When the Children Came Home: Stories of Wartime Evacuees by Julie Summers

The standard images of wartime evacuation usually show bewildered London children on railway stations, clutching luggage or treasured toys, as they wait to be dispatched to new homes in the countryside. We are much more interested in the evacuees’ departure than in their return. As one woman said many decades later, “When people ask me about evacuation, they only seem to want to know what it was like when we went away, not when we came home.” The strength of Julie Summers’s moving work of oral history lies in her recognition that, for many, leaving their family was an adventure but returning years later to parents who had become strangers was a greater psychological challenge. Drawing on a wealth of interviews and memoirs, Summers has created a thought-provoking new perspective on the familiar tale of the millions of children who were sent out of the cities for their own safety as Blitzkrieg threatened.