Rachel acted as unofficial billeting officer in 1940, exploiting her network of local acquaintances, touring the area on horseback to target farms and cottages and allocate Toynbee Hall children. It is the role seized on by Basil Seal in Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags, foisting the fearful Connolly family upon carefully selected genteel victims, the more frail and addicted to gracious living, the better. Basil's motivation is pecuniary and gleefully malicious. In Rachel's case her war work fired her social conscience. But west Somerset was not to know that and she may well have caused a certain consternation, trotting briskly into farmyards, smiling sweetly and talking not of the next meet but of numbers of bedrooms and sanitary facilities.
Rachel was one of the many for whom sudden exposure to the realities of pre-war urban poverty changed an entire perception of their society. She was in her thirties and had lived all her life in the country, her time divided between riding and hunting and her career as a talented wood engraver and avant-garde painter and sculptor. London was simply a place you visited for social or cultural reasons. For her, as for most middle-class people, the teeming tracts of the East End were nothing but names on a map, Stepney, Bow, East Ham, Poplar. They were invisible and inconceivable. Then came 1940. Rachel saw – many saw – and their perception of society would never be quite the same again. The circumstances in which hundreds of thousands of children were growing up – the malnutrition, the absence of home hygiene – shocked even those who should have known. Neville Chamberlain wrote to his wife: ‘I never knew that such conditions existed, and I feel ashamed of having been so ignorant of my neighbours.’
The revelation for rural middle-class England created by that diaspora of the Blitz evacuees was to contribute to pressure for the social reforms of the post-war period. The effects on people who experienced the evacuation trauma were powerful. The two nations – rural and urban, prosperous and poor – met face to face in a way that had not happened before; indeed many of the hosts and evacuees lived under the same roof for months or years. Rachel worked in Stepney with bombed-out families throughout 1940 and 1941; she saw at first hand how these people lived, how they had been living throughout her own tranquil and cushioned youth at Golsoncott. In 1945 she voted Labour, and continued to do so for the rest of her life. My grandmother, whose own form of paternal Toryism remained unshaken, learned to live with this. Locally, Rachel's politics were seen as an artistic eccentricity, but something you did not tangle with.
The extent of the dismay and perplexity engendered by the evacuees suggests that there was no such thing as pre-war rural poverty. Of course there was – but it was different. The very tag given to the evacuee children – the ‘skinnies’ – evokes the distinction. Rural children ate better; however low agricultural wages were, there was always the extra resource of the cottage garden. Rural working-class life was hard, cottages were damp and cold, but the poverty was qualitatively different from urban poverty. The countryside was deeply disturbed by what it now saw.
A report on urban conditions published in 1943 estimated that up to 30 per cent of children were living in a situation of dire poverty. Hosts of evacuees found themselves coping with children who were sewn into their only set of clothes and whose only shoes were a pair of plimsolls, children with scabies and nits, children who were visibly undernourished. Many, of course, were not in such a condition – inevitably it was the extreme cases that attracted comment and attention. My aunt, preparing her mother for the arrival of the Golsoncott allocation, wrote briskly: ‘They will have doctor's certificates, but will need pretty thorough baths. Do you mind?… I think you had better get toothbrushes, combs etc. as even if the children bring them they may not be too clean.’ Many evacuee children came from homes in which there was no bath, where they customarily slept on the floor and ate meals in the street – a slice of bread and marge in hand. Their rural hosts were frequently a notch or more up the social ladder; the bewildered children found that the country was a place where things were done differently.
The mass movement of mothers and children in the war years produced two different kinds of confrontation. Firstly, there was the apposition of country and city, an ancient divide, but one of which many had become ignorant or oblivious. Peering back into the 1940s, it is difficult to realize how deeply polarized that society was then – even for one who was around at the time and exposed to its stringent rules and assumptions. There is a fair amount of mutual ignorance today between city and country, but it is tempered by two powerful forces of enlightenment – television and general mobility. The sight, sound and function of the countryside are familiar to all, if only through the windows of a car or as the backdrop to some news item or rural drama series. There cannot today be many children who are surprised to find that a cow is bigger than a dog – as were some evacuees who had only ever seen such creatures in pictures. Equally, a Somerset farm labourer today may never have visited London or Manchester but the inner-city scene is a presence in any living-room; everyone has stared at Toxteth, at cardboard city on the South Bank, at human bundles stretched out in shop doorways, at grid-locked streets shimmering with exhaust fumes.
There was also the heightened class confrontation, with the newly sharpened perception everywhere that there were others whose lifestyle was startling and provocative. There were different apprehensions of the class divide in the country and in the cities. In rural areas rich and poor were used to living in proximity to each other – the local big house was visible, its occupants known by sight and by name. The face of patronage was one that could be recognized. This cannot have made the chasm any more acceptable, but it was an economic landscape that was familiar and in that sense one that was domesticated. For the residents of Stepney or Bow, the nobs in the West End were a distant phenomenon in newspapers or newsreels. Just as many East Enders' only knowledge of the country came from their annual hop-picking excursions, so their experience of the upper classes was indirect and indistinct. The prosperity of country gentry came as a revelation, seen up close with all the telling details of a lifestyle that must have seemed barely credible.
The evacuation exercises involved around 4 million people, and that is just the quantity of actual evacuees. Add to this number all the host families, the officials responsible in the reception areas, people like my aunt who became involved in war work, and one sees that a vast swathe of the nation was affected.
There were three main waves of evacuation. The first – and in many ways the most traumatic and astonishing – was that of 1–3 September 1939, when 1,473,000 people were moved from Britain's cities, the majority of them before war was declared on the morning of 3 September. The next phase was the so-called ‘trickle’ evacuation once the bombing had started, when around 1,550,000 were moved to the reception areas between September 1940 and the end of 1941. Finally, a third wave of a million people fled the cities again in 1944 in response to the summer of the flying bombs. There were mothers, pregnant women, the old and the sick among these huge migrations, but the vast majority were children. By the end of the Blitz, only 7,736 children had been killed as a result of bombing. Only? But it would have been many more, without the evacuations. Some 60,000 adults died, half of them in London alone, with a further 86,000 seriously injured.
The statistics are dizzying, but they are also meaningless until you think of them in terms of lived experience, as conveyed in the dry but telling prose of Richard Titmuss, official historian of the evacuation exercise: ‘From the first day of September 1939 evacuation ceased to be a problem of administrative planning. It became instead a multitude of problems in human relationships.’ The Golsoncott infants were so young that their time there should have been subsumed for the most part into the murk of their very early years. But they had been separated from their mothers, with all that implies. Between 30,000 and 40,000 under-fives met this fate, and even at the time developmental psychologists were expressing unease at this trauma and its potential long-term effects. For older children, the sta
rk experience of being swept away from their homes and dumped down among strangers would have been mitigated only by childhood's absence of solid assumptions and expectations. Children exist in a continuous present and make no presumptions about the future. They know already that the world is a startling and unreliable place, where anything is apparently possible and in which you are required to conform to mysterious codes imposed by the adult world. Every child picks its way through a complex minefield of requirements, learning self-preservation as it goes. This natural flexibility of children must have enabled most of them to respond more expediently to the situation than an adult could. And indeed the reaction of so many accompanying mothers is an indication of this – the vast majority of those evacuated in the first wave beat it back to the cities before the end of 1939 when it became apparent that the bombs were not yet falling.
But the children could make no such choice. The abundant literature of evacuation preserves their perplexity, resentment, anguish… and sometimes their pleasure, surprise and curiosity. The situation must have seemed part and parcel of an always unpredictable world, and they reacted according to temperament and in the light of their particular circumstances, with many demonstrating a robust adaptability. Their voices ring out over the years – those children of the 1940s who were part of an unprecedented diaspora intended to save their lives, but which would also end up as the unanticipated instrument of social enlightenment.
The inner-city children were confronted with alien practices. Their hosts were from a wider social range. Compulsory billeting took no account of social status – in theory, at least – but simply looked at numbers of rooms and sanitary facilities available in a home. The measure of surplus accommodation was one person per habitable room, which, according to pre-war assessments would give a reassuring 4.8 million billets. When it came to the crunch, things were not quite so straightforward. The nation's potential hosts seem to have divided into those who saw it as their patriotic duty to provide hospitality and those who were determined to resist at all costs. Not surprisingly, resistance grew stronger higher up the social scale. The 1939 wave of evacuation had tested the waters. Its effect was to make billeting far more difficult the second time round. By late 1940, a Ministry of Health senior officer could say grimly: ‘The real hard core is the upper middle classes’ (at this point I think fondly of my grandmother). There were of course various categories granting exemption – age and infirmity, chronic illness, war work and so forth. Billeting officers described the blizzard of medical certificates provided by compliant doctors. And of course the billeting officers themselves, appointed by the local authorities, became objects of fear and suspicion.
But it was indeed a lot to ask of people – an invasion of their homes and their privacy, a disruption of their lives. Titmuss nicely nails the matter once again: ‘For the authorities to impose – and to maintain for five years – a policy of billeting in private homes was a severe test of human nature.’ And human nature responded in all its infinite variety. But the squeamish reaction of some middle-class hosts was not the only reason why the evacuees were billeted for the most part with poorer families. The tactfully phrased plea of one evacuated mother says a lot: ‘I can't eat like them; although it's kind I'd give anything to be put with my own class.’
Unaccompanied children could not recognize the problem as one of culture clash. Like all children, they knew what was normal and what was not, and reacted accordingly. One child commented: ‘The country is a funny place. They never tell you you can't have no more to eat, and under the bed is wasted.’ Two little boys from Glasgow, confronted with a white-sheeted bed, recoiled in horror: ‘That's a bed for dead folk.’ Sleeping and eating habits were often matters of conflict. The survey compiled in September 1940 by the National Federation of Women's Institutes provides revealing evidence not just on the condition and assumptions of evacuees but also on the attitudes of the usually well-meaning but frequently horrified hostesses. Bed-wetting and head lice were a constant refrain (more later on these seminal matters). But the problem of eating habits ran them close. Countrywomen were dismayed at the city child's habit of demanding a slice of bread and marge or dripping (a luxury) to eat in the street or on the doorstep. Many evacuees could be persuaded to sit at a table only with difficulty. The children, for their part, were suspicious of fruit, green vegetables and what the country regarded as ‘a plain cooked meal’. They were used to fish and chips, cakes, bread and jam. Evacuee and host eyed one another across an abyss.
The Golsoncott evacuees arrived in December 1940. Rachel wrote in advance to her mother:
The two whom I know are certainties are Raymond Margries and George Marling, both aged three. I forget what they look like, but the parents of George are very decent people, the Margries are all right too. Miss James (Matron)… will bring them down.'
Shortly after, she wrote again:
Beside George and Raymond, there is now Joyce Owen, aged three. She comes from a very poor home indeed, nothing could be worse. I was sorry to have her, but she is a Stepney child, and I could not refuse. Maureen Sullivan, four, may be coming, and Brenda Durman, three, is another possibility. The sixth will be from another district and a girl…
Poor little Joyce Owen. The ‘very poor home’ may account for her being evacuated alone, so young. One wonders why particular families were willing – or more probably obliged – to send very small children off without their mothers. And inevitably one suspects that poverty, large numbers of children and impossible home circumstances must have been at the back of it in many cases. Mothers in dire circumstances with large families would have been more inclined to part with an infant. Perhaps Joyce's mother was in the sort of situation highlighted by Margery Spring Rice's 1939 Pelican, Working-Class Wives, Their Health and Conditions (which itself induces intense nostalgia for that high-minded, eclectic, enquiring and infinitely useful blue-spined imprint – publishing has never been the same since).
A woman such as Joyce's mother may well have had too many children because advice on birth control was not readily available. She was very likely anaemic – out of a sample of 1,250 women questioned by the Women's Health Enquiry Committee of 1933, 558 had been diagnosed as anaemic – and those were only the ones who had had the problem diagnosed by a doctor. Anyone who has been temporarily anaemic knows what it feels like – continuous lassitude, being out of breath if you climb stairs or walk uphill, permanent fatigue. Before the war, huge numbers of working-class women felt like that all the time. Joyce's mother may also have suffered from headaches, constipation and haemorrhoids, rheumatism, carious teeth, gynaecological problems, varicose veins, ulcerated legs, phlebitis – conditions all found to have a high incidence among this sample of women. She was lucky if she sat down for half an hour between rising at 6.30 a.m. and winding up the day at around 9 p.m. The Spring Rice account is a dispassionate survey of the condition of such women, concluding that the factors contributing to the dismal picture were poverty, ill health and a lack of trained knowledge on the part of the women. The book anticipated post-war welfare reforms by advocating such things as Family Allowances to be paid to the mother and an extension of the National Health Insurance system to cover the wives and children of insured men.
The Golsoncott evacuees were a part of the second and extended ‘trickle’ evacuation of 1940. By the time they arrived at their safe haven London was burning. My aunt's letters home from September of that year onwards are a vivid account of what it was like to work in the East End throughout the worst of the Blitz. Her main task at Toynbee Hall at that point was to cope with the increasing flow of families who had been bombed out or who had become so demoralized that they wanted to be evacuated. But by then the pressures on the reception areas were such that billets were hard to find, and she was frequently having to tell distraught mothers that nothing could be done unless and until they were actually homeless. She rails against the apparent inefficiency of the Stepney authorities:
The people
there really are wonderful. Lots were wandering, homeless, towards the City this morning, with suitcases, all they had saved: but they seemed quite resigned and unmoved… the arrangements for the homeless really are very bad in Stepney – it is a disgrace. In Bermondsey, where hardly a street is unbombed, I believe it is far better. None of the homeless people I had in were grumbling; they were all determined we must stick it out… The Mayor of Stepney spoke on the 6 p.m. news last night; I don't suppose you heard him but, luckily, I did. He said he was giving out money to anyone needing it, so I shall send him all the hard cases I have in next week with a note asking him to give them rail tickets etc.
Rachel was thirty-two – energetic, resourceful and with a streak of adventurousness. She seized on this wartime experience – quite alien to anything she had ever known. Sometimes a note of exhilaration creeps into her descriptions of London in 1940:
We had a marvellous view of an air fight so high up that nothing but the extraordinary patterns of the frozen exhausts could be seen. These stayed for ages, half an hour at least, after the planes had gone by, so that soon the sky was full of circles and strange patterns. Sometimes the three German planes, which could be distinguished by their close formation, which left three exhaust tracks tight together, were flying exactly into the tail of their own track. It all seems like slow motion – you see our fighters coming in at an angle to attack, but so slowly, apparently, that you can tell before if they will be in time to attack or not.