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Once Upon a Wartime, an exhibition which opened earlier this month at London’s Imperial War Museum, takes five children’s novels about war and conflict and uses them as a starting point to explore what war can mean for children.
Imperial War Museum entrance
War Horse by Michael Morpurgo, Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden, The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier, The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall and Little Soldier by Bernard Ashley provide the inspiration and setting to explore themes of loyalty, separation, excitement, survival and identity. Whilst these are books typically read by children older than my normal focus here on Playing by the book, I was nevertheless extremely keen to visit this new exhibition, to discover what inspired the authors to write their books and find out about the historical context of each story through objects, photographs and films.
I was also very interested to see how the museum chose to bring these books to life – exhibitions about children’s literature are not that common – and I thought you too would be interested to see how these books have been translated into a family exhibition.
In my review which follows I’ve included plenty of photos (to give those of you unable to visit the exhibition the best possible flavour if it) and
Wow. Every post of yours makes me glad I discovered your blog. Awesome and thank you for taking us to the museum while being thousands of miles away.
As soon as I read the title of your post I thought MORPURGO! The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips is also a superb first introduction to war. All the ladies and gentlemen involved with the big decisions regarding war and conflicts should read these books – maybe the world will be different then.
Oh choxbox! What a way to start my day – with your lovely comment
Thank you.
I haven’t read The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips but I’ve now put a reservation on it in the library – thanks for the suggestion.
Wow, amazing post, thanks. I really hope I’m going to be able to visit the exhibition while it’s on. I’ve been thinking about children’s fiction and depictions of war quite a bit recently as I’ve been choosing some historical books for my son’s primary school library. I always enjoyed war fiction as a child, although I think that I read it in quite a different way than I would now as an adult and a mother. I loved Carie’s War as a kid but in my mind the war was kind of a backdrop for the part that terrified me which was the incident with the skull and her feelings of guilt at having done something secretly very bad. It still stops my breath thinking of that now! With The Silver Sword I was facinated with the idea of the children being on their own and fending for themselves. The whole concept of evacuation or of separation from your family was the focus for me as a kid, imagining myself in that situation and the psychological implications of it. It wasn’t until I was about 13 and we studied the poets of the 1st WW that I think I began to think about the horrors of war or even war as a subject rather than a backdrop for some other kind of psychlogical drama.
My Nan is 97 and lived through the Blitz in London with my two uncles as small children. She has always been an awesome storyteller and my childhood was filled with her war stories too- most of them were tales of daring escape and the kindness of others in adversity. She was evacuated to Portsmouth, of all the silly places, at the beginning of the war. Once she found out where she was (the station signs were blacked out of course) she stayed one night and hitched a lift back to London with the Czech Army whom she flagged down in the road (she just started walking back with a 4 and 6 yr old so certain she was that Portsmouth would be bombed, which it was days after). She said that if she was going to be bombed she wanted to deal with it with her family and friends in her beloved London and she stayed there for the duration of it. Anyway, I digress… I’ve always enjoyed war fiction although now I read it totally differently I think. Have you read Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh as that’s amazing too, it’s about two children living through the Blitz in London on their own after getting separated from their familes- I read that recently and wish I’d read it as a kid.
One thing that always strikes me about WW2 fiction is how much it still influences us all today, we tell our children about it, we don’t want them to forget, it’s still very much a part of our psyche as the war generation are still around and the changes that the war made to families, lives and cities can still be felt, even now. When I think of all the conflict in the world I always think of how long it’s going to take the people involved to deal with the shock of it and the damage- not just the structural or the physical but the psychological trauma. This gets passed on to children born after the war (my mum was born in 1950 for example) and even their children’s children. I tell my boys about my Nan and Uncles in the war now although I think the horror of it has been watered down through the generations somehow and it’s more of a story, less personal narrative now. My eldest was born 60 years after the end of the 2nd WW for example. Writing war fiction, especially children’s war fiction is a way that we as adults deal with the psychological damage of war (damage sustained by precious generations even) as well as having the purpose of educating the next generation in the hope that they will never find themselves in the same situation.