British and Finnish War Children Abroad
The narratives of the British and Finnish war children who were sent abroad during World War II illustrate socio-spatial confusion, fragmented autobiographical memories, embodied emotions, and sensational memories of places and events that cannot be connected to a certain time or a definite spatial context.
The sense of placelessness comes across even more intensively than in the narratives of the home front evacuees. War children traveled abroad alone, and the adult caretakers on those evacuation journeys did not know the children they were escorting. Thus, the familiar social ties were left behind and often fractured right from the start. These children also landed into completely new social and cultural contexts, which radically changed their daily practices and rhythm of life. Whereas on the home front the majority of war children rejected the place and tried not to lay down roots in evacuation places, and only a small minority described a dispersed sense of spatiality, the case of war children abroad is quite different. Among these children, all three socio-spatial coping strategies were identified from their accounts. According to the empirical data of this research, a minority of war children developed opposite coping strategies in order to be able to come to terms with the vague sense of placelessness in their daily life. Along with the rejectors of place, a small group of children became what is here called conformers to place.The children who conformed to place created tight and durable relationships with the new socio-spatial context. In a way, these children rejected part of their existential spatiality because they began to deny their past ties of belonging. Conformers adjusted to or rather absorbed themselves into the host society, family, and spatial context. After the war, the conformers in particular wished to stay in their host families and countries.
Even when sent back to their country of origin, several former war children returned to their countries of evacuation as adults. There are no exact statistics of the Finnish children who remained in their evacuation countries. It is estimated that 7000 to 15,000 children stayed in Sweden and about 400 in Denmark directly after the war (Korppi-Tommola 2008, p. 449; Kaven 1994/2003). About 1300 of these children were formally adopted in Sweden and 200 in Denmark, but many private foster agreements were also made and some children returned after having first been sent back to Finland (Korppi-Tommola 2008). In the empirical data of this research, a few statements on staying or returning were found. A couple of Finnish interviewees claimed that they had wished to stay in Sweden, but this was not possible. One Finnish child recalls that her host family had tried to hide her for 2 weeks after the arrival of the letter asking for all Finnish children to be returned home. After those 2 weeks, however, she and her host family jointly decided that she should travel home. In one case of two siblings, the Swedish host family adopted the brother while the biological parents wanted the younger sister to be sent back home to Finland. This meant that the siblings were separated for the rest of their childhood.There are no statistics available about adoptions of British war children. Fethney (1990/2000, p. 263) argues that some British children never returned from overseas, and in some occasions after the war, the biological parents even moved to the Commonwealth host country in order to be with their children. In addition, several British war children returned to their host country later in their life. These decisions illustrate how effectively some war children adopted the context of their host families and societies. In the accounts of these war children, the most confusing moments were lived not during the years of evacuation but after returning to their home countries. This belated sense of placelessness resulted in plans for return and often their realization.
The great majority of overseas child evacuees tried to hold on and nurture emotional ties to home and at the same time adjust to their new environment. This dispersed spatiality was exercised through several practices: through language differences (dialectal differences or instances of switching back to their native language in difficult emotional situations), drawings, stories of home, playing, etc. (Kuusisto-Arponen 2011b). Past and present spatialities were mixed but neither was fully lived. This created confusion in daily encounters because children did not know what was expected of them, how much they could speak about their homesickness, and how much they could trust and emotionally invest in the relationships with the new adults and peers. Among the Finnish war children, the challenge was even greater at the beginning because the common language was lacking. Former war children recalled the occurrence of several psychological symptoms in the early weeks and months of evacuation, such as bed-wetting and muting. Gradually, when the children and adults started to understand one another, their life began to normalize and a new daily rhythm was found. Yet, the language barrier continued to affect the life of Finnish war children: if any letters were sent or received between the host and biological family, the adults could not understand them and children’s translating skills were insufficient. British overseas evacuees shared the same language and so at least had a possibility to lean on adult host parents for explanations, even if the confusion of being in a completely new environment was overwhelming.
Interestingly, most children with a dispersed sense of place claim very directly that their experiences and time spent abroad were a mainly positive period in their lives. They also insist that they coped well considering the overall social and political seriousness of the situation. These “yes, I had a happy childhood” and “everything went fine” arguments bring to mind overgeneralized memories (see Schonfeld et al.
2007). Sometimes, especially in the Finnish interview data, oral narrations and bodily reactions were not in line. For example, laughter and sarcasm were used as a coping mechanism when describing emotionally difficult moments. Thus, implicitly, war children’s recollections also unveil very different tones behind gratitude discourse.After the war was over and children returned home, many of them still continued to feel a certain sense of placelessness which was not easily put into words, but somehow started to define their lives. They missed their evacuation families but had to be loyal to their biological parents, as one of the Finnish interviewees argued. Many visited their host families during summer and school holidays, and some visited their former evacuation places when adults.
Fethney (1990/2000, p. 264) talks about divided loyalties among the war children. It is argued here that this divided loyalty is one implication of spatial trauma that continued to affect some war children’s later life. These traces and fractions in spatial belonging are still witnessed even several decades after the war. As the Manchester-born Geraldine Robb argues: “I feel always that my childhood roots are in New Zealand, and always have a great longing there” (Geraldine Robb, 11 years old, Fethney 1990/2000, p. 265). In a similar manner, one Finnish war child recalls her brother’s placelessness that troubled him to the end of his life.
He [brother] died in Denmark. He went back there when he was a grown-up. Well, he said that he felt that he had been abandoned twice when he was a child. For the first time when he left Finland for Denmark and had no apprehension of why it was happening. And for the second time when returning to Finland. The only place where he felt good was the journey between these two places.
It seems that the ties and sights of belonging became an extremely complicated matter for many children who tried to cope with forced displacement by dispersing their sense of place. At the time of the war, they did not have the necessary linguistic and social skills nor enough support from the adult caretakers - and they had experienced a traumatic event of being forcibly displaced. This created social, cultural, and psychological conditions for spatial trauma, and for some former war children, this trauma still continues.
9