This article utilizes poetic representation of an oral narrative to explore the wartime experiences of Jackie (Cole) Hanauer who as a child lived through the repeated bombings, displacement, distress and uncertainty of London during the Second World War (WWII). This poem utilizes a poetic critical ethnographic approach and extends current historical research on individual experiences during the Blitz that have focused on personal literacies against the backdrop of mythic and stifling perceptions of this historical period. The methodological approach consisted of recording, transcription and transformation into poetic form using the guidelines of poetic rendition. The resultant poem offers emotional insight and experiential understanding.
Critical Ethnography, Poetry, and War
There is a human element to war. This is especially true when one considers those conflicts in which national violence is explicitly directed at civilian populations—women, children, and senior citizens—with the aim of generating fear, forcing demoralization, and causing suffering on the home front. This article explores the wartime experiences of Jackie (Cole) Hanauer who as a child lived through the repeated bombings, displacement, distress, and uncertainty of London during the Second World War (WWII). The aim of this article is to capture and then poetically represent the recalled consciousness of these lived experiences and thus offer some insight into the memorial remnants of these experiences 70 years after the events themselves.
As such this article is part of a tradition of critical ethnography in which the presentation of human experience is utilized to present, explicate, and offer access to individual experiences as a counterweight to public and state instituted discourses (Denzin, 2003). Previous poetic inquiries of this kind have addressed homelessness in New Zealand (Carroll, Dew & Howden-Chapman, 2011), living with HIV (Poindexter, 2002), the social experience of mental illness (Clarke, Febbraro, Hatzipantelis, & Nelson, 2005), the voices of seriously ill African American senior citizens (Parsons, Dobbs, Williams, & Daaleman, 2011), being an Arab American in the aftermath of 9/11 (Newton, 2005), being a female soldier (Hicks, 2011), living through child deportation in the Kindertransport (Hanauer, 2012) and experiencing the intifada (Bassett, 2012). What all these studies have in common is the focus and presentation of the experiences of individuals in difficult circumstances as a way of countering more standardized and politicized ways of presenting these events. This type of work offers the potential for freedom in that ethnographic performance texts can “provide the grounds for liberation practice by opening up concrete situations” (Denzin, 2003, p. 263). Poetry is particularly suited for this type of literacy directed resistance since it “provides its readers with specific insights into individualized, personal human experience” and thus counters “the desire to collectivize and generalize” (Hanauer, 2003, p. 69). In so doing, it can remind us all of the value of the humanly individual life in a range of meaningful life experiences.
Wartime London: Historical Perspectives
The military offensive on the civilian home front in England by the Germans during WWII consisted primarily of aerial bombing missions and rocket attacks. Historically two periods of bombing were recorded: following the Battle of Britain in 1940-1941 there was a period of intense aerial bombing referred to as the Blitz and then towards the end of the war in 1944-45 unmanned V-1 and V-2 rockets raids were launched by the German military. The initial attacks at the beginning of the war started on September 7th, 1940 and continued till the 11th of May 1941 (Inwood, 1998). There were during this period 76 nights of concentrated nighttime bombing during which 19,000 tons of high explosive was dropped on London killing 15,775 Londoners and destroying the homes 1,400,000 people (Bell, 2009). The human price of this aerial onslaught was substantial.
The second round of civilian bombings was towards the end of the war. On the 13th of June 1944 the first of the unmanned V-1 attacks was launched (Longmate, 1986). These attacks consisted of pilotless flying bombs that dropped to the ground when the engine stopped giving those below 12 fearful seconds before the arrival of a bomb blast (Garlinski, 1978). The V-1 attacks lasted till the 27th of March 1945, killing 5,864 people and destroying 76,784 homes (Garlinski, 1978). The V-2 rockets were faster than sound ballistic missiles that took only 4 minutes to reach London from their launch pads in Holland (Bell, 2009). These attacks started on the 8th of September 1944 and ended on the 27th of March 1945 (Foster, 2010) killing 2,754 people (Longmate, 2009).
The bombing of London transformed life in the city. Streets were blacked out at night, street signs were removed, houses were destroyed, the landscaped was pockmarked with bomb craters, family, neighbors and friends were injured and killed, life moved underground to air raid shelters, tube stations and cellars (Bell, 2008). The human ramifications of these attacks against civilians were significant. As reported in civilian diaries and memoirs, people suffered from anxiety, stress, and fear often expressed through physical manifestations such as stomach problems (Bell, 2009). Family life was disrupted: fathers were in the military far from their families; women took on new roles as heads of households and workers in factories and a range of positions that had previously been controlled by men; schooling was intermittent; food was rationed; children were evacuated and divided from their families (Bell, 2009). Dislocation, sleep deprivation, uncertainty, anxiety, stress and fear were part of everyday life.
To exasperate the psychological issues of being under such intense pressure, the social discourse of the period did not facilitate the expression of emotional understanding. Quite the opposite was true. The overriding public discursive position was that continuing life on the home front was a heroic act of resistance against the Germans (Bell, 2008). The official propagated narrative of the Blitz was “one that emphasized civilian bravery as the road to national survival; it was one in which fears and anxieties could not be overtly expressed” (Bell, 2009, p. 155). As eloquently analyzed by Amy Bell (2009) this was a discourse that feared fear itself and silenced the explicit expression of negative emotions hiding them in the world of physical ailments. Furthermore, this discourse of wartime London lasted well beyond the years of the war and has fulfilled a symbolic function in the cultural and historic memory of Britain.
It is against this backdrop of an official version of wartime London with mythical and symbolic status in cultural memory that new historical research on individual experiences has emerged. This research propagated through the exploration of personal literacies such as letters, journals, diaries, and oral histories has transformed our understanding of this period of British history (Bell, 2009; Rose, 2003; Welsh, 2006). More than anything else, this historical work has legitimized the role and importance of individual voices and allowed emotional subjectivities in relation to these wartime experiences to emerge.
Poetic Representation: A Methodological Approach
The poem presented here extends this direction of historical research and consists of a poetic rendition of a recorded and transcribed oral life history of childhood experiences in London during WWII. Poetic representation as a research method is situated within the seminal work of Laurel Richardson who utilizing a postmodern-interpretivist position presented sociological data in poetic form with the aim of extending dialogic interaction between participant and reader positions (Richardson, 1992a, 1992b, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2003a, 2003b). Building upon this, more recently Hanauer (2010) has stated that in poetic research the “actual experience of the art work by the research recipient is the understanding of the phenomenon under investigation” (p. 2). As a form of arts-based research, poetic representation of an oral life history has the potential to involve a “whole thinking person” in order to construct a lived “virtual reality” (Alexander, 2003, p. 5). The outcome of this form of research is insight and understanding of experience based on engagement with the actual poetic rendition of subjective understanding and consciousness. Against the backdrop of a stifling, ideologically constituted, mythic construction of historic events in London during and following WWII, this form of engagement with an individual life history is significant for both participant and reader having historical, familial, and personal value.
The method used for constructing this poetic representation consisted of recording Jackie (Cole) Hanauer in her living room, transcribing the poem utilizing the conventions of conversational analysis and then transforming the text into a poem using the guidelines of poetic rendition (Hanauer, 2012; Langer & Furman, 2004; Richardson, 1997, 2003a, 2003b). A private and quiet intimate setting was chosen for this telling of her wartime experiences. The oral life history was only minimally prompted with the request to hear and learn more about her childhood experiences during the war. The narrative telling was recorded using a digital recorder. Once the recording was made, it was transformed into a written text with all relevant coding for oral transcription. The poetic rearrangement of the oral transcript was preceded by an extensive period of listening and reading the oral transcript, numerous conversations with Jackie Hanauer about her described experiences and an examination of the existing historical research literature on London during WWII.
The construction of the poem was a reflective, dialogic, and analytical process. The words of the poem, without exception, are those of Jackie Hanauer. The process of poetic representation involved organizing the oral transcript into marked thematic units, editing extraneous sections, and carefully constructing the graphic presentation of the information so as to maximize emphasis, emotional salience, and juxtaposition (Hanauer, 2012; Langer & Furman, 2004). Maintaining what Langer and Furman (2004) have termed as the “accuracy and emotional integrity of the presentation” (p. 4) was paramount in the poetic construction and a central component of the dialogic engagement with Jackie Hanauer concerning the representativeness of the poem (Richardson, 1997). While chronological narrative facilitated the global organization of the poem, the thematic units of the poem were directed by internal components of Jackie’s narrative and broader historical understandings. Every attempt was made to retain the personal and familial events in conjunction with the broad events of a country at war. It is exactly this interaction that is so important when reading a poetic presentation of wartime experiences—how life as a child during war is subjectively retained and understood; how war and personal, family life events intertwine and become psychic material throughout later life.
The choice to present Jackie (Cole) Hanauer’s childhood wartime experiences as a poem was important for this research inquiry as it allows war and its effects to be seen through the prism of personal engagement. In this sense, this research project is a pacifist endeavor. As argued by Denzin (2003) performing critical ethnography offers the opportunity of the private and personal reentering public discourse potentially countering government machinery propagating aggressive state agendas. The aim here is to present one person’s memory and lasting consciousness of a childhood war experience and thus to provide evidence to explore and understand what war is in contrast to the more fictionalized, romanticized, and glorified versions propagated in some settings. But it needs to be recognized that presenting an English WWII experience as a pacifist project has its own difficulties. Going to war with Nazi-Germany embedded in a fascist ideology designed to erase individual humanity with its explicit state racism and willingness to murder millions based on pseudo-scientific understandings of what counts as human, and belligerent use of state violence translated into imperialist expansion, war and occupation presents a classic case of a “just war” —jus ad bellum (O’Brien, 1981; Walzer, 1992). If any war was just, directing state aggression to halt and respond to the inhumanity of Nazi Germany was justified and yet, war is war with all its personal life changing (life ending) ramifications. Knowing what war is and how war is experienced by children, mothers, senior citizens and soldiers is necessary if war is to be avoided and as such this poetic rendition of war experiences is a pacifist project.
On a more personal and familial level the dialogic, poetic reconstruction of these war experiences has allowed a conversation around childhood experiences to emerge and facilitated far greater interfamilial understanding and closeness to emerge. On the level of history, this poem provides more data on the remembered experiences of those who lived through the difficulties of wartime London and continues this direction in current historical research into the Blitz. The aim throughout and in relation to these various different levels, has been to accurately present Jackie (Cole) Hanauer’s remembered and subjective experiences in London during WWII in way that allows emotional insight and experiential understanding to emerge for the readers.
Jackie (Cole) Hanauer’s Childhood in Wartime London: A Poetic Representation
I.
And so, I remember,
I remember there was a lot of tension
that was when the war was declared.
I remember everyone listening to the radio.
It was such an important part of our lives,
the radio, and all the announcements.
It was kind of a huge radio had a prominent place
like a big thing, like this, like an arch,
like a cathedral with three knobs.
And my granddad always used to say,
how come sound comes out of the air?
how can it be that the sound is coming?
And I used to sit with him, he used to love me dearly.
And I loved him. I loved him very much.
II.
Everyone was scared that London and all the big cities were gonna be bombed
and they weren’t.
But everyone was afraid,
and most of the children were sent out of the big cities,
evacuated.
And I went with my mother, I wasn’t sent by myself.
I went with my mother.
And we lived in some,
tiny cottage after living in a big house in London,
surrounded by fields,
and there were these cows,
which I was afraid of
and if we walked outside there were these cowpats
it looks like white mud,
you know, and you kind squash in it, it was kind of revolting.
And I remember being
afraid of the cows.
We must have been near an air force space,
because the planes used to thunder overhead all the time.
They were practicing for the Battle of Britain.
III.
After a while,
I don’t know how long,
my grandparents missed us so much and we missed them.
We went back to London.
It was all very very quiet.
I remember going back.
We had a flat, just down the road from my parents,
my grandparents.
And everyday my mother took me to visit my grandparents,
they had a little kind of a grocery shop.
They were always standing in this shop,
and they were ever so proud of me.
All the customers used to make a fuss of me,
and they used to sit me on top of these big square tin boxes
of biscuits,
and I used to sit on top
and I could pick any biscuit that I wanted, you know.
IV.
The Blitz started.
I must have been around four and a half or five.
My mother decided that we would go leave London.
My father stayed in London working
and we went to a house where there,
we had a room,
where my mother’s cousins were there
with their children,
that was my auntie Annie’s,
cousin, my grandmother’s sister.
And we went there, and I got the measles.
And because there were so many children in the house,
I had to go to the hospital.
And so they put me in the hospital,
em, and it was awful because the Blitz started
and there were a lot of war wounded,
and they were laying everywhere,
and me laying in the corridor somewhere.
Em, in one of, at the first raid,
or second raid on London,
my father was in his tailoring shop.
it had big glass windows,
em, and some kind of a bomb dropped nearby,
and he, the glass flew into his face and all over him,
and he was bleeding everywhere, everywhere.
And somehow,
I don’t know how,
he had the presence of mind to run into the local hospital,
and he saved his life by doing that.
He would have bled to death
they sewed him up.
And because I was in hospital,
they sent my father to the same hospital, where I was.
So, I remember very brief seeing him,
and my mother was running between the two of us.
V.
And then, I don’t know, but I don’t know exactly why,
but we went to London again.
My parents let their flat go
It was a rented flat.
And they’d had for their wedding a lot of money and they wanted to buy a house,
wedding presents.
And my grandparents wouldn’t let them.
They said no, it’s very far away, we’d never see Looksie, they called me Looksie.
So they rented another flat,
with my mother’s sister auntie Julie
and her husband uncle Ashe.
And I loved it because everyone was making a huge fuss of us all kids,
because I was kissed,
I was cuddled, everyone bought me presents.
They loved me, really loved me.
And then, my father did something,
unfortunately,
he went and volunteered.
He was taken into the air force.
He volunteered to the army.
He was taken into the air force
with his tailoring skills to make whatever. I don’t know what.
And he was sent to Cornwall,
in the South of England.
And, I mean, I didn’t understand.
I didn’t know what was going on.
We saw him sometimes
And my father Harry was being sent abroad
and we didn’t know where.
He was going, that’s all.
VI.
So, my mother and my auntie Julie,
decided to move in with their parents,
my grand grandparents,
and that we would all live together
My auntie Julie would help my grandparents in the shop
because they weren’t so well.
And my mother would run the house.
That’s how it was gonna be.
So we moved there.
And I didn’t know where my father was.
Nobody knew,
after many many months, a long time,
we found out that he was in Palestine.
And we started to get letters
and my father used to write to me,
“Jackie be a good girl,
look after mommy
and remember I love you.”
And I took it all very seriously.
Although I was a very little girl and I could barely write, yeah.
You know, I could hardly write.
I was about seven or eight.
And sometimes we went to school, sometimes we didn’t.
Sometimes, there was an air warning, sometimes there wasn’t.
VII.
And then the Blitz really started
there was very very heavy bombing
every night.
My mother decided that I should leave London,
and I was sent to my other grandmother,
that’s my father’s mother
who I barely knew because
my mother Annie didn’t like her.
They were at loggerheads.
They decided that she is my grandmother
and that she’ll look after me
and she was staying with her daughter
and my cousin.
She was five years younger than me.
I was about seven and she was still a little, a little toddler.
And so, I went there and we lived in the house of some people.
They weren’t Jewish.
There were other children there and a bicycle.
And I was green with envy because I’ve never had a bicycle
and I couldn’t ride one in anyway.
And they rode the bicycles.
And I so much craved affection
I asked my grandmother whether I could sit on her lap.
but there wasn’t that love,
you know
that I had from my other,
my other grandparents.
VIII.
I started to go to school,
it was in the country somewhere,
we used to walk through the fields.
I remember walking through the fields
it was muddy
I was very unhappy.
I cried a lot.
I cried at night when I set myself to sleep.
And I prayed every night that everybody should be well,
that my family in London should be safe,
and my father in Palestine.
I had this book which I used to read every night
about a mole that went under the ground.
I used to go to school,
walking with the kids.
We used to play.
I went to Sunday school which is where you learn all about Christian religion.
I thought it was very nice and I liked it.
VIIII.
My mother used to come and visit once a week.
And it was very hard for her.
She used to come on the buses.
She came one day
I was at Sunday school with the other kids
and the lady in the house,
not my grandmother
thought that my hair ought to be curly
she permed up my hair
it was all frizzy, sticking around my head.
My mother was furious.
She didn’t want me to go to church.
She didn’t want me to go to Sunday school.
She packed up all the things
and we went home.
We went back to London
on by the same day.
I was so thrilled
so excited
and we went on the train.
I had what we call it, motion sickness.
We went on the train.
The train was crowded.
There was lots of foreign troops in England.
There were these American soldiers on the train
and we sat next to somebody.
I started to feel ill.
I vomited.
I vomited on his uniform.
My mother was so embarrassed,
she said “I ‘m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
He said “no no, it’s alright.
it’s alright I’ve got a little girl just like your little girl at home.”
And he said to my mother
“why don’t you come out with me tonight.”
My mother refused
She wouldn’t go.
And I was very upset
because I knew that the American soldiers give
anybody who goes those with them presents.
I’d seen it in the village where we were living,
Some of the women had nylon stockings
and lovely pretty boxes of chocolate with lovely pictures on top.
And she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t go.
X.
We went back to London
the real bombing started.
It was a very bad time.
During that time,
my grandmother
who’s been not very well all her life,
her house was a big old draughty Edwardian house,
huge, three stories, four stories even
and the shop was on the ground floor.
It was very cold.
She used to lean over this oil heater to keep warm.
She used to get bronchitis.
She got this very odd cough
and I don’t remember really,
she was very ill and she got bronchitis.
They put her into hospital
and she died
she was fifty two.
My mother and my grandfather, and my aunts were absolutely heartbroken.
I don’t remember so much because I was too little.
I really didn’t understand
but I know that they sent me out of the house
and I had to go and stay with a cousin,
while they sat shiva.
1
Then we all we lived together.
XI.
When the very bad bombing started,
they decided that we couldn’t stay at home
because
underneath the shop were these
huge oil tanks
which my grandfather used to bottle
and give to the customers.
My mother decided it was too dangerous,
if a bomb hit the place
we’d go up in flames.
So, every night we used to go to the shelter.
XII.
But my granddad wouldn’t leave the house.
He wouldn’t leave the house.
He didn’t go.
Sometimes I used to sleep with my granddad in the same bed.
I used to love him so much,
and he loved me
we used to play games in the evening.
And he always let me win.
Hahaha, I always won, hahaha.
I was about seven or eight
one day,
we obviously didn’t go to the shelter that night, obviously.
I don’t know why but I came downstairs.
We slept like on the first floor.
I came down,
there was a kitchen
my granddad had his armchair there.
And he was sitting in his armchair
I couldn’t wake him up
and he was dead.
He died of a heart attack during the night.
He had heart problems,
He couldn’t live without my grandmother.
XIII.
That was another terrible heartbreak
for my mother and my aunt,
they sent me away to stay with this cousin.
I was very very upset.
He was like my daddy.
He took the place of my daddy.
The bombing
it was quite frightening, I suppose.
I wasn’t afraid.
My mother was wonderful because she didn’t show me her fear.
I know she was afraid.
She was afraid of loud noises.
We used to go and watch these search lights,
it used to be fun.
And when our local church was hit,
and it went up in flames,
we all went and watched it.
All the kids, we watched it.
It was like fun, that’s because it was war that’s was how we were.
And the best pleasure,
my best pleasure was to go to play in the bomb damage,
I loved going there.
It was great fun.
I was an only child,
and all the other kids were there,
we used to mess around and pick up
the little bits,
little bits of all kind of things
and the boys used to take the shrapnel
and exchange it,
you know bantering
and firing,
like pretending to fire at one another.
I was a great reader, and I loved to make things.
And I suppose in a different time,
if times had been different,
they would’ve realized
that I was very artistic.
But there was no time for, you know, to do anything like that.
I was often ill.
all this running back and forth,
I didn’t have a quiet calm childhood,
you know with steady food, it was hard.
XIIII.
Then we started to get this intensive bombing.
We had the V-ones and the V-twos
which were very frightening,
We used to go every night to Camden Town station.
It was quite a long journey,
because we lived in Paddington.
We used to go down two escalators,
it was the deepest underground station in London.
And we used to go down there.
We used to take blankets
but then later on,
there were bunks built underneath
in all the, all the tunnels were,
built up
and we used to sleep there
and I liked it.
I liked it very much
because I used to play with the other children.
There were the women’s voluntary service,
they used to bring down the drinks,
and we used to get biscuits and I thought it was good fun.
Then in the morning
we had to get up
go back
and go to school.
I was always ill
with colds and all kinds of illness.
I was very pale and thin
my mother used to call me Orphan Annie.
We lived in this horrible drafty old house.
I never had a proper night of sleep.
We were always running around.
We didn’t eat properly.
It was difficult.
My mother did her best.
XV.
When the V-ones started,
that is the first time
I remember being afraid
because we used to hide.
It sounded like an airplane
coming over
it was a rocket.
It used to drone along burr burr,
and then it would
stop.
And then when it stopped,
you knew that it was coming down,
the engine stopped,
and it would fall.
So you waited for it,
and that was very frightening,
very very frightening.
Even more frightening
was the V-twos
which had no sound,
no sound at all.
We didn’t hear anything.
And you suddenly heard this enormous explosion,
and the ground shook,
everything shook,
even if it wasn’t near you
and afterwards you would hear the engine
because they travel faster than the speed of the sound.
So you would hear this tremendous bang
and everything, everything shook
even if it was three miles away.
And then afterwards you would hear the explosion and nothing coming over,
That was very bad,
it was very very bad.
XVI.
My mother became ill.
During all these bombings,
this old shop,
it was an old shop,
the shelves collapsed, tins,
it all fell on her head.
And about a month later,
she developed this huge lamp in her throat
and she couldn’t swallow.
They took her into hospital
and removed her thyroid.
And while she was in hospital,
I stayed with my auntie Julie in the old house
every day we used to go to visit.
I used to sit by the bed and hold my mother’s hand.
I was about already nine I think.
I don’t know how long she was in hospital,
but when she came home she was very weak.
And we were still living in this old house
and my auntie Julie had found a flat for herself in High Gate,
which is on the other side of London,
and when my mother came home,
I don’t know how long afterwards after two or three weeks I think,
she went to live in this new flat,
it was the new flat, her flat.
And she left me with my mother who was not at all well.
And I was about nine
I was very, so responsible,
I had to do everything.
I had to look after her,
I felt that I had to do everything.
I used to make sandwiches.
And not much food was available.
But there was a fish and chips shop down the road.
So, every evening I used to go and buy chips
and that was our supper
take it up to her in bed,
and I remember it clearly she was very very weak.
XVII.
It was getting towards the end of the war,
They decided that my father was to be sent home
on compassionate leave
because my mother,
his wife was ill,
and I was a little girl to look after her,
we knew he was coming.
And that was when I got my new dress.
I was thrilled,
I was very excited that he was coming.
And we knew what day it was.
It was in June, and it was a hot day.
And I wore this dress,
I put it on first thing in the morning.
And em, hung around all day outside up in between mommy
and hanging around outside the house.
And eventually in the afternoon a taxi came
and out stepped my father
whom I would’ve never known
never.
He was very thin,
very dark,
dark brown by the sun in Aden.
2
He’s been in Aden,
he’s been shipped to Aden from Palestine.
I knew it was him because he was wearing an air force uniform
and he came up to me
and he kissed me
and he said “hello Jackie,
you’ve grown to such a big girl, yeah”.
Anyways, I took him up
I don’t know how their reunion was, you know
It was very difficult altogether and then it was coming to the end.
XVIII.
It was VE Day,
a victory of Europe day, that’s how it was called.
And they set up in every street,
big long trestle tables with flags and balloons everywhere,
and cakes,
and jellies,
and every child was gonna get a present.
I was very excited and we were all going have a banana.
Now that was a huge thing, nobody had seen bananas for years and years.
Anyway, we went to this party and I was given a little painting set, and I was thrilled.
I had this painting, this little painting set with a paint brush and a banana.
I came home with this banana,
and I started to eat it and from the excitement I couldn’t.
I vomited the whole thing up, yeah.
XVIIII.
And that day, I remembered very very clearly,
I was already quite big. I must have been nearly ten.
I’ve been to the hospital
because my heart beat was too quick.
I was developing something.
We were at the hospital with the doctor
when we heard about this atom bomb.
And my mother said to me,
“This is too wicked a world to bring children into”
XX.
And we went home,
and we saw disgusting pictures in the papers, terrible
terrible pictures.
To have a little bit of light relief we used to go to the cinema,
there used to be glamorous films,
you know singing, and dancing, all from Hollywood,
and they all looked so beautiful,
and to cheer people up I suppose.
There also used to be the news reels.
And one day, it must have been,
right at the end of the war,
they showed pictures taken in the concentration camps,
and I saw it.
And my mother said “close your eyes,
hide your eyes, hide your eyes,
hide your eyes.”
But I’ve already seen it.
I vomited again.
And after I could never look any pictures like that.
I couldn’t look at it.
It used to make me ill.
XXI.
I won a scholarship to the grammar school
which amazed everybody
because I hardly went to school.
I started school.
And I was the youngest girl in the school.
It was a girl’s school.
And we were taught to be ladies.
It was a classic,
you know, a school with classics,
with Greek, Latin, and history, and elocution
and how to stand and how to behave.
We were meant to grow up and be ladies.
Postscript
What are the outcomes of war in terms of human consciousness and influences on the continuing contours of a human life? In one sense as in the poetic representation of Jackie (Cole) Hanauer’s childhood experiences during the Blitz and WWII in England, life continues, one pulls through and makes the best of a bad situation—the war narrative ended with Jackie getting into a very good school and learning to be a lady reflecting the broader social position of the response of the British people to the bombing of London. In reacting to the final version of this poem, Jackie wanted to emphasize the positive asking for this postscript to remind everyone that the “morale of the British population during the 6 years of war, rationing and general shortages, bombing and missile attacks was, in my memory, admirable and remarkable.”
At the same time, the poem itself brings to light the ways in which family life, death, violence, sleep deprivation, illness, dislocation, and bombing intertwined creating a childhood rife with difficulty, anxiety, and fear. The experiences of war, severe in their own right, are juxtaposed with childhood experiences of “having fun” at bomb sites and in underground shelters in playing with other children and the horrific events relayed through media outlets of the day radio and cinema newsreels of the usage of the atomic bomb and the realities of the holocaust. Perhaps this poem more than anything else shows how war intermingles with everyday life and creates its own pastiche of events normalizing the horrific and unacceptable.
