In the fall of 1998, I read an article in The New York Times about a group of seven British adults who came to the States to see where they had lived during World War II. Nicknamed “the English children,” they had lived together in a grand house in Tuxedo Park, NY which housed 18 evacuees. The residents of Tuxedo Park banded together to provide for their care. The returning adults, then in their sixties, wandered about the grounds, reminiscing about their time spent there, about their home away from home.
I cut the article out of the paper and couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had known, of course, that in September 1939, just before England declared war on Germany, mothers and children began to be evacuated out of London and other urban centers. Over the course of a few days, more than 1.5 million people were evacuated. I had encountered this in literature, too: the children in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia were just such children, sent to the country from London.
Bombing raids, however, ceased to materialize and by the start of 1940, many children had returned home, often against the advice of the government. But by that summer, the threat had once again increased and although evacuation was voluntary, more children left the cities before the Blitz began in September.
I hadn’t known, though, that children were also sent out of England, through both public and private programs. Children were sent to the Commonwealth countries, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, and they were also sent to the United States. It was suggested that Queen Elizabeth and her daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, be sent out of the country as well, but Queen Elizabeth made it clear that the royal family would remain in Britain during the duration of the war. It is estimated that approximately 14,000 children were sent to North America.
But the evacuation programs were short-lived. In September of 1940, the SS City of Benares was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat; 81 out of the 100 children on board were killed. All programs were canceled immediately thereafter.
For years, the Times story stayed with me. The thought of children traveling around the world was not new to me: both my children were adopted, and they, too, traveled across a sea to join our family, although they were infants at the time. When I first read the article, they were one and five. I thought about what it must have been like for the children but I thought about the parents, too, the parents who made the impossible choice to send their children away and the parents who opened their homes and hearts to a stranger.
I tracked down other stories. I visited the Imperial War Museum in London and got a better sense of life during the Blitz. I read accounts of evacuees online. P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins series, served as an escort for children of friends and then wrote a children’s novel about the experience entitled I Go By Sea, I Go By Land. I watched Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, a riveting documentary about Jewish children sent to Britain during the war. The writer Lore Segal was one of those children; her novel Other People’s Houses is based on her experiences.
And then I read See You After the Duration, a memoir by Michael Henderson, a wonderful account of the evacuation of two brothers who were sent to live with a family south of Boston. It was in those pages that I learned that Henderson and his brother were sent to the same town where I went to high school; in fact, we attended the same school. I was a boarder there for three years in the 1970’s; it was the first time I left home. Obviously, my experience was very different from the experiences of any of the evacuees, but I knew a little something about what it felt like to be in that place, so far from home. I did a lot of growing up during those years, and there’s a way in which that town, and Boston more generally, often feels like home to me, even though I only lived there for three years.
Suddenly, a story began to take shape. I could see the quiet town, with the cemetery right across the street from the school. I knew how silent it could be after a big snow. I could smell the lilacs blooming in the spring. The dorm I lived in had been an enormous estate home, and I imagined a smaller version of that, with a wooden table in the heart of the warm kitchen, a formal living room with blue and white china in the corner cabinets, and French doors leading out to the back lawn. Out of that sense of place grew the characters that now populate the book. Nancy Gregory, puttering around in that kitchen. Ethan Gregory, grading algebra tests in his small study. Their sons, William and Gerald, chasing their dog King up and down the grand circular stairs.
My earlier research helped the British family come to life, too: Millie Thompson, heading up a set of narrow stairs with a grocery bag in each arm. Reginald Thompson, lighting the candle nubs as darkness sets in. And, finally, their daughter Beatrix, traveling alone across the ocean, before stepping off the ferry onto a dock in Boston on a hot August day, waiting for the family she will one day call her own.
It is fascinating to know more about the background of the novel. It's amazing how long it can take for the imagination to configure disparate elements as a book.
Fascinating to hear about the story's taking shape and the many sources of influence, both sensual, archival and through other books.