London Kids In The Country

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4452, 30 January 1940, Page 1 (Supplement)

London Kids In The Country

O' - lONDON is now a childless city. A hush lies over the parks. The lawns where primly starched nannies pushed their prams, where children played and dogs raced, are almost deserted. It is as though a modern Pied Piper had swept the city from end to end. And this is true also of the other large cities in England and Scotland.

Under the Government Evacuation Scheme, about 2,000,000 children and mothers were taken from their homes in congested metropolitan areas and scattered over the countryside into new homes and new environments. This —the greatest rearrangement of population in modern times —was completed in four days. Already it has cost half a billion dollars. In reception areas the influx has on an average upped the population 25 per cent. That increase, in terms of extra water and food, sanitation, medical care and schooling, is a formidable burden for any community.

No other warring country has attempted any such hegira. But Britain’s crowded cities present some of the world’s likeliest and most vulnerable bombing targets. Unless millions were to risk being trapped, evacuation had to be treated as a national necessity, to be solved in an organised, almost compulsory manner. Neville Chamberlain called it “the greatest social experiment which England has ever undertaken.” It cast 2,000,000 city people, most of them poor, many from slums, into a rural life which they did not understand. Lower-class English are not used to being told by their government what is best for their children. Upperclass English families, many of whom have taken children into their homes, are not used to rubbing elbows with strangers from different walks of life. In addition to its social problems, evacuation disrupted the nation’s transport system for four days when every wheel was needed to concentrate men and arms. But the children, England’s future, must come first.

By Frederic Sondem, Jr.

Sudden as evacuation was, plans for it had been drawn up immediately after Mr. Chamberlain’s return from Munich. England, Scotland and Wales were divided into areas of three types: dangerous areas, from which all children up to 16 and mothers with children under five should be removed; neutral areas, moderately dangerous but not congested, which should be left as they were; reception areas in rural districts.

Local health authorities, making a houses-to-house canvass, figured the capacity of every home on the basis of one person per habitable room. With 100,000 social workers, the gigantic survey was completed in six weeks. Meanwhile, every school in evacuation areas registered children, the workers struggling against such arguments as: “Wot! Let my Tommy stie with strynge people? Garn, I needs ’im in the pub!” The plan was not compulsory, but the teacher is highly respected by the poorer English citizens, and the roster was soon complete. Meanwhile, for three months the railroads and other transport agencies wrestled with the problem. Timetables for thousands of special trains had to be made; 300,000 children would have to be cleared from London alone on the first day. When evacuation started, the machinery functioned with incredible precision. Take, for instance, the little boys of Junior School on Commercial Road, East London. At 5.30 a.m. on September Ist, they assembled in the schoolyard. Each child had a tag on his coat lapel with his name, address and evacuation number of the school, 1017. On his schoolroom desk he found his haversack, also marked, containing a change of underwear, toothbrush, towel, handkerchiefs, night clothes, and a 48-hour ration of bully beef, biscuits and chocolate. After inspection of gas masks, the urchins marched off to Aldgate subway station. Seventy-two subway stations in London were closed to normal traffic that day. The rest of the

city stood still while School 1017 was whisked, a hundred strong, to Waterloo Station. The teachei in charge and his assistants, each with ten boys, had instructions on a printed card: “1017, Waterloo platform 12, 6.45 a.m. Punctually, School 1017 marched two by two through the gate, scrambled for window seats on the train. The youngsters, excited at the idea of going to me country, pressed their noses to the windows and grinned as they left London. Two hours later they were decanted at Reading, 40 miles away, where the city council was ready with buses. Twenty children and two teachers climbed into each. One group assigned to a nearby village half-an-hour later drew up to the vicarage. The vicar and his helpers were ready with piles of sandwiches and hot tea. Villagers who had volunteered to take children chose the ones they liked best. Every little boy of 101/ found a new home within five

hours. All over England the same thing was happening. Nine of the main roads out of London were turned into one-way evacuation arteries. A continuous strea.ni o buses, trucks and automobiles crammed with singing children reached as far as one could see. So precise were the plans of the railroads that the incoming army of London commuters was not delayed more than half-an-hour. What the ’ arriving commuters saw, they will never forget. Not that the children were particularly tearful —for most of them it was something like the promise of an extended picnic. But implicit in that first tense day was the all-encompassing tragedy about to be played upon the European stage. An unseen force was already disrupting homes and families, suddenly propelling multitudes into strange places, among strange people. A burly bobby, eyeing the long lines of children trooping to thentrains, hand in hand, observed. “One of them kids is mine. Opel knows when I’ll see him again It may be years. And some of ’em.” he added, “are, going to have a bad time of it.” Some of them have had a bad time of it, although competent inspectors tried to send children to homes that would make them most comfortable the poorer children to the simpler

homes, those accustomed to luxury to the more pretentious. When lack of room made compulsory billeting necessary, they tried to choose the families who would resent it least.

The vicar of the village near Reading took two of 1017’s tough little cockneys. Tommy’s mother keeps a pub in London’s East End; Jimmy’s father is a dock worker. Adjustment has not been easy. To the vicar’s mystification, the boys scrupulously avoided walking on the grass and insisted on playing on the road. Jimmy was appalled at the thought of a bath and Tommy refused to use his handkerchief. Both complained at having rooms to themselves, saying: “We gets frightened, we do.” They were disturbed at the idea of climbing into a bed with sheets.

Recently they had a grim experience with country law. On Market Day, Jimmy sneaked up to one of the pig pens and opened the gate. He swears he will never do it again. The village constable was angry and there was no place to hide. “No respect for the King’s cloth, eh?” said the man in blue. “I’ll teach ’em that before they go back to London!” One child, seeing a tree laden with plums, exclaimed: “Blimey, I thought they came in boxes!” Another little city girl wanted to know “how many apples they tie on trees.” Children used to margarine complained of country butter.

To some of England it has been a revelation —one which may have long-range repercussions for the better. It was a shock to find that for some slum-dwellers lice are an accepted condition of life, that slum children 12 years of age are still, not housebroken. In one ultra-fashionable district, when a contingent arrived from the toughest part of Birmingham, neither the aristocratic ladies nor the butlers could control the children who quickly formed gangs, scoured the countryside, beat up the village boys, closed railway-crossing gates, threw stones at policemen, pillaged orchards and chased cows. The local police, harassed to exhaustion, refused to accept further responsibility. The embattled farmers insisted that the children be transferred to their houses. “We’ll take care of ’em,” promised one old countryman,

brandishing his stick at a council hearing. They will, with short shrift, and the youngsters will be far from happy for a long time.

Most difficult to handle have been the mothers. In the village where the 1017’s were quartered there arrived a family from London’s East- End - - Granny Smithers, huge and raucous, and three daughters with three children apiece. They were timidly polite at first, even agreeing to live in separate houses when the vicar firmly insisted that they could not all live in one room. But when they discovered that there was no pub in the village they brooded disconsolately. “If I cawn’t ’ave me drop of port, I wants to go back to London,” Grannie announced. “To ‘ell with the bombs! I cawn’t stand this plice,” a daughter chimed in. The vicar did his best but finally the Smithers family returned to London, loudly vowing that they would never come again into such an unholy wilderness. Local welfare organisations and schools, trying desperately to overcome these difficulties, are doing a titanic job. New quarters are being found for classes. Sports and excursions are being organised to keep the children busy. Communal kitchens where the mothers can work will relieve the burden on householders — because two women at the same stove do not make for peace. The owners of large houses have responded nobly with facilities for maternity wards to relieve the overcrowded hospitals; country squires with big estates have turned part of their houses into schools. The poorer families are only too willing to take “ evacuees,” because they can make a small profit off the weekly Government allowance.

It is too early to tell yet how the Government Evacuation Scheme will turn out. In any case, under-priviledged hundreds of thousands will have good food and clean beds for one, two, three years, perhaps more. They will then, just as suddenly as they left, be expected to return. The second adjustment will be harder than the first, and it may have to be made with metropolitan England in the throes of post-war depression and unemployment. As the bobby said, “Some of them are going to have a bad time of it.”