Going to the country

One and a half million children were evacuated from London and housed in the country in two days. The evacuee child with its gas mask round its neck and the luggage label so particularly distressing to modern sensibilities, is a familiar image, but perhaps more credit is due to the organisation of Operation Pied Piper which went into action on 1 September 1939. In the light of recent events in New Orleans it begins to seem a miracle of planning and execution.

According to Jessica Mann’s preface to this reissue of Barbara Noble’s 1946 novel about the emotional consequences of evacuation, an Evacuation Sub-Committee was established as early as 1931, in anticipation of chaos. Newsreels of bombing in Manchuria, Abyssinia and later Guernica, had prepared people for the worst. Mann quotes Bertrand Russell: ‘London will become one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will cry out for peace…’.

The aim was to ensure that ‘the children of the poor should have the same chance of safety as those whose parents could afford to make their own arrangements for escape’. Not much thought was given to possible psychological damage, especially, as Mann points out, since the planners were middle-class men who sent their own children off to boarding school at seven. But one memo from the Ministry of Health, amazingly, did question whether ‘separation might not involve greater risks than air-raids’ , and it is exactly this possibility that Noble addresses.

It is a gentle, serious story in which, rather disconcertingly, everybody behaves well. Doreen, aged nine, is a docile little girl who has been strictly reared by her grim but devoted mother. Mrs Rawlings works as a charwoman, is fiercely high-principled but cannot bear to part with Doreen though she knows she should.