British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War
Firing the youthful imagination
Owen Dudley EdwardsEdinburgh University Press, 744pp, £150,
Nicolas Barker on Owen Dudley Edwards' overview of WW2 children's fiction
Anti-Semitism was a threat only slowly recognised. Charles Gilson in Out of the Nazi Clutch and Josephine Elder in Strangers at the Farm School (both 1940) faced Nazi persecution of the Jews head on, while Angela Brazil (The School in the Forest, 1944) evoked an ancient Scotch atrocity to raise money for victims of the new. Marjorie Fischer’s Palaces on Monday was a rarer ‘red-starry-eyed view’ of the new Russian alliance. Attitudes to the Japanese were ambivalent too, even after Pearl Harbor, and confused with imperial memories of the East.
All these tendencies faithfully recorded a shifting social scene, aptly echoed in the last chapter title of ‘The School of War’, ‘Officials and Genteel-men’. The five chapters of ‘Lessons which May (note the qualification) have been Learned’ are headed ‘God’s Things and Others’, ‘Identity, Authority and Imagination’, ‘Gender’, ‘Class’ and ‘Race’. Religion, staple of their Victorian precursors, needed care: ‘either it looks like humbug, or it makes the rest of the story seem silly’ was Richards’s commonsense view. But Brent-Dyer’s martyred Vater Johann finds self-sacrificial parallels in Violet Needham’s The Stormy Petrel (1942). The Devil as Hitler was seen off by ridicule. In Katharine Tozer’s Mumfie Marches On (1942), the little elephant plays on his greed, baits a rat-trap with a cream-puff, and catches him in fairy-tale style by the nose. He is shipped off to Churchill, and Mumfie rings him up. ‘What did he say?’ they chorused. ‘Well, the line wasn’t very good — but it sounded like “Whoopee”.’
Both authority and identity posed complex problems; if authority was as likely to be ridiculed as respected, identity could be transferred to machines, flying or locomotive — the Rev. W. Awdry suffered for his pacifism, but in fiction it was more slightly treated. Gender, class and race were all aspects of humanity confused by the war. None was evaded in children’s books. Richards and Johns, early advocates of feminism, created realistic Rosalinds. Blyton was clear-eyed on both sex and class in The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage. Race posed harder problems, as traditional Jewish caricatures were banished by the slow realisation of the Holocaust. Only Jan Maclure’s Escape to Chungking (1942), better than Johns’s Biggles in the Orient, faced another, very different, race and culture, the Japanese, with respect and understanding. The theme of the Doppelgänger, the enemy, the opposite, who is human too, recurs here, as between Biggles and his indestructible but always defeated foe, Von Stalhein.
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Margaret Stoll
April 21st, 2008 11:35amI'm glad you mentioned Violet Needham. She doesn't seem to be remembered much nowadays although Blyton, Johns, Crompton et al are well recalled and their works presented to a modern audience (Martin Jarvis reading the William stories on Radio 4 - what a joy!)
No, Violet Needham brought a new word and a new concept to my vocabulary - 'fortitude'. The young hero of 'The Black Riders' and 'The Stormy Petrel' was a precursor of Alex Rider, the boy agent. 'To look a tyrant in the eye and say him nay' as Needham's hero Richard Fauconbois did, became an ideal of mine. And perhaps, an icon for those times.