No Place to be a Child? The Persistence and Peculiarities of Children’s Play during the Second World War in London and Liverpool.

Operation Pied Piper – the mass evacuation of children from urban ‘target’ areas to the relative safety of rural Britain – has long dominated popular discourse surrounding children’s experiences of the Second World War. Whilst the scheme itself directed a spotlight onto the urban children of war, the legacy of evacuation has cast the experiences of those who remained city-dwellers into the shadows. This marginalisation of the ‘non-evacuated’ is upheld by the wealth of written and visual depictions of evacuees which are widely available and routinely circulated. Consequently, the overriding image of British youth during the Second World War features a huddle of smartly dressed children on a station platform waving goodbye to their teary-eyed mothers, each donning a hand-written identity label and a single bag of belongings. Collective memory has also been configured by ossified government-issued propaganda which declared the city to be no place for a child as Britain descended into war and the threat of an aerial bombing campaign loomed. However, as will be illuminated by the children who speak to us through the sources in this paper, urban children found their own ‘paradise for play’ amidst the smoking ruins of Britain’s cities.

Through an inter-city comparative study, this paper endeavours to challenge the marginalisation of the experiences of the ‘non-evacuated’, illustrating the distinct experiences of urban children in Britain’s war-torn cities. Drawing from autobiographic accounts and photographs, this study illuminates how wartime children metamorphosised the objects, spaces, and characters of war to incorporate them into their worlds of play, leveraging an enduring sense of optimism, perceived invincibility, and insatiable curiosity. 

Through colonising tears in the urban fabric of their cities – such as the disordered and unprogrammed spaces of bombsites – according to their individual imaginations and needs, as well as undertaking various roles within wartime society, this paper seeks to understand how children confronted and contended with the traumas of war as ‘sub-adults’.