MISSING PARENTS IN THE FAMILY STORY

Nicholas Tucker
This article considers missing porents in the lamily staty, drawing an a wide range of texts. but
focusing on Eleanor Graham's The Children Who Lived in a Barn (1938). While the notion of
lively adventure stories where young adults manage happily without adults present is appealing,
it is suggested that the absence of literature exploring children's needs in relation to significant
adults did nothing to mitigate the casual way many children were later treated as evacuees
during the Second World War.

One of children's literature's truisms is that it is necessary to get rid of parents early on
in a story if the child characters concerned are going to be able to experience really
exciting adventures. Like many Other received ideas in this foeld, It is not strictly
accurate. From The Swiss Family Robinson onwards. numbers of perfectly good
adventure novels have included parents too; think of the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder,
Roald Dahl's Donny the Champion of the World or, more recently, Geraldine
McCaughrean's (2001) Slap the Train! But for those heady adventure stories where
children regularly perfonn feats way beyond their skills and maturity, not having parents
around to voice their inevitable objections certainly does make it easier for a writer
when it comes to the willing suspension of reader disbelief. Anne Ellis (1970) in The
Family Story in the 1960s estimates that, in the period about which she was writing,
around 40 per cent of parents in such adventure stories were disposed of by their own
death, mostly through rail, air or car accidents. Another popular cause of prolonged
parental absence in children's books was illness, either of the parent themselves or else
someorle dear to them. Such parents can therefore still be described as nice and loving
even though once they go absent they often seem to care very little about what their
children may be doing from day to day. Straight parental abandonment meanwhile, as in
Honsel and Gretel, is not on the whole employed in twentieth-century adventure stories,
so allowing an image of the family as a semi-sacred institution to survive lIn~thed.
When a parent does deliberately walk out, as in Cynthia Voigt's moving and memorable
novel Homecoming (1981). the sadness and anxiety this provokes In the children left
behind persists throughout the story. This is in contrast to the more care-free
atmosphere found in those stories where children understand that their parents have
only left them because they have to. Once on their own, these child characters nearly
always'cope extremely well. The oldest child will take up the parental role themselves,
and together with the rest will get by with very little trouble. Almost invariably drawn
from the wel~ heeled middle classes. they can usually rely on a certain amount of
deference as well as practical help from those others around them from more humble
walks of life. While the very youngest children may miss their parents to the extent of
having a little weep every now and again. older children are shown as having virtually
no psychological or emotional needs for their mother and father. Problems, when they
arise, will tend to centre around purely physical difficulties such as how to catch, skin
and cook a rabbit. light a fire, sail a boat at night. capture and tie up thugs or escape
from caves, dungeons. locked rooms. thick forests or far distant parts. Their fictional
parents. meanwhile, tend to get by worry-free without their children because they too
seem to have little or no obvious emotional attachment to them. For such parents,
chUdren may indeed be 'Better drowned than duffers' (Ransome 1930, 16), although
one can only speculate how well that famous paternal telegram would have gone down
in a Coroner's Court had any of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons actUally met
that watery death that so often seemed to be coming their way. Had it been made
evident in such fiction that the parents did feel strongly for their children. this would
then make it difficult for their offspring to forget about them quite so easily, so
hampering the progress of the story. And when such children and their parents are re-
united in the final chapter, and sometimes on the very last page at that. it is the parents
who occasionally behave more childishly, leaving their children basically in charge
right up to the end. A good example of this particular genre is provided by Eleanor
Graham's (1938) The Children who Lived In a Bam. Going into many editions, it has
since been re-published by Persephone Books in 2001 along with a perceptive preface
by Jacqueline Wilson. The author was the founding editor of Puffin Books, a post she
held for 20 years. A powerful figure in children's literature ellis (1944) quo1es her,
writing critically about the 'familiar pre-war formula for a 'good modern story' -to get
rid of the parents. divOfCe the children from home surroundings and influence and, in
an atmosphere of artificial freedom, to project them into a succession of thrilling
adventures, 'very unlikely to occur in real life.' How then did Eleanor Graham herself
cope with 'getting rid of the parents' in her own novel? It starts with five children aged
between 7 and 13 whose parents go away an a plane trip, once again to minister to
illness. but who then disappear without trace. Left on their own. the children are shown
having to cope with real, identifiable problems. The bam where they are camping out is
cold and wet. and there is hardly any money to buy food. Local people are suspicious
rather than overtly helpful, and a hated District Visitor-always referred to as the
DVconstantly tries to get all the children put into orphanages. So far, so realisticand
Graham also understands her child characters' dependence on each other and the
necessity they all feel to stay together. A few years later, this was also the conclusion
that the celebrated child psychoiogist Anna Freud came to when working with a group
of young concentration camp survivors. They too placed the continual presence of each
other first in their emotional needs. She concluded that putting up such children for
adoption might mean they would lose more than they gained. This was a comparatively
novel finding In child development; and to the extent that Graham antidpated it. she can
be congratUlated. But on a different emotional front her stmy also soon ceases to
convince. As the Daddy in the stmy putS it to his slightly more hesitant wife when their
joint depanure is first mooted: Now stop fussing about the children. They can manage
perfectly well by themselves-and it's quite time they had a shot at it. You do far too
much for them. It doesn't give them a chance to be independent. And. after all. isn't that
what we've been trying to teach them ever since they wen! born? (Graham 1938) It is
this philosophy, however crass and se1f~ng, that is then more or less endorsed by the
events that occur In the rest of the stmy. Graham's close attention to physical detail
masks the fact that her description of children's apparently endless ability to cope
emotionally oyer a long period of time is both unreal and. I would argue. dangerously
misleading. The father in this stmy Is a writer. and it is tempting to speculate that he
might have been a children's writer. His chikkearing philosophy Is another sort of
fantasy. consoling to adult readers as well as to child readers. Increasingly beset by lad:
of servants and the growth of child psychology stressing the Importance of family fore.
real twentietlKentury parents too may have enjoyed reading adventure stories about
children's capacity to live independently for a while. While their own children can enjoy
the fictional fantasy of their own premature competence. parents might equally relish
the fantasy of being part of a parental couple that can get away from their children from
time to time without ever having to experience worry or guilt. Or put another way. here
was fiction that appeared to confirm that because children do not really need their
parents all the time. parents in their tum need not be there all the time. Fiction is aU
about fantasy, and it would be mearH'1\1nded to begrudge either children or parents
enjoying comforting. even llattering, fantasies in their literature, But fiction is also
about truth, and it is here that the plethma of stories about children coping without
parents seems dysfunctional at the time in that it was so rarely balanced by other sorts
of stories pointing out the importance of parents for children. This is not a trivial point,
FIction always has the capacity to teach and set rofe models. and those parents who read
stories to their children or just to themselves could not help but absorb some of their
particular mlnd-sets at the same time. But the universal message conveyed by adventure
stories featuring super-<:ompeten1 child characters was not. at this particular period of
history. always in children's best Interests. Eleanor Graham wrote her best-selling The
Children who lived in a Barn in 1 g38. One year later. real children were sent to live in
the country away from their parents. Some had a good time; OIDers did not, sometimes
suffering for long periods as a result. It would be stUpid to blame children's adventure
stories for the extraordinary lack of supervision that occurred once child evacuees were
<,laced in their country billets during the last war. But it could also be said that such
adventure stories played no pan in alening anyone in authority at the time to children's
dependency needs, and the way these were so rarely taken into account when children
were placed in a new home where they failed to bond. The official line at the time was
that there was a war on and everyone had to do their bit. Taking children away from
town centres did indeed make sense during periods of intense bombing. But failing to
follow them up after that was a wicked act of dereliction, and anyone who doubts this
statement should read the various eye-witness accounts quoted in H. V. Nicholson's
(2000) searing account of mukiple child neglect and abuse: Prisoners of War. True
Stories of Evacuees: Their Lost Childhood. Official reactions to occasional complaints
at the time can be judged from a terse note quoted by Nicholson from a civil servant in
the Home Office, expressing his strong feelings about pupils and parents who
complained about conditions in those camp schools set up in the countryside during the
war. Most of the parents would prefer that their boys should attend the day school and
live at home. The boys themselves have been used to living at home and there Is no
boarding school tradition in the family. Boys and parents alike see all the
Inconveniences of institutional life and very often overlook Its advantages. Whereas the
parents of a boy at public school usually discount his stories of hardships, there is a
tendency for parents under the new circumstances of a camp school, used for evacuation
purposes, to accept grumbles at their face value. (Nicholson 20001 Curiously enough,
some of the most popular children's writers who wrote glowingly about the joys of
being away from parents already knew more than enough about childhood loneliness
and neglect from their own lives. Eleanor Graham was a sad, isolated child, as were
Anhur Ransome and Enid Blyton during much of their childhood. Well placed to
describe a child's need for enduring parental love and understanding, they chose instead
to dwell on a child's apparently effonless emotional resilience. Contemporary child
psychology was also in a period of denial about children's dependency needs. it was
only towards the end of the war that John Bowlby and Donald Wlnnlcott staning getting
the message out that a child's needs for attachment to penmanent figures in their lives
was as basic as his or her needs for nutrients, wanmth and physical safety. Even so,
some of the best children's authors, better used than most to thinking about their own
childhoods while writing about Imaginary ones, could have done more to write about
children who actually suffered from being separated from their parents. Had they done
so, they might well have got to a position of understanding more about childhood
attachment needs in advance of the psychologists at the time. Squandering the chance of
making such emotional insights in preference for stories of flattering but ukimately
unconvincing juvenile derring-do was surely something of a cop-out, Describing a state
of childhood dependence Is harder than getting away with fantasies of independence,
and we still live in a culture where crude and insensitive accusations of being a 'cissie'
or 'mothe(s boy' inevitably rankle. But good writers should be equal to this challenge,
particularly when young readers know In their hearts that however much they thrill to
adventure stories set away from home, it is only on condition that their own family
remains warm and accessible in reality and at the same time. A similar charge could
also be made against those many romantic children's stories written about boarding
schools during the first half of the twentieth century, and sometimes well beyond. Such
stories rarely spoke of the agonies of home-sickness, the perils of being bullied and the
estrangement that sometimes grew up between parents and children so prematurely
deprived of their home base. The Home Office spokesman already quoted, writing so
warmly about boarding school traditions, may well have had a wonderful time at the
establish. ment he almost certainly went to or he may have been lonely and bullied and
then preferred to forget about the experience. In all eventS, there were no boarding
school stories available to him at the time to shake his conviction, so convenient for the
wartime authorities, never 'to accept grumbles at their face value.' It took William
Golding's (1954) superb Lord of rhe Flies finally to hole the myth of young children
able to manage quite easily on their own and well away from home for any but the
shortest period of time. Popular psychology also caught up with this insight, with John
Bowlby's (19S1) Child Care and the Growth of Love, a paperback best-seller in 1951.
Children's adventure stories today as a result show far more understanding of both sides
of the parent-child dyad. But it Is a pity that they could not have moved towards such
emotional awareness at a time when this was really needed, in the years shortly before
and then during the Second World War.
References
BOWLBY, J. 1931. Child care and the growth of love. London: Penguin.
ELLIS, A. 1970. The family story in the 1960s. London: Bingley.
GOLDING. W. 1954. Lord of the flies. London: Faber.
GRAHAM, ELEANOR. 1938. The children who lived in a barn, 2001 ed. London:
Persephone Books.
McCAUGHREAN. G. 2001. Stop the train! Oxford: Oxford University Press.
NICHOLSON, H. Y. 2000. Prisoners of war, true stories of evacues: their lost
childhood. london: Gordon Publishing.
RANSOME. A. 1930. Swallows and amazons. London: Jonathan Cape.
VOIGT, C. 1981. Homecoming. London: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.
Nicholas Tucker (author to whom correspondence should be addressed),
54 Prince Edward's Road, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1 BH, UK.
E-mail: nicktucker@dsl.pipex.com

New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship, Vol. 11, No, 2, 2005
ISSN 1361-4541 print/1740-7885 online/05/020189–5
© 2005 Taylor & Franci, DOI: 10.1080/13614540S00324187