Britain’s Wartime Evacuees: The People, Places and Stories of the Evacuations Told Through the Accounts of Those Who Were There (Voices from the Past)
The impact of mass air raids on civilian targets was the great unknown at the outset of WW2. Pre-war exercises seemed to prove that ‘the bomber always gets through’. The only defence appeared to be mass evacuation from the cities, with priority for children. On the first weekend of the war, three million children left home, mostly without their parents, half on the government scheme and half ‘unofficially.’
Much has already been written about the official evacuation (very little about the unofficial evacuees), but this has enshrined several enduring myths, which Mawson helps to dispel. Her book is narrated almost entirely in the words of the evacuees themselves. She must have interviewed hundreds. Some had happy experiences, too many suffered emotional or physical abuse. Many rural billets were more poverty stricken than the city slums.
My only disappointment is that the thematic structure of the book fragments the individual stories. This is not helped by a very inadequate index. Nonetheless this is an outstanding piece of oral history, telling it as the evacuees remember it, good, bad and terrible.
