Under fire
THE IMAGES are familiar: either bewildered-looking children labelled up like Paddington Bear, gas masks slung around their necks, await evacuation as the war starts or, six years later, grinning and happy, they wave their Union Jacks amid the festivities of VE day.
A generation grew up during the Second World War but, beyond the far-from-universal experience of evacuation, what was wartime really like for those not yet old enough to take up arms? The extent to which the war affected them and was affected by them, has largely been unexplored.
What Sean Longden uncovers in Blitz Kids is a complex picture of a generation for whom the death and destruction of the Blitz became the norm. For the large numbers of young people who saw active service despite being under-aged, the experience was perhaps even more shocking.
Longden allows his many interviewees to tell their own stories while supplying enough context to knit their disparate accounts into a compelling narrative. The characters become familiar as we follow their stories through the war and beyond.
The paradoxes are clear. Many missed crucial years of education as their schools closed, yet they were launched into a world where their skills were needed more than ever. They faced unprecedented levels of both freedom and responsibility. Debates raged about soaring rates of youthful delinquency while children barely into their teens (Scouts, Guides, members of the Home Guard, Army Cadets and the Auxiliary Fire Service) were busy unloading ambulances, putting out incendiary bombs, raising crops and guarding targets.
Many of those only slightly older, desperate to “do their bit”, perished on battlefields and at sea. By the end of 1939, 140 boy sailors alone, some as young as 14, had been killed in action.
The experiences Longden has painstakingly unearthed range from the ridiculous (for instance, a group of Guides planning to lure German invaders into clumps of nettles) to the truly humbling. Colin Ryder Richardson describes his experience of the sinking of SS City of Benares in September 1940. The liner was carrying 90 children to the safety of Canada when it was torpedoed by an enemy submarine. The 11-year-old helped the sailor in charge of his lifeboat to boost the morale of the freezing and terrified survivors and then to dispose of their bodies as they gradually died around him.
Stretcher bearer Bill Edwardes, 17, encountered his first casualty immediately after landing in Normandy: “A Jeep driver, leaning over the steering wheel, the top of his head had gone.” Soon he was patching up seemingly endless numbers of horribly injured soldiers, reassuring many whom he knew would not actually last the day that they had a passport out of the carnage, a “Blighty wound”.
However, for all the terror and loss, many of Longden’s interviewees remained children. They played on bomb sites, collected shrapnel, went to the cinema and sometimes they incurred the wrath of their parents. Roy Bartlett recalls, at the age of 12, managing to extinguish an incendiary bomb in his garden just before it could ignite 50 gallon barrels of paraffin oil in the outhouse. His reward was a ticking off from his mother for swearing.
The detail with which he and the others relive their war, more than 65 years later, is proof of just how profoundly their experiences affected them. The stories are by turns amusing, shocking and unbearably sad and Longden has done us all a great service in allowing them to be told.
GIULIA RHODES
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EMERALD TORRINGTON’S 20th birthday gets off to an inauspicious start. Although the servants are pulling out all the stops for her birthday dinner, the family are down on their uppers and her resented stepfather is away, seeking a loan to keep the family in their rambling country house Sterne.
However, after a train crashes nearby, the rail company billets dozens of very inconvenient survivors upon Sterne, third-class passengers at that. The horror!
If the survivors are a motley crew, unceremoniously shut out of sight in the study, the same could be said of the dinner party guests: Emerald’s obnoxious brother and eccentric little sister, their self-absorbed mother, Emerald’s timid friend Patience with an unexpectedly handsome brother in tow.
Having set her first two novels in the Fifties (The Outcast, bestseller and winner of a Costa Award, and Small Wars), the first half of Jones’s venture into the Edwardian period echoes the atmosphere of Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle or Rosamund Lehmann’s In A Summer Season, all coming-of-age nostalgia and escapist grandeur.
However, as the party falls under the spell of foppish crash survivor Charlie Traversham-beechers, the evening takes a warped and somewhat less convincing, almost hallucinogenic, turn. It is also a pity that the book is emblazoned with a sticker saying, “The supernatural new drama”, stripping away any ambiguity surrounding the oddly homogeneous train passengers.
Jones builds a three-dimensional world around Sterne and some of its inhabitants, touching on issues of class and the role of women but other characters feel like ciphers. The Uninvited Guests descends into dark whimsy, not quite succeeding as escapist nostalgia or as social commentary.
CHARLOTTE HEATHCOTE