Borrowed Children

Text extracted from opening pages of book: BORROWED CHILDREN Inscribed FOR REASONS WHICH THEY WILL UNDERSTAND TO THREE EXECUTIVE OFFICERS OF THE CHILD GUIDANCE BRANCH OF THE COMMONWEALTH FUND OF AMERICA CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE FOREWORD ix INTRODUCTION xiii PART I HOW THEY CAME I. THE CHILDREN ARRIVE 3 ( i) The Home Counties. ( n) The Dales, ( in) The South-West. II. THE CHILDREN SPEAK 14 ( i) From the South-West, ( n) From the Dales. III. TRIAL AND ERROR 28 IV. A FEW WORDS ON HOSTESSES .... 49 V. WHAT WOULD You Do? 57 PART II WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE VI. COLLECTING THE FACTS 85 VII. RUNNING WILD 108 VIII. THE NEXT STEP 120 APPENDIX 140 vii FOREWORD TT is estimated that 734,883 unaccompanied chil-JL dren were evacuated in the first days of September 1 - 939- Daily Telegraph, January z6th, 1940. Wars, whatever we may think of them, can teach something to those of us who are ready to learn. This war, owing to the danger from bombing from the air, has taught us of all things a great deal about children. Not only about the state of health and de gree of cleanliness and civilization, and so on, of the nation's children, but about how children different types of children will behave in unusual circum stances, and through that we find that we have learnt some fundamental truths about all children. Here, in this book, is a fascinating record, intimate and actual, of dozens of cases of what happened both in those first extraordinary few days in September, and then in the months that followed. But Borrowed Children is not merely good reading, as interesting as a novel, an adventure tale or a very candid diary, it is also the first record for the ordinary reader of the findings of experts, on what weordinary people call bringing up children, and its many curi ous problems. ix FOREWORD Some fairly complex ideas on the management of difficult children, or of normal children who so often suddenly go through a difficult phase, have been confirmed in such a way in this huge experiment that you and I, who are perhaps mothers of families, or teachers, or merely interested onlookers, can at last understand what these ideas are, and are able to see almost at a glance what the experts on child psychology have been working round to in the last fifteen years. Now the child psychologist can really help us. For re member, that neither the mother nor the teacher sees the whole problem. I, for instance, as a mother, didn't, till I read Bor rowed Children, understand the point made by Dr. Moodie, in Chapter VII ( that learning to read and write has such a quite unexpected influence on the over-strung child). On the other hand, when I had both teachers and children billeted on me, I found that there were many little points of home management that were quite new to the teachers though they were experts at their own job. ***** The first evacuation was a failure you hear people say. A costly failure! Read this volume, and I think you may agree that, failure or not, something very substantial may actually have been gained by it. For if the ordinary run of people who have to do with chil drenI mean parents, teachers, doctors, magistrates, club workers, and now billeting officers, and so on FOREWORD can get a new grasp of their job ( as they can if they add the record of this little book to their own experiences), then I don't think that Evacuation, costly and nerve racking as it has been to many of us, can be classed as a failure. At any rate, the experiences of 1939-40 mark an epoch in our knowledge of how to avoid a great many pitfalls in the bringing up of children. As this book goes to press new emergencies make this knowledge immediately vital to everyone who took their part in the first adventure and those who take up their tasks for the first time. AMABEL WILLIAMS-ELLIS. June 1940. XI INTRODUCTION EVACUATION is another name for Dislocation. Of the problems confronting the British Com monwealth at this moment the dislocation of life in the Mother Country is n