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Blitz Evacuees
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During the Second World War, the British government made a sustained effort to remove civilians, especially children, from areas of the country that were likely to be bombed by Nazi Germany. The result was that large numbers of children (over a million at some points during the war; at least one writer claims that more than 3.5 million people were evacuated in total) were sent from urban areas into the countryside or to Canada, to live with distant relatives or complete strangers. Fictionally, a standard way to achieve Parental Abandonment (especially in British works) is to use some of these evacuees as protagonists. This is a gold mine for writers; some standard plots that can result are: The child who's known nothing but the city suddenly has the opportunity to experience the beauties of nature, with little adult involvement. The protagonist is taken from a happy family to a wretched or even abusive home. The inverse: the protagonist is originally from an abusive home, and finds happiness for the first time with their hosts. The protagonist is sent to work on a farm and is forced to grow up early, but is neither violently abused nor loved. The evacuee's host family or their surroundings are in some way magical, and the plot consists of their discovery and exploration of this magic. One that almost never crops up in fiction is the evacuee who returns home to find that their parents have been killed in air raids or have just upped and left. 40,000 children went unclaimed at the end of the war. Also rarely mentioned are the children who, having reached adulthood overseas, never returned themselves. The limitation of the plot device is that you're tied to a WWII-era setting, although similar stories can be written about refugees from later wars and political skirmishes in Europe, Asia, and Africa, especially children sent without parents. A variation occurs when the evacuees are sent out of the country, allowing for a Fish out of Water story when they arrive (or return). In fictional depictions they'll often be shown going to America or Australia, but in Real Life most overseas evacuees were sent to Canada (America not being in the war yet and taking pains to appear neutral, and Australia being too far away and not in danger itself... yet.) Evacuees, at least at the early stages, will be seen with labels around their necks. These were to allow for identification if the trains were bombed. At the time, everyone was told it was to stop them getting lost. Subtrope of War Refugees. Compare Take Care of the Kids. Although the common wisdom is that the government "overestimated" the potential number of casualties, later research suggested that the mass evacuations saved enough lives to make the original estimates seem inaccurate. However there remains debate over whether the dislocation and emotional suffering was really necessary. For Real Life stories of the evacuees, see No Time to Wave Goodbye and The Day They Took the Children by Canadian author Ben Wicks, an evacuee himself. Examples |
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The BBC Schools programme Look and Read had a storyline called Spywatch about a group of evacuees who suspect there's a Nazi spy in the village. The Framing Story was about one of the evacuees returning to the village in The Present Day and helping create a World War II display for the local library. | |
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Lord of the Flies very cruelly combines the first two types. While being evacuated from World War III, the kids' plane crashes and the pilot dies, leaving them to explore an island paradise without adults. Most of them learn to like the island so much they don't care about being rescued, but by the end of the book, they've done a lot of damage to the island anyway—not to mention each other. | |
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The novel (by Michelle Magorian) and TV film Goodnight Mister Tom is a type 3; crusty old geezer Tom Oakley is forced to look after a shy boy evacuated from London, and gradually grows to like him. Then the boy is called back home by his abusive mother, but Tom goes to London to rescue him. | |
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Mrs. Slocumbe of Are You Being Served? continually mentions having been a "Land Girl" during the war. However, she's always very vague about exactly how old she was when it happened. Her experience is elaborated upon when the cast retire to the country in Grace And Favour. That's somewhat different, though. The Land Girls were members of the Women's Land Army, a form of war service in which women worked in agriculture, forestry and the like in order to free up more men for the armed forces. It's one of many hints (of varying subtlety) that the outwardly prim Mrs Slocombe is one tough old bird underneath. Town mouse/country mouse aspects will often be common to both groups, but a major difference is that the Land Girls are adults. |
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Horrible Histories has a sketch that recounts the Real Life descriptions that evacuees gave of things they encountered in the country, like cows, as if it were a trailer for a horror movie. | |
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Discussed in Battle of Britain, where one pilot, reading mail from home, is irritated to learn that, after going though considerable trouble to get his family moved into the country, his wife is writing to complain that she's bored, and wishes to return to London. | |
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The 2015 horror film The Woman in Black: Angel of Death features a group of children evacuated to an Old, Dark House where they encounter the titular Woman in Black, a vengeful spirit from the late 1800s who kills children whenever she is seen. In retrospect, they really should have taken their chances with the Luftwaffe. | |
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Torchwood has an elderly man with a London accent living in Wales: he was sent there during the Second World War and when his family died his Welsh foster home adopted him. | |
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Bedknobs and Broomsticks uses the "host family is magic" example to start the plot. Three kids orphaned in the Blitz are sent to the country, and find out they're living with a witch in training. Incidentally, the movie's star, Angela Lansbury, was a Blitz evacuee herself (the Limey Goes to Hollywood version). | |
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In Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me, Dennis was evacuated as a kid, during which time he thought his mother had died. It wasn't until after the war that he found out that she was alive and that she wanted him to believe she was dead because she ran off with another man. | |
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World War II: In their coverage of the events of 1939, they report that Britain—fearing the German Luftwaffe—evacuated some people, particularly children, from some of her cities shortly after declaring war on Germany, but as the inactivity of the "Phoney War" set in they returned to their regular lives, only for the Blitz and Battle of Britain to take hold starting in 1940. | |
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Grave of the Fireflies is about two Japanese children who lose their home and family in an American air raid and have to move in with an aunt, who resents having two extra mouths to feed during strict wartime rationing. | |
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Call the Midwife references this from time to time. Since it's set in the mid-1950s in East London, it's never directly shown, but some Poplar residents reference being evacuated. | |
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The Secret of Crickley Hall: The titular Devonshire house, which seems to be haunted, is revealed to have housed several evacuated children, all of whom, apparently, died in a 1943 flood. | |
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Also seen on Foyle's War. One episode plays with version two; the young evacuee is unhappy, but more because he's been separated from his family and the life he's known and familiar, and not because of any abuse; the mother and father of the family who have taken him in aren't exactly welcoming, but they aren't actually abusive either, and the daughter tries hard to make him feel welcome and cared for without success (partly because she herself is lonely, trapped and miserable in this family, and thought — erroneously — that the experience would be something like version three). Then the father blows the evacuee up so that he won't tell anyone that the father, a judge, has been accepting bribes to exempt people from military service. Ouch. | |
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Summerland (2020): Frank is from London, and has been sent out to a small Kent village to escape the Blitz. This is why he's placed in the care of Alice. Many other children have been too, with another girl later coming in from Belfast. | |
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In the short story The Case of the White Snake, little Collette survives an air raid that destroys a London bomb shelter but her mother perishes in the blast. After she's rescued from the rubble Collette is sent to an orphanage in the countryside, where she's far from the only child to have lost a parent to the war. | |
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Gunnerkrigg Court: Mort's flashback to the day of his death shows him standing next to a poster urging parents to send their children away. Doesn't happen to him though, since he's killed by an air raid soon after. | |
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In The Lost Crown, two of the ghosts Nigel encounters are brother and sister evacuees, who died young and can't rest because they're still waiting for their father to return from the war. | |
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In Who's Left Behind? Kayoko's Diary, the titular child protagonist leaves her family in Tokyo to go to live with her aunt in Numazu for her own safety. This ultimately saves her life as the rest of her family (save for her immediate older brother) are killed in an American air raid. | |
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The Molly line of American Girl books features Emily Bennet, an evacuee sent to live with Molly's family in the U.S. They bonded over their mutual admiration of the English princesses and Emily helped Molly put on a proper tea for her birthday party. In The Film of the Book she is given a much more prominent role. | |
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In one of Denis Norden's humorous monologues on My Word!, he reminisced about his own time as an evacuee (in 1935 for some reason), with the daughter of the couple he was billeted with teaching him the ways of the country. Although just how clueless the young Norden was about nature was taken to extremes: | |
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In A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones, Vivian is sent to the country to live with her cousin, but is abducted by time travelers after she gets off the train. | |
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Insu-Pu tells the tale of 11 evacuees whose ship to the US sinks. They are stranded on an island where they establish an independent society. | |
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Doctor Who has used this a few times. In the original series, the Seventh Doctor story "The Curse of Fenric" features several evacuees actually in the countryside. "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" features a gang of homeless children living in London during the Blitz. At least some of them are evacuees who then ran away from their host families (though others may be orphans). Abuse is implied. "The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe" features a mum and her two kids getting sent out to an old mansion, where the Doctor plays caretaker. |
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In Aunt Dimity Digs In, several of the current residents of Finch are revealed to have first come to the village as these during WWII, and they return there to live later in their lives because of the pleasant memories and the feeling of sanctuary the place gave them. | |
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In Barefoot Gen, Japanese children are sent off to the countryside so they won't be threatened by bombing. Akira, the only one of the Nakaoka children selected for evacuation, decides to sneak back to Hiroshima, and his family has trouble persuading him to return to where the food is no better and other irritations are worse. For all their hardships, at least the children sent away survive the war; many of their relatives don't. | |
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In Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, the cousins sent to live on the farm are refugees from London during World War II. | |
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