Evacuated British Children on the Home Front

According to oral history data, war children can be divided into those who reject the place, those who conform to the place, and those who have a dispersed sense of spatiality. Interestingly, no matter which attitude and coping strategy the child developed, some sense of placelessness seemed to occur.

The British children evacuated on the home front developed a sense of placelessness even though the alterations in their cultural and social environment were not nearly as formative as in the case of the British and Finnish children who were sent abroad. The home front evacuees spoke the same language as their host families, but at the beginning, the dialectal differences sometimes caused awkward or funny incidents. Several, especially younger, children traveled with their mothers, and school children were often evacuated together with some of their schoolmates or other peers. British home front evacuees sustained some sense of familial social ties not only because of such peer relations but also because the siblings were not usually separated from one another but lived in the same host family. In addition, the unaccompanied children were often placed in families with other evacuees.

Many evacuated children recall playing and socializing with other evacuees in the area. In Schweitzer et al. (1990), children from London described rare occasions when they were able to visit their homes and their parents could sometimes visit them in their evacuation families.

In their written recollections, most British child evacuees framed their evacua­tion experience tightly against the familial environment at home. They also com­pared the different places they lived in during the war to one another: home was always described with a much more loving and caring attitude than the evacuation place. Directly war-related memories seem to have had a significant role among the British child evacuees on the home front. Home in the city environment turned out to be quite a different emotional and physical scene from the one before the war. Often the nightly airstrikes and air-raid sirens, bombing of the cities, seeing people dying or dead, and the constant feeling of fear became emblematic childhood experiences. Yet, the home city remained the primary site of socio-spatial belong­ing and center of being. Evacuation challenged the dynamics of belonging but even the safer rural environment did not resolve children’s anxiety. It changed its form: children were often worried about the well-being of their parents or other relatives left behind in the cities. Paradoxically, this had to do with the fact that social connections were sustained and information among the evacuees was exchanged.

The British children evacuated within the country can be divided into two categories that also reflect their different narrative and spatial strategies: (1) children traveling with adult family members (or another larger group of familial peers) and (2) unaccompanied child evacuees traveling alone or with a sibling or siblings. The children in the first category who traveled with a parent or familial peers recalled several single events of their evacuation time in a manner typical of traumatic experience, but they also narrated their life history very differently from the unaccompanied children.

Children rarely understood the physical distance of their travel. This is one of the intriguing features in the sense of placelessness. The relative distance between the familiar and the strange seemed infinite; even traveling with a parent did not change this existential experience of being forcibly displaced to some unfamiliar place far away. This is well described in 9-year-old Allan Burnett’s recollection of traveling by train to a nearby rural town. Allan, as many other child evacuees, paints a detailed picture of the sites of leaving and arriving, but does not remember the actual journey and routes.

The journey seemed endless. It took all day, although it was only a little over hundred miles.

The strategy to reject place becomes even more evident in the recollections of returning back home. Children describe that their homecoming to a bombed and ruined city was simultaneously sad and happy, but they easily fitted back to the normal rhythms of life. In their later life, they felt more nostalgic than anything else toward the places they had seen and the people they had met when evacuated during the war. As one boy evacuated with his schoolmates recalls:

I was pleased to be home with my own family at last, I could never forget those I had lived with, those I had played with, the places I had seen and the things I had learned during my five long years of evacuation. (Tony Fawcett in Schweitzer et al. 1990, p. 74)

The second category of home front evacuees traveled alone or with a sibling or siblings. In their narratives, several typical features of traumatic experiences are notable. These children often felt lonely, unwanted, and sad at having been sent away from home. They recalled details of the houses they lived in during the evacuation and the kind of clothing they wore in particular situations. These recollections were extremely vivid and detailed, with sensational and other kinesthetic memories. Moreover, the memories of the unaccompanied children seem to include a series of single events with no explanatory or connecting narrativization. They also described in less detail lived memories of daily life. They often felt a sense of placelessness or in-betweenness and, for example, recalled denial and the suppression of emotions. As one girl traveling with her little brother explained:

[In the train station and rushing to the evacuation train] I wasn't sad or unhappy - in fact I was quite looking forward to the adventure.

The quote above illustrates how the oldest child often carried the psychological weight of taking care of not just oneself but, more importantly, the younger siblings and was therefore continuously worried about failing the parents' demands that the siblings should stay in the same family. Anita managed to do this but only by grabbing her brother's arm and not letting go when the evacuees were being allocated to host families. Similar memories frequently occur in the unaccompanied children's emotive-spatial descriptions.

Unaccompanied children developed two coping strategies to tackle placelessness. Some of them rejected the place and tried to exclusively keep up the ties to and memories of home. This was much more difficult without adult support and shared narrations of other evacuees. Interestingly, some home front unaccompanied children developed a coping strategy, what is here denoted a dispersed sense of spatiality. This meant that they simultaneously aimed at retaining the lived memories of home and former social and spatial ties while also adjusting to the prevailing situation. This strategy often led to multiple experiences of socio-spatial confusion, which on some occasions continued to affect war children’s life in the years after the evacuation. In the following quote, Pola, 5 years old at the time of the evacuation, describes her sense of insecurity and feelings of strangeness that unexpectedly surfaced every now and then.

A certain amount of valuable ground was lost in my emotional development, as result of being evacuated, affecting my confidence and limiting my ability to interact normally with others.

Pola’s experience is an excellent example of bodily and situational memories that cannot be actively recalled but surface involuntary (Brewin et al. 1996). These kinds of intrusive and inexplicable memories of forced displacement have affected some war children’s later life and orientation to other meaningful places, sites, and events - in other words spatial trauma continued to define their lived sense of belonging. In general, British home front evacuees were forced to cope with placelessness mostly during the war years, but their homecoming restored their existential sense of belonging. The duration of spatial trauma was short-lived, and the fractures between self and place did not end up as formative as in the case of the war children sent abroad.

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