When the Children Came Home: Stories of Wartime Evacuees, By Julie Summers

What did you do in the War, children?

Books about the three major evacuations of close to a million British children during the Second World War fall into two broad categories. Some celebrate the kindness of strangers, while others brood over the way that unsupervised host families were free to abuse their young charges. When the Children Came Home mixes both approaches, but with a tendency towards the heart-warming.

From all the many accounts, interviews and memoirs of former evacuees which she has consulted, Julie Summers concludes that at least 85 percent record a positive experience. This is good to know, although unhappy times may get blanked out until an author makes a really determined effort to winkle them out, as HV Nicholson did in Prisoners of War: True Stories of Evacuees – Their Lost Childhood. Uncited by Summers, this study, now out of print, is essential reading for anyone still inclined to take too rosy a view of everything that happened after wartime mothers waved their children goodbye.

Summers is a good and knowledgeable writer, sympathetically describing the problems faced by both parents and children. For example, if things went well in their new berths, often in the deep countryside, children would find themselves grieving for what they had lost on their return to dirty, smoky towns. Parents, in turn, would expect the child they had last seen up to four years previously to have largely remained the same. Instead, they might be confronted by unrecognisable adolescents with strong rural accents, occasionally resentful that the parents they had idolised all that time now turned out to look old and grey.

The children, always quicker to adapt than adults, seem largely to have come through the experience in time, but the mothers often suffered terribly, aware for the rest of their lives that they had lost a former intimacy which they could never recover. The administrators of the evacuation schemes did not help here, failing to provide any money for interim parental visits, possibly fearful that these would needlessly unsettle the children. Meanness did not stop there: one child living in Hastings was unable to attend her mother's funeral because no one could spare the train fare to London.

There are many descriptions in this book of spinsters, bachelors, older parents or previously childless families who seized the chance to cherish the children so unexpectedly loaded on to them. Reading the loving accounts of these temporary guardians, given by evacuees now in their old age looking back, is powerful, emotional stuff.

Summers has previously written about the problems faced by wives on the return of their soldier husbands in 1945. This book adds in another factor: problems with returning children. But for all that, its overwhelming message is the fact of human resilience, and the ability of children to bring out the best in anyone still with affection to spare.