasm for this payment in kind. At tea time
. . . one often remarks rather forcibly the conspicuous absence of the jam ration. Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today . . .’

Schools, too, were set to change: an Education Act passed in 1944 raised the school leaving age to fifteen, introduced free secondary education for all and heralded the advent of the grammar
school and the secondary modern. As the war came to an end, there was a strong feeling that education would provide one of the major keys to rebuilding the nation. ‘Rab’ Butler, the
President of the Board of Education, was in an expansive mood as he introduced the Bill:
³⁰
‘An educational system by itself cannot fashion
the whole future structure of a country, but it can make better citizens . . . Such is the
modest aim of this Bill . . . We today have the responsibility for laying the
foundation for the nation’s future, and we dare not fail,’ he said.

The war in Europe would end sixteen months later, with those high hopes for the future held firm in most people’s hearts. In Pakefield, near Lowestoft, the young Michael Foreman would
watch as residents built victory bonfires on the mined, barbed-wired beach. Later, a wrecked landing craft would become a pirate ship in which he and his friends could play. Others would return to
peacetime with heavier hearts. Bernard Kops, in London when the war ended, found it hard to celebrate when most of his Dutch Jewish relatives were dead: ‘Suddenly the bells were ringing and
everybody was cheering and dancing and kissing and I went down to the Embankment with the crowd, but amongst them I thought of those other crowds, those of my family and people like them who had
perished; who had suffocated, gone up in smoke. I thought of all the young men like me who no longer had dreams, who lay rotting under the earth.’

For many the victory would be tinged with regret, not just for those who had died but for what had been lost at home, as well. Jim Porter, arriving back from New Zealand with his sister, Joyce,
had never had a very warm family life. But now his parents were virtually strangers: ‘We met my mother and the lodger at Temple Meads Station. Dad was still somewhere overseas. Over five
years had passed and we did not know each other. Mum had moved to Bath so we still had a bit further to travel, wondering at the immense bomb damage everywhere. Late that night, Joyce and I went to
bed and the world was never the same.’

6
 Born in the Ruins

It was with mixed feelings then, but primarily with a sense of relief and even optimism, that Britain’s families began the job of reassembling the scattered jigsaw that
war had made of their lives. Children returning from rural and foreign billets, fathers and even mothers returning from whence the war had flung them, refugees from elsewhere putting down roots in
their new surroundings. For Hana Kohn, who had arrived in Britain on the eve of war on the Kindertransport, there was a slow realization that almost all her family were dead. Looking back, she
found it strange that she had not asked more questions earlier.
¹
‘I’ve often thought: “Well, when did I become aware of
it?” I wonder why I didn’t read the newspapers more. I seemed to have my nose to the grindstone with books and things I needed for study . . . I don’t think I was encouraged too
much. But I think by about 1949 it became quite clear that there was no hope.’

It was to be many years before Hana would be able to piece together sketchy details of the fate that had befallen her parents, sister, grandparents, aunts and uncles. ‘We have details of
how some died horribly, like my uncle Arnold – because he was a slight hunchback he was one of the first. And Grandpa, who never hurt a fly . . . Oh, I don’t know. Treblinka, one of
these places. They were just lined up and shot. In a way I’m glad I don’t know the details.’ Hana and her
brother, Hans, who was later adopted by his
English foster-family, threw themselves into preparations for university and for a life in which both would become pillars of their communities – Hans as a doctor, Hana as a teacher.

There were grim discoveries nearer home, too. Just three weeks after VE day, the government published an official report by Sir Walter Monckton on a boy called Dennis O’Neill who, like so
many others, had been separated from his parents in wartime. For Dennis, though, the war had been merely incidental in this separation. His parents, Thomas and Mabel, had married in 1918 in the
Welsh town of Newport and had nine children – one of whom died – before being convicted of child neglect in 1933. Dennis was finally removed from the family home in 1938, and spent the
war years being shunted between a series of children’s homes and foster-families. In June 1944, he was placed with a farming couple named Reginald and Esther Gough, at Minsterley in
Shropshire. To the social workers who visited, the couple seemed ideal foster-parents. They were young and childless, and promised to bring Dennis and his brother Terry up as their own. And at
first the boys seemed to be fine. In September 1944, Dennis wrote to another brother, Tommy, in an apparently cheerful mood: ‘Dad and I will be off to the auction next week to take a bull.
Terry and I have got two new rabbits . . . we have been blackberrying and kept the money for a new suit for best.’ In January the following year, the Goughs called the doctor to say Dennis
seemed to be having a fit. When the physician arrived at the remote farm, more than two hours later, Dennis was dead. He had died of heart failure after being struck repeatedly in the chest. His
back bore the scars of beatings with a stick, he was painfully thin and he had septic ulcers on his feet. Both the Goughs were charged with manslaughter. Terry told the court he and his brother had
lived mainly on bread, along with milk they could suck from the cows’ teats. On the day before his death, Dennis had been beaten for taking a bite from a swede which
was being kept for cattle fodder. Gough had thrown him out of the house, saying if he was going to eat the cows’ food he could stand out in the field too. Even after the boy had
finally been allowed to return to the house and go to bed, he had followed him to his room and beaten him again.