Enid Blyton · Alison Uttley · Philippa Pearce · Lucy M. Boston · C.S. Lewis · Tove Jansson · Astrid Lindgren
IF THE GREAT WAR SCARRED THE NATIONAL PSYCHE – with the countless young men who never came home or came home irrevocably damaged – the Second World War too left its marks. More than the first war, it marked not just the adults but the children who lived through it. The experience of aerial bombardment, and the realistic fear of invasion, meant that the violence wasn’t over there, but over here. Families had lived through blackouts, become familiar with the close confines of Anderson shelters, jostled with strangers as they sheltered in tube stations from the bombs. In ruined cities, children made improvised playgrounds of bomb craters.
The evacuation of children to the countryside began on the day Germany invaded Poland in 1939. One and a half million children were displaced in three days. They called it “Operation Pied Piper.” (Did nobody remember that in Robert Browning’s poem the piper was leading children into danger, not out of it?). Families were separated. New connections formed where the evacuee children were taken in by strangers, and new worlds opened up to the evacuees: town mice found themselves amid country mice, and the children of the poor fell, often, on the charity of the more prosperous.
But there was also mistrust, misunderstanding, homesickness, and the pain of separation. When the feared bombing raids didn’t at first materialize, around half that first wave of evacuees were brought home by their anxious parents just a few months after leaving, in the face of government advice to leave them where they were. Further waves of evacuations followed in 1940 when the bombing raids started and when there were fears of a German naval invasion.
It need scarcely be said that as the war came to an end, and the liberating armies crossing Europe discovered the death camps, there came a general reappraisal in the adult world of what modern civilization meant, if anything. The Holocaust doesn’t make its way into children’s stories directly – hard to see how it could – though Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, published in the original Dutch in 1947, went into English in 1952. It shadows, you could say, the children’s stories of the era.
The post-war years were far from triumphal. Rationing in the UK went on till 1954: fresh eggs, meat, and dairy were scarce. In his memoir Miracles of Life, the writer J.G. Ballard described arriving in the UK from China in 1946:
Looking at the English people around me, it was impossible to believe that they had won the war. They behaved like a defeated population. I wrote in The Kindness of Women that the English talked as if they had won the war, but acted as if they had lost it. They were clearly exhausted by the war, and expected little of the future. Everything was rationed – food, clothing, petrol – or simply unobtainable. […] More importantly, hope itself was rationed, and people’s spirits were bent low.
The post-war decades saw the places in which children lived starting to change, too.* A million new houses, many of them prefabs, were built between 1945 and 1955. The 1946 New Towns Act paved the way for the birth of a whole series of new developments – Stevenage, Crawley, Harlow, Welwyn Garden City, Cumbernauld in the midfifties and, in the late sixties, the gigantic Milton Keynes. Slum clearances and relocations were coming, and high-rises started to spring up. The divide between the propertied aristocracy and upper middle classes, and the urban or rural poor, was shifting. More and more people were living in places without a history. The grand country houses that had symbolized pre-war privilege and stability – and for which Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) articulated an elegiac longing – had been requisitioned during the war and were now handed back to their impoverished owners in a dilapidated state. The wrecking ball was coming for Toad Hall.
This long post-war rupture produced new forms and new storytelling possibilities – as well as new audiences. But it also produced a longing, if an equivocal longing, for connection with the past, with older forms of storytelling, and with something that would embed childhood in a history from which it must have felt like it had come unmoored.
* I think it’s in this context – make-do-and-mend, a sense of the instability of home – that we can consider the pint-sized Proudhonists of The Borrowers (1952), the first in Mary Norton’s series about a family of tiny people who live in the walls of victorian houses and “borrow” from humans what they need to survive.