... And the Policeman Smiled (30 page)

Anna chose these children on the basis of her private feelings; she thought they would fit in and she would like them and she could give them something … Anna wanted young ones she would have for some time. Some three– and four-year-olds she took in because they had an older brother or sister at the school.

Private benefactors enabled the school to build two new dormitories, while thirty of the youngest children were accommodated in an old farmhouse. There was never enough money for essentials. Hardly a week passed without Anna Essinger setting off for London on a fund raising mission, invariably returning with promises to sponsor more refugee children. The sharpest financial blow came in mid-1939, when the owner of Bunce Court decided she wanted to sell the freehold. It was a choice of buy up or get out. Somehow a mortgage was raised, but the diversion of resources frustrated Anna Essinger's attempts to add further to the number of admissions. In May 1940, her problems were compounded by an evacuation order which transposed Bunce Court from Kent to Shropshire and by the internment of some of its best teachers. The school occupied Trench Hall, a stately home which, having stood vacant for seven years, showed all the obvious signs of neglect. This was when Anna Essinger's philosophy of self-help came into its own, not least in transforming the jungle of a garden to provide food for the entire school.

How Bunce Court got through the war it is hard to imagine, but get through it did and with flying colours, if the testimony of former pupils is anything to go by. The school was that rare achievement – a family within an institution. There was greater contentment there than within the average hostel or foster home and most certainly a greater sense of personal fulfilment.

The irony of Bunce Court was its failure to survive for very long after the war. Anna Essinger's commitment to refugee children was extended into the peace by the arrival of youngsters who had survived the concentration camps. But when they moved on the school lost its reason for being. There were not many families with young children who welcomed a school with Teutonic associations,
however liberal, and the refugee label was a further disincentive to parents canvassing the choice of private education.

Having retired to a cottage on the estate, Anna Essinger appointed a successor, who fought a losing battle against falling rolls and proprietorial interference. Bunce Court, the school, closed in 1949. It reopened soon afterwards as a home for unmarried mothers.

There was a clear understanding between the RCM and the Home Office that youngsters who were already into their teens when they arrived in Britain in 1938 and 1939 should undertake some form of vocational training. But there were four conditions to be met before permits were issued. Two of them favoured refugees; their conditions of work had to be at least as good as those offered to British workers, and their employers had to provide real training as opposed to handing out menial jobs to what was essentially cheap labour. But the other two conditions were tightly restrictive. Young refugees were not allowed to compete with their British contemporaries, and the jobs open to refugees had to be specifically created for them. This meant that farming was the likeliest occupation for RCM boys, even though they mostly came from urban professional and commercial backgrounds and had a positive aversion to rural life. But the country needed food and there was a shortage of workers in this traditionally ill-paid industry.

In February 1941, the RCM circulated some 1500 fourteen-year-olds on the attractions of a career on the land:

Farming is a fine life and a very important occupation, but it is an occupation in which training is necessary. During training you would discover all the benefits of open-air life, and you would learn about growing plants and vegetables and breeding pigs and poultry and ploughing the land in which corn, wheat, turnips, potatoes and many other things will be grown. In a year, you would be able to see the whole of the processes needed to grow and produce these things and, at the end of the time, you would have the satisfaction of seeing the results of that work.

At the same time as you would be learning this outdoor work, lessons would be given to you in English, and religious instruction would be provided. You would work and live among other refugee boys and girls with the same ambition as your own …

Think seriously about farming as an occupation and talk it over
with those who have looked after you. If, when you have done this, you feel you would like to undergo the training, let us know. We feel that if you have put your heart and soul into the work you will have derived a great deal of benefit from your training.

The letter did not mention that, having made the choice, there would not be much chance of going back. The policy of the labour exchanges towards boys who wanted to come out of farming was to refuse them alternative employment.

Clive Milton was one of the few who found that the open life did have its virtues:

We learned to milk cows. We kept pigs. They were not huge farms and we trained for about eight weeks. The farm was very good for me. It gave me time to organise myself – more so than if I had stayed with my cousin. On the farm there wasn't much to do in the evenings – it gave one time to reflect. At seventeen I felt that life was great. But I was always aware of living on charity, which I disliked.

After the training period we went out to a farmer who needed help. The first farmer I went to was a smallholder. He needed a boy to give him a hand. He couldn't afford me for very long. Then I went to a larger farm in Wiltshire. At first the family were very friendly but I think I was beginning to display my entrepreneurial instincts, which they did not like, and there was a bit of friction. I could see opportunities for making money on the farm, but the farmer was looking for a boy to clean out the stable, not a boy dreaming of renting a piece of field and rearing his own animals …

I was always working – I worked in the evenings at bars and doing woodwork. I got up at 5.00 a.m. and went to bed at 11.0 p.m. seven days a week. I had saved £1000 by the time I was nineteen. Then I bought a tractor and was going to be a subcontractor but I got called up.

Another occupation, essential to the war effort and which urgently needed more staff was nursing. An RCM report on girls in nursing appeared in 1944, when the number of
Kindertransporte
volunteers in the profession passed the two hundred mark.

Of course, there are some who prove unsuitable for nursing. It is found very often in the cases of those who fell by the wayside that they have entered hospital work too young. War-time needs have led the Ministry of Labour to consider the age of seventeen and a
half as suitable for entry, but we continue to believe that under eighteen a girl is not psychologically or physically developed enough to undertake the strenuous and demanding life of a student nurse. The gap between school-leaving age and eighteen is best filled by a course such as nursery nursing.

Training for nursing was on strictly formal lines, with great emphasis on turning out in a neat, starched uniform and on working to the rule book. Comments in personal record cards dwell on disciplinary matters.

A talk with Matron reveals that Ruth is a very good worker, especially with small babies. She is accurate and reliable and clean in her work (unfortunately not in her personal hygiene, which is so important for a children's nurse). Matron and the other nurses have tried hard to improve this fact, but unfortunately without much result.

Many girls worked in minor clerical jobs and were encouraged to learn shorthand and typing skills at evening classes. Brigitte, aged sixteen in 1943, hoped to give up her job as a messenger to do secretarial studies full time:

We informed her that this was quite out of the question as it would prove far too costly on public funds, there being full maintenance, fees, clothing, pocket money, books, to be provided for at a possible minimum of £3 a week … when asked why she could not consider evening classes she said that she had to be at home and in bed between 9 and 9.30 and she would have no time to study.

Brigitte did make enquiries at Pitmans, where classes started at five in the evening, and at the Kilburn Polytechnic, where there were weekend classes, but continued to doubt her ability to study enough at evening classes.

She was interested in a correspondence course but that could not be advised for so young a girl. She says she has friends and mentioned Mr Israel, who had promised her some financial help. She asked whether, if these friends could give substantial financial help, we would have any objection to her leaving work for study. We told her if other people could give her the opportunity we could not, we certainly would have no objection.

Menial work was easy to come by, either through the local Labour Exchange or through the Movement. But the jobs were invariably dead-end and, despite the Home Office call for ‘real' training, wages were at subsistence level or below, which led to a succession of requests for small loans from the Movement. Many girls and boys wandered from job to job, like Rosina Domingo:

A friend from Vienna and I went into domestic service in a very big house near Brighton. The servants there resented us. ‘The foreigners come here and they do this and they do that … There are plenty of English people to do the work …' All I got there was five shillings.

Once again I was a nursery maid. My friend was a kitchen maid. We shared a room and we had stone hot-water bottles. We used to joke in the night and have a laugh. The hot-water bottle and my friend fell out of bed and the cook was in the room underneath and she hit her the next day.

In 1940 I came to London with that friend and we went for a job near Tottenham Court Road in a clothes factory – a Jewish firm. They gave us jobs as machinists. At the end of the week we had to leave because the other girls would not work with Germans. The employers cried because they knew what had happened to us.

When Bloomsbury House or a regional committee acted as a Labour Exchange, it was a case of take it or leave it – there was no time for career advice. Claire Barrington worked in the tailoring trade:

Tailoring was seasonal, which of course I didn't know. This means you are in one day and you can be out the next. There were more men than women in tailoring and I got on better with them than with the women. They were nicer. I worked for private tailors, people who were doing quite expensive clothes. They didn't pay us much, but they charged a lot. They were always screaming and shouting, but it wasn't all that bad – only the insecurity. I was forever worrying about getting a job or being out of work. It was a constant worry.

I may have had a visitor from the Movement once in a blue moon, but as long as you had a job and you ate reasonably well then that was all they worried about. Anyway, they had too many to deal with so they couldn't single me out. I was completely forgotten; nobody cared whether I lived or died. I have heard some
dreadful stories of people who were domestic servants who were treated like scum … I could never go through that again …

After going to evening classes to study dress design, Claire hoped for better things, but was soon disillusioned when she found that her employer expected to use her designs without paying her. She then tried a government training course in shorthand and typing but, lacking confidence, ended up as a filing clerk.

I was so insecure, I overworked in order to please everybody. In the end I resented it – it was no different from tailoring. But it was me who created the pattern. A born victim. Since you are not sure of your ability and you lack confidence, you are willing to do everything, and eventually it all piles up on top of you and you resent it and eventually you leave. That was the pattern of my life.

Herbert Gale came to England in December 1938, at the age of fifteen. While in the transit camp at Lowestoft he was offered a choice of hostels in Belfast, Leeds or London. He chose Leeds. His regional committee found him work:

I was sent to an upholstery firm, where I had to sew one side of a cushion in readiness for it to be stuffed for a three-piece suite. I was given fare money and a packed lunch – meat loaf sandwiches. I have never stopped hating minced meat since then … I found the work really boring and the people I worked with were very suspicious of me being a foreigner. They were poor and uneducated. My wages were 5/- a week, which I had to hand over unopened to the hostel. I was given 1/- back.

After a while I wanted to change my job. They found me a job in a hairdresser's, where I was a lather boy, in between sweeping up. I lathered the customers for a shave and, after I had proved myself, I was allowed to put hairgrease on the customers. I was promised that when I was more qualified I would be allowed to shave the customers. I did get a few tips! There was a Jewish baker's next door owned by a very kind lady who was on the Committee. She told me to come in every day and have as many cakes as I wanted – free!

Philip Urbach fell on his feet when by chance he met a teacher from a school which was being evacuated to Wales. The school was Summerhill, run by A. S. Neill, whose revolutionary views
on education have since had considerable influence on modern teaching methods. Philip was taken on as a sort of pupil-teacher, helping with the children and also furthering his own education.

He was a wonderful man, A. S. Neill. Not only did he pay me a pound a week in the end, but I could attend classes whenever I wanted. He gave me considerable freedom to do whatever I liked with the children – I was expected to do something – but sometimes I would simply help fire the boiler, which was always a great preoccupation at Llanfestiniog. At other times I would take the children for walks or adventure expeditions, or I took them camping. It always amazes me now, looking back, because I was so young and inexperienced, the kind of trust he had in me. I took them on mountaineering expeditions, although I had no experience myself of mountains. I also took them for various sports – unlikely as it may seem when you look at me now – including some German ball games which were not very well known over here. And I began to teach a little. So I spent two years there and what English education I had, I had there.