The poetry of wartime evacuation

How the evacuated teachers encouraged evacuees to share their feelings, through poetry

During the war, many evacuees wrote poems to describe their experiences and often it was their teachers who encouraged them to do this. Evacuees wrote about their involvement in the war effort, their thoughts of home and family and their feelings regarding the eventual return home. Some described the joy of ‘Victory in Europe’ Day whilst others revealed their sadness at leaving behind the ‘foster families’ who had cared for them and whom they had come to love. Poems about victory and the return home are mostly provided by evacuees from Guernsey who came to England and Scotland in 1940. Perhaps this is because they felt physically separated from their homes and families by the English Channel. Many evacuees composed poems in their later years, often after attending evacuee reunions. After talking about their experiences with each other, they wrote poetry that examined the effect that wartime evacuation had upon their lives. Kathleen Barber was seven when she was evacuated, from Lowestoft to Glossop, Derbyshire, with her younger brother. Fifty years later, she attended a meeting of the Lowestoft Evacuee Association where she read out her poem, ‘The Market Place’.

The opening verse describes the evacuee ‘selection process’ that had occurred in Glossop Market Place in June 1940.