Doreen, by Barbara Noble

I discovered this absorbing short novel via the Backlisted Podcast. At the start of each session they share what they are currently reading, and Barbara Noble’s Doreen (1946) caught my attention immediately because it was about the evacuation of children out of London during the war.  It’s an historical event that has always interested me because my father and his little brother were evacuees, exploited as household help by servants in a big house.  But though he spoke very little about his experience, he did recount an act of kindness when someone used their petrol ration to give him a lift home when he’d sprained his ankle. So his experience was not entirely negative.

I can’t watch videos like this one without getting emotional. My father also talked about being lined up in a hall, and the humiliation of people choosing which children to take, using the same words as those in this video:  ‘I’ll take that one.’

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Evacuation Poster, Ministry of Health (Wikipedia)

The evacuation was, as Jessica Mann says in her illuminating preface, an unprecedented plan to move the population elsewhere.

Evacuation was designed both to relieve the authorities of the most vulnerable during the emergency, and also with the altruistic intention that the children of the poor should have the same chance of safety as those whose parents could afford to make their own arrangements for escape. Never before or since have children been taken en masse from their homes in vulnerable cities to live with strangers in safe areas.  (Indeed nowhere else was anything of the kind even contemplated; the French government considered and rejected the idea in 1939, while the Germans decided there was no point in discussing it as the enemy could never penetrate the air defences to bomb German cities. (p. vi)

As we have seen during the pandemic, societies which have high levels of trust in government tend to cooperate more with expectations that the people will do what has to be done, even if they don’t want to.

Nearly one and a half million children left London in two days; on 3rd September war was declared and several days after that parents received postcards saying where and with whom their families were living.  London’s children had disappeared: according to the novelist Storm Jameson the city ‘looked as if some fantastic death pinched off the heads under fifteen.’

Whether to send their children to shelter in safer areas in Britain, or overseas to the Dominions or the United States, was the most difficult decision parents ever had to make.’ (p.vii)

The choice, for parents confronted by Operation Pied Piper was between separation or deathly danger. 

Of all the stories that could have been told about the evacuation, Barbara Noble chose to use a very narrow lens.  Her story is not about a difficult or uncooperative evacuee, or a child who wet the bed in distress each night.  It’s not about exploitation by servants who are bore the brunt of the extra work suddenly thrust on them, and the hardships for children who were given menial tasks that left little time for play or homework. Nor is about children who suffered physical or sexual abuse who had no one they could trust, to tell.  And it’s not about middle-class country families being confronted by working-class children with incomprehensible accents who had different habits and standards of hygiene, or how those children were offended and hurt by patronising attitudes and snobbery.

Noble focusses on one child — ten-year-old Doreen Rawlings — whose mother initially refuses to send her child with the others.  But then the Blitz in all its horror makes her decision untenable:

On her way to the office that morning, walking through streets crusted with broken glass, on legs uncomfortably swollen from a night spent dozing in a deck chair, Mrs Rawlings decided she would have to do it; she would have to send Doreen away to the country. Things weren’t getting any better, they were getting worse. Even her faith in the shelter, which up till now had had an almost fanatic quality, was shaken after last night. The shelter had rocked and her faith had rocked with it. Bombs had fallen and buildings had collapsed, and with them had collapsed Mrs. Rawlings’ obstinate, angry confidence in her own invincible rightness of opinion. But for her pride, she could have wept. Life was hard enough without losing Doreen. (p.1)

Helen Osborne, whose office Mrs Rawlings cleans, finds this indefatigable and stoic woman in tears in the washroom. Helen engineers a generous offer of a private arrangement with her brother, an Oxford solicitor and his childless wife, so Doreen is sent to a kindly home where she is loved and well-treated. Doreen is about a child who came to love both her families, about her host family’s fear of losing her, and about her parents’ fear that the longer she stayed with her host family, the more likely it was that she would be lost to them.  Her behaviour and speech would become different, her expectations of the future would change, and she might not even want to come home at all.

Very perceptive about class differences, the novel explores these effects on the child Doreen, her mother and estranged father, and the couple who come to love her, Geoffrey and Francie Osborne.  The third person narration shows how the child observes people and events and the decisions that are made about her, and how she doesn’t process what is happening.  She is a biddable child, and no trouble to anybody.  It is only when her mother visits at Christmas that her loyalty is tested.  First her mother is critical of the maid Lucy, not because of anything Lucy has done but because Mrs Rawlings has let slip to Lucy’s mother that Doreen’s best friend Edie has been killed in the blitz, and she did not trust Mrs Warman to hold her tongue:

‘Lucy liked my present’, Doreen said happily.
‘You didn’t tell me she was simple.’
‘What’s simple mean?’
‘A ha’penny short. Not all there.’
‘Oh Mum, she’s not. She’s ever so nice.’
‘I dare say.  But she’s simple, for all that.’ She spoke harshly, venting on Lucy her annoyance with her mother.
‘Well, I like her,’ Dorren maintained in a subdued voice. ‘She often brings me sweets.’
‘You didn’t ought to eat a lot of cheap sweets,’ Mrs Rawlings countered automatically. (p.79)

In a scene which captures reality as Doreen experiences it, but doesn’t understand her mother’s insecurities and her sense of herself as a good mother, Mrs Rawlings erupts into further criticism:

Running her hand down Doreen’s woollen stockings, Mrs Rawlings sighed sharply.  What darns! Real botches, they were.  She’d have to cut them out and do them over again.
‘Does that Lucy mend your clothes?’ she asked.
Doreen looked up from her book, surprised.
‘No, Mrs Osborne mends them for me.’
‘Well, I’m sorry for Mr Osborne if she darns his socks like she’s darned these stockings of yours.  Shocking, they are. I’ll have to do them all over again.’
Doreen sat very still, but her face, from forehead to neck, grew slowly scarlet and her eyes filled with tears.
Mrs Rawlings, unnoticing, snipped away angrily with her scissors.  Little bits of black wool fell on the floor beside her.
‘I think you’re very unkind,’ Doreen said at last in a strangled voice.
Mrs Rawlings looked up quickly and stared at her in astonishment.
‘What did you say?’
‘I think it’s a very unkind thing to say that about Mrs Osborne’s darning. She hates darning.  She only does it because I can’t do it myself.  I don’t mind if they’re a bit bumpy.’ Her voice shook. (p.80)

This is the most courageous act of Doreen’s young life, and mother sends her to bed for it.

Barbara Nobel (1907-2001) wrote six novels

• The Years that Take the Best Away (1929)
• The Wave Breaks (1932)
• Down by the Salley Gardens (1935)
• The House Opposite (1943) (Reprinted by Dean Street Press in 2019)
• Doreen (1946) (Reprinted by Persephone Books in 2005)
• Another Man’s Life (1952)

Only Doreen and The House Opposite seem to be available, I’ve just bought The House Opposite for the Kindle, it’s about a couple having an affair during the Blitz… this is the blurb:

It was curious that the aerial bombardment of London, which had ennobled so much that was normally sordid, should only debase a love affair between two people who had managed for three years to overcome the threat to their relations implicit in all such. To die together would be simple. It would not be so simple to be dug out still alive from the same collapsed building.

Elizabeth Simpson is a secretary having an affair with her married boss. Her father is an air raid warden and her terrified mother takes her courage from concealed bottles of rum. Owen Cathcart, their neurotic teenage neighbour, slips out during night raids to watch the fireworks and collect souvenirs of shrapnel. And Bob Craven, a soldier Elizabeth uses as cover for her illicit romance, plans his taxi rides to see the most dramatic bomb damage.

In this riveting drama of life during the Blitz, the extraordinary immediacy and vivid, intimate detail stem directly from the first-hand experiences of Barbara Noble, who lived and worked in London throughout the war. The result is a unique social document and an unforgettable reading experience.

I wish Persephone Books were more readily available in Australia…

Image credit: By Ministry of Health (publisher/sponsor), Cowes, Dudley S (artist), J Weiner Ltd, 71/5 New Oxford Street, London WC1 (printer), Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (publisher/sponsor) – http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//141/media-141142/large.jpgThis is photograph Art.IWM PST 13854 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30842986

Author: Barbara Noble
Title: Doreen
Publisher: Persephone Books, 2005, first published 1946
ISBN: 9781903155509, pbk with French flaps, 238 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Rainy Day Books, The Basin, Vic, via AbeBooks, $25.00