Young Voices: British Children Remember the War (1939-45)
Lyn Smith Viking, 464pp, £20
In 1940, the passenger ship City of Benares was torpedoed by a German U-boat. It was midnight, in the middle of the freezing Atlantic, and the ship was crammed with evacuee children travelling from Britain to North America. Seventy-seven children died that night, but some of those who survived were interviewed 50 years later by the historian Lyn Smith; they are among the voices that she has recorded in this vivid and moving collection.
Schoolboy Derek Bech clung with his mother and sisters to a duckboard raft. The waves were icy and 20 feet high and they could see the bodies of children, some only four years old, whose lifeboat had overturned. Derek recalled: "The ship sank literally in front of our eyes. We were very close to it and it heeled right up in the air, then fell slightly sideways to where we were, and slid away from us backwards, going down stern first. It had all its lights on, it was a blaze of light, and then it went. Our first reaction . . . was 'What a waste of ice-cream!' Because we'd lived with all this ice-cream, which we loved." Derek's sister Barbara remembered that "when dawn broke, we could see a craft, which we tried to approach. It turned out to be an overcrowded lifeboat with two girls crouched on it, holding on to the keel . . . We did try to get near them, but as we got nearer, our boat began to rock, and in the end one of the men said 'We can't do it'. And we had to leave them." Lyn Smith, for 30 years an oral history interviewer for the Imperial War Museum's archive, has tracked down one of those girls on the lifeboat, Bess Cummings. She told her: "Our eyes were beginning to close and we were encrusted with salt. Beth [her sister] recalls seeing these sea creatures like glow worms on her clothes . . . I had a red-raw chin. Our fronts were like jelly from being flung up and down so many times, but we were past pain. We were barely alive."
What makes these accounts so compelling is that children's experiences (even those recollected in adulthood) have in their telling a particular immediacy. It is of course impossible to know whether the descriptions of "tingly" feelings of expectation at the beginning of the war are due to hindsight 50 years later, but for the most part, the accounts that Smith has solicited capture a child's response to war - in which horror and ice-cream are not incompatible.
The experience of those on the City of Benares, however, was rare. For most British children between 1939 and 1945, the war on the home front was marked by the experience of evacuation (for many, the first time they had been away from home, let alone away from a city), rationing, war-games, watching dogfights over the South Downs, walls that had ears, digging for victory, making-do and mending, and hearing adults speak of things in whispers. Rural Britain didn't suffer so much from the rationing that made staples of powdered egg and whale meat in urban areas.
Noel Dumbrell, a schoolboy in Ashurst, Sussex described a popular pie made of baby rooks and sparrows as "very white and sweet, done mostly in stews in the copper". In bombed-out cities, boys were employed as bicycle messengers racing over the rubble with information for the police and fire service. You could earn good money from the government for rosehips that would be used to make Vitamin C-rich syrup.
For urban evacuees, rural life was a revelation. The selection process was brutal: children were gathered in village halls and families came and picked out the ones they wanted to take home. Pretty girls went first and a boy with a birthmark, one interviewee remembers, was left till last and then dragged round the village with the billeting officer to find him someone who'd have him. Country children thought it hilarious when evacuees didn't know where milk came from, evacuees thought it primitive that rural homes often didn't have electricity - only gaslight or candles. Foreign refugee children found it even stranger. A Basque child-refugee housed in an encampment near Southampton in 1937, remembered that "they gave us cups of tea. In Spain we only had tea if we had a tummy- ache, and then it would be prescribed by the chemist, but here everyone was given some".
After the war, in 1946, nine-year-old Michael Nicholson's father was put in charge of the inland waterways of north-eastern Germany. "I went round a lot with my father . . . I remember the children playing outside and hearing them laughing and thinking, 'Good Heavens, German children laugh the same as we laugh!'."
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