Blitz Kids: True Stories from the Children of Wartime Britain to Commemorate the 80th Anniversary of VE Day
Blitz Kids is based on a set of 15 interviews drawn from 80 which the authors carried out among men and women now in their eighties and nineties who as children had experienced ‘The Blitz’. Strictly speaking, the Blitz refers to the mass bombing raids on London and other British cities between September 1940 and May 1941. All the interviewees had certainly experienced these raids, but their memoirs ranged across the whole of WW2, including the Evacuation, the V-bomb raids of 1944-5 and even VE Day. Which makes them all the more interesting.
Several of the interviewees had already published their own memoirs, so there is little new still to reveal. These case studies do, however, underline certain points which were less appreciated in earlier years. None of the interviewees recalled being frightened during the raids or felt they had been traumatised. Some children were of course, but in general for children who had known nothing but war, the abnormality of war was their normality. As our teacher explained to us (I am a Blitz Kid myself), we needed to understand how stressful the bombing was for our mothers (our fathers being at war) as, unlike us kids, they had not grown up with it.
The Evacuation was far more stressful for most children, as several of these memoirs illustrate. Not all families took in evacuees for the kindest of motives or were exemplary foster parents.
The book is structured as 15 separate stories each told in the third person. I think they would have had more impact if told in the first person, as far as possible in the interviewee’s own words. Some editorial comment would of course be necessary, but we know the facts – it is the subjective experience we need to capture while we still have time.
