Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain

Abstract

How do children cope when their world is transformed by war? This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and playgrounds. This study of the material worlds of wartime childhood offers a unique viewpoint into an extraordinary period in history with powerful resonances across global conflicts into the present day.Modern warfare is a unique cultural phenomenon. While many conflicts in history have produced dramatic shifts in human behaviour, the industrialized nature of modern war possesses a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of our behaviours, from the total economic mobilization of a nation state to the unbearable pain of individual loss. Fundamentally, war is the transformation of matter through the agency of destruction, and the character of modern technological warfare is such that it simultaneously creates and destroys more than any previous kind of conflict.The material culture of modern wars can be small (a bullet, machine-gun or gas mask), intermediate (a tank, aeroplane, or war memorial), and large (a battleship, a museum, or an entire contested landscape). All share one defining featurethey are artefacts, the product of human activity rather than natural processes. In this sense, for example, the First World War's Western Front is as much a cultural artefact as a Second World War V2 rocket, a cold war early-warning radar station, wartime factories and bombed buildings, as are photographs, diaries, films, war souvenirs, and a host of conflict-related art forms. Similarly artefactual, though not always understood as such, are peoplethe war-maimed (sometimes fitted with prostheses), war refugees and their camps, collectors of memorabilia, and the post-conflict 'presence of absence' in towns and cities of large numbers of missing men, women and children. Each in their own waythrough objects, memories, attitudes and actionsperpetuate different engagements with conflict and its painful and enduring aftermath.The material culture of conflict offers a field of study which is both rich and fiercely relevant to the world which we inhabit. Wars and other forms of conflict have formed that world. Today we still live in the shadow of two world wars which set new standards for extremes of violence, and violent conflicts remain in progress across the globe as this series of books is inaugurated. These events have created a truly massive volume of material culture. The ways in which people engage with it is conditioned by society's equivocal attitude to violent conflict itself. As John Keegan wrote, 'We are cultural animals and it is the richness of our culture which allows us to accept our undoubted potentiali...

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