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Children’s reading 1939-45

Nicholas Tucker

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1I was not quite three when the war started in 1939, but became a keen reader during the next six years. Favourite books, carried from one part of Britain to another as my parents moved home after home to avoid bombing, helped provide a welcome sense of continuity to a world otherwise very much in flux. With numbers of book warehouses destroyed during 1940 bombing raids on London Docks there followed a great shortage of all books for children. I sometimes wonder whether my own future academic interest in children’s literature partly arises from trying to make sense at the time of whatever we still managed to find to read from whatever source.

2For there was still a lot of reading done, some in books eventually to do with the war but mostly turning to whatever else was available, either written long before or else concentrating on quite other topics altogether. Those children’s books published in the inter-war years, when you could still find them, mainly concentrated on past classics, school stories and mini-adventures involving camping, tramping or sailing in the deep countryside. War stories were less popular following the carnage of 1914-18, with fictional fighting now tending to take place long ago in the past, in the Wild West, or in response to unrest in the colonies. Open political discussion or social criticism was almost entirely absent. Instead, conventional inward-looking middle class values, attitudes and prejudices continued to be contentedly shared with those parents like mine just about affluent enough to buy the still quite pricey hard-back books then in the shops.

3So when faced in 1939 by a bellicose enemy whose youth over the last six years had been indoctrinated by toxic racist nonsense, our own children’s fictional world was distinctly challenged. Fighting spirit could no longer be sought from Kipling or John Buchan, the first dead and the other in his last year. A. A. Milne was still a pacifist, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare had retreated into fantasy and Henry Williamson had gone so far the other way as to dedicate a novel to Hitler. But at least the ever-prolific Percy F. Westerman was still writing, with At Grips with the Swastika coming out in 1940 along with the somewhat optimistically titled When the Allies Swept the Seas in the same year. Nineteen more of his novels appeared before the end of the war.

4But the children’s patriotic literary hero of the hour and for years before and after was Captain W. E. Johns. His Biggles Defies the Swastika was published in 1941, with fourteen more novels following up to 1945. Transitioning from ace fighter pilot during the First World War to Squadron Leader in the second, Biggles, whose earlier stories were originally intended for an older audience, had long been hugely popular with all ages. Enthusiastic readers included Battle of Britain pilots, some of them only just adult themselves. In separate stories Johns also created Gimlet, known as the King of the Commandos, and Worrals, a female aviator. Her existence followed a suggestion to Johns from the Air Ministry that he provide a boost for recruitment to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, otherwise known as the WAAF.

5On the home front Enid Blyton was not initially keen on the war and took time getting going. When she did her stories often featured the plight of evacuees transplanted to the countryside. Unmasking a German spy in a boarding school was popular with her too, also found in stories by Elinor Brent-Dyer. But Richmal Crompton and her great eleven-year-old character William was quickest off the mark. William and Air Raid Precautions, published in 1939, was packed with her anarchic brand of humour much appreciated at a time of increasingly officious interference into daily life. Also originally aimed at an adult market, Crompton’s sly wit appealed across the board. Four more of her story collections came out up to 1945, with William variously irritating Air Raid Wardens, discovering unexploded bombs, “helping” the local Spitfire Fund, interacting with local evacuees, publically embarrassing black marketeers and joining in with fire-fighting.

6Children’s weekly comics too quickly joined up. Inexpensive and printed on the cheapest available paper during a national shortage, their appeal across all social classes was total and they were much read. Comics for the very young still stuck mainly to already well-loved characters, with anti-German strips hardly figuring. But the Dandy did introduce Addie and Hermy-The Nasty Nazis comic strips in 1940. The same artist, Sam Fair, went on with Musso the Wop-He’s a Big-a da Flop in The Beano a year later. War Comics had Noddy and Pip, two inept soldiers guarding the White Cliffs of Dover, and The Beano showed Pansy Potter, the Strong Man’s Daughter, “Having fun galore-sinking U-Boats by the score!” In Knockout, Billy Bunter, now transferred from the closed-down Magnet comic, inadvertently helps with the capture of a U-boat by getting stuck in its hatch. But established stories carried over from pre-war times still stayed in the majority, continuing to feature hard to find ice-creams and chocolate Easter eggs, all with no war preparations anywhere in sight.

7Aged four in 1940 I loved the Dandy and Beano, with their occasional anti-German comic strips just one of many pleasures. With the ever-amiable Dennis the Dachshund elsewhere still coming up with his mangled English on BBC radio’s Children’s Hour, and Erich Kästner’s classic Emil and the Detectives set in Berlin long a family favourite, there was little incentive in what I read or heard to hate Germans. Indeed, having so often been forced to take the German role in games with my older brother I secretly came to have some sympathy for an enemy always required by my peers to lose every contest.

8This attitude changed as I got older and on to text comics such as Adventure, Champion, Commando, Hotspur, Rover and Wizard. Running to around 40,000 words each week in tiny print, British military heroes in serial stories now walked forever tall. Even when captured after a crash-landing, Rockfist Rogan in The Champion, Squadron Leader and ex-heavyweight boxer, could be counted on to make his escape. However much his “swarthy” German captors shouted at him in invariably “guttural” tones, Rogan’s punch to the jaw was always enough to settle matters. In response games with other children at home or in school now echoed with “Achtung!” or “Schnell!” picked up from our weekly reading. In The Wizard, meanwhile, Wilson the Wonder Athlete, the first to run the three minute mile, regularly thrust enemy opposition aside. Towards the other end of the social scale, Steelfingers Stark, a stage escapist and expert lock-picker in Hotspur, was also on hand, once breaking into the headquarters of the German Command in Norway. Much more detail over this whole area can be found in Owen Dudley Edwards’ sprawling but immensely readable British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War.

9I was beginning to read books too. Rowland Walker’s 1942 story Commando Captain earned my instant respect when I witnessed how it made my older brother cry. I duly wept in my turn after reading how one of its heroes dies on the last page, his best friend repeating Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done” as he runs to save his own life. British soldiers did not usually die in our fiction; this was something of a shock. Another favourite was Katherine Tozer’s Mumfie Marches On. Possibly because it was a birthday present and therefore excitingly new I adored it, insisting that our next cat should bear the same name. It was not a particularly good story, involving a treacherous parrot hiding spying messages in telegraph poles – a reference to the supposed and largely imaginary activities of so-called Fifth Columnists. This I failed to understand. Winston Churchill and Hitler both make an appearance, but the image of Germany’s leader caught in a giant mouse-trap baited with cream buns was unconvincing even at a young age. Yet it was still my very own book and the young elephant Mumfie, strutting around on two legs, remained an attractive hero.

10It was later replaced in my affections by Biggles Fails to Return, another much-prized birthday present. And I was now well into Enid Blyton, whose Famous Five series provided much hectic excitement without mentioning the war at all. With little else to choose from and no public libraries with children’s sections, the only other option for keen child readers between birthdays and Christmas was to get their hands on older popular adventure writers still lingering on adult bookshelves. Sapper, Bulldog Drummond, John Buchan and P. C. Wren could all tell a good tale, and should German or more particularly Prussian soldiers ever become involved in plots they were still no match for their British counterparts.

11Shortly after the end of the war my aunt took my brother and myself to a cartoon cinema in London’s Upper Regent Street, where giant figures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on the pavement outside aroused almost unbearable anticipatory excitement. Half-way through there was a regular news bulletin, as always without any suggested audience age restrictions. Which is why we all came to see in pitiless detail screened pictures of the recently liberated Belsen concentration camp and its tragic inmates. Something changed for me at that moment despite my aunt telling us to look away, and those images have been with me ever since. Nothing in our books, comics or films had given any indication that Germans, generally portrayed as little more than casually brutal but essentially bumbling idiots, could also ever have been involved in such previously unimaginable acts of inhumanity. I left the cinema sadder but wiser. War stories that continued to come out after that were never to seem the same again.

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Nicholas Tucker, « Children’s reading 1939-45 »Strenæ [En ligne], 25 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2024, consulté le 16 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/strenae/11278 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/130tg

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Nicholas Tucker

Nicholas Tucker was Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex (1969-2000). Before that he was a secondary school teacher (1959-1964) and then an educational psychologist (1964-69), both times working for the Inner London Education Authority. He is the author of nine books about children, childhood and reading, and has also written six books for children.

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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