After visitors to the Imperial War Museum in London examine the antique tanks and airplanes, explore the exhibits dedicated to Britain’s major wars, wander a realistic trench from the First World War just as a squad of grimy tommies are about to go over the top, and survive the “Blitz Experience” in the blacked out bomb shelter—complete with explosions, dust, and trembling wooden bench—they can browse the gift shop. Among the magnets and postcards and propaganda posters and books and videos dedicated to military technology, Nazis, and Winston Churchill, they might find a packet blandly called “Children in War: Documents relating to the British home front, 1939–1945.”
As their collective title suggests, the just over one dozen items in the collection provide snapshots of the lives of English children who lived through the Second World War. The letters, diary excerpts, government documents, posters, and other sources address nearly every way that children have been both actors and victims in the wars of the last two centuries.
They are refugees: A young evacuee from London describes his uninspiring wartime diet (lots of bread and jam), complains that his host took away his pen-knife “just because I cut myself,” and urges his “mum and dad” to “let us come home.”
They are the children of soldiers: A little girl crowds a carefully printed note to her father with a jumble of sentences:
I hope you are alright and I hope you got my last letter. Mam has had some letters from you and thanks for your letter to me I have got a real school-girls hat made of felt with a rim that turns up. I hope it won’t be long before you are home again with Mam and me. Bye-bye love from Love Pat XXXXXXXXXXX. …
On the envelope is stamped, “IT IS REGRETTED THAT THIS ITEM CANNOT BE DELIVERED BECAUSE THE ADDRESSEE IS REPORTED PRISONER OF WAR.”
They are on the front lines, as targets of German bombs and torpedoes: A school essay describes the routine at a boarding school during an air raid, when the students rush to their gender-segregated shelters while the Headmaster beats a drum, a Prefect rings a bell, and the boys dashing to their shelters “look like a herd of cattle kicking up a lot of dust.” After the “all clear,” the students march back to their classrooms and pick up their lessons where they left off. A telegram from “a northern port” to a Mr. Burton W. Mackay” reports the safe arrival of his child, one of scores of children being evacuated to Canada despite a U-boat attack that left the ship damaged “but all children well and happy.”
They are chroniclers of the war: A diary excerpt shows the extent to which children immerse themselves in war news, statistics, and even strategy. During a fortnight in September 1940, during the height of the Blitz, Joan Thompson reports the exact times and lengths of air raid warnings; the number of British and German planes shot down each night; the disruption of school and Girl Guide meetings; casualties and funerals among relatives and acquaintances; the nightly targets—Buckingham Palace, Elephant and Castle, the East End “bombed ...to smithereens”; going out with friends to collect shrapnel. Along the way she speculates about the intentions of two boys—Eric and Will—and dreams of getting an Irish setter after the war.
They contribute to the British war effort: A certificate from the “OverSeas League” presented to the Borrowash C. School on Empire Day, 1942, is illustrated with a parade of youngsters from all the ethnic groups living in the Empire, carrying packages and other items for the soldiers. The certificate applauds the schools’ contributions to providing “comfort and contentment to the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the British Commonwealth, who have rallied to the cause of safeguarding freedom, justice and security.” A poster issued by the Board of Trade explains “Useful jobs that Girls can do—to help win the war”; “in these days when EVERYTHING must be made the most of,” they consist of hints for household conservation, recycling, and repair. The equivalent poster for boys deals with repairing tools, cooking utensils, windows, furniture, and other household items. Another certificate, issued to thousands of English boys and girls over His Majesty’s signature on June 8, 1946—a day formally set aside to celebrate victory— declares that “you have shared in the hardships and dangers of a total war and you have shared no less in the triumph of the Allied Nations.”
Obviously, the experiences of an American girl reading about the Civil War in the children’s magazine Our Young Folks in 1865 differ from those of a working-class child living near the bombed out docks of London in 1940 or those of a late twentieth-century Ugandan boy enduring an endless, vicious civil war. Yet the hardships and attitudes and conditions described in these documents do address most of the categories—if not all of the variations—of children’s experiences as actors and victims of war.