Just Don’t Mention the War

The big traumas in life can be managed, for better or for worse, according to the experiences one has had earlier, even from the times before memory and how other people dealt with the little, dependent child. My early experience of separation was experienced brutally and suppressed for years, but inevitably coloured my life. It was also followed by restoration, an equally important part of the whole experience, granting a measure of optimism and resilience that has helped me time and again.

So – is it now time to visit those early days?

“Just don’t mention the war!” But of course, I have to. I was just two years old when it began and therefore seven when it finished – most of it just about within my memory span.

My mother said: “We sent you to Sawley Grange in Derbyshire to my cousin’s farm for the summer. It was so hot that you ran around in the fields all day in pants. There weren’t any air raids after all, so we brought you home. It was called the ‘phoney war.'”

Of course, I must have missed my parents, but I have no memory of this time. My mother added: “Everyone around then remembers listening to the radio and Chamberlain saying we were at war with Germany.” I was born in September 1937 and this was September 1939.

My father was a Professor of Electrical Engineering at University College in London. My brother John said to me recently: “Everyone was saying it would be over quickly, but Daddy didn’t believe that. He had everyone in the department in packing cases. When the order came to evacuate the faculty to Swansea, all he had to do was nail down the lids.”

After the phoney war, Swansea, with its docks, coal and factories, was a prime target for bombing. The local children had to be evacuated out again, this time without our families, I think in 1940. My brother John, at 4 years old, was about to attend Bryn Mill primary school when the war started. He thinks we were evacuated out about two years later. When I was older, my mother used to show us the family photo album.

“The whole school was evacuated to Pumpsaint, near Lampeter in mid-Wales,” she told us. “John was already at school, but you were too young. They took you as a favour, Elinor. Look – here are pictures of you with two of the teachers, Miss Dunsford and Miss Dodds. You loved them, they were so kind to you.” My poor mother! Poor children! She tried to make the best of it, but it was a terrible separation and she knew it.

A Tribute to my Mother

I always knew my mother, in particular, loved me. That is the most vital ingredient for the healthy growth of a child: to know that your parents, or at least someone, loves you no matter what.

My mother was a gentle, quiet person, but with a great sense of humour and of the ridiculous – a fun person to be with. She was the oldest child, born in 1898, with two younger sisters and a brother. In her own childhood, she had to take on a lot of responsibility for the family when her parents went away as missionaries to India and she eventually had to stay behind, in the care of relatives.

In her teens in boarding school, she became fascinated with the work of Sigmund Freud, whose writings were just coming out in English and she determined early on to qualify in medicine and then become a psychoanalyst. What an amazing ambition for a young woman of that time – there was only one medical school in England then, the Royal Free in London, which admitted women at all and psychoanalysis was barely thought of as a respectable career!

She struggled through the years of study by applying for grants and teaching surface anatomy to the life drawing art students at Bedford College when started her medical studies. She never knew, each year of her six-year course, whether she would be able to find a grant to continue, and in the later years, she also had to become guardian at times to her sisters as they returned to the UK.

I have only patchy memories of her telling me about the years after qualification and meeting my father, but I may return to them later. For now, I will just say that she married comparatively late, and had first my brother John in 1935, then myself in 1937. I was born on her 39th birthday and she used to joke that it was very tactful of me, as the focus shifted to me and no-one bothered about her age after that.

When the Second World War broke out, our family moved to Swansea, as my father was a Professor at the University of London and the faculties were all moved out. She was already working as a psychoanalyst, but her sense of duty compelled her to offer herself as a GP in place of a man who had been called up. My father and she argued for a while, as he wanted us to be sent to Canada for safety in case Britain went down. Maybe his schooling in Germany and experiences in the First World War gave him a greater fear of the might of the German war machine. I’m glad my mother prevailed, though any of these places might as well have been the moon to a toddler.

For years I felt I had to avoid the subject or comfort her when it came up, but we were able to talk a little when I grew up about how much it hurt her, with her greater understanding than most of her generation of the effects of early separation because of her psychoanalytic training, as well as her maternal instinct.

My mother eventually told me it also brought up much of her own early experiences as the daughter of missionary parents, and it seemed to her a dreadful thing to be repeating it with me and my brother. Neither she nor I could explore it together very much, even then. It was so painful. It took me many years and much therapy later on, as an adult, to recover from this, but I now understand and empathise with her dilemma. I also repeated it in a very diluted form by being a working mother. In the profession we call that ‘repetition compulsion’, to make it feel better.

I can’t really imagine what it must have been like to be living through not just one but a second World War, as both she and my father had to do. I am sure she was a good GP, but she hated it. She had to take great responsibility and had difficulty getting advice and support. She must have worried constantly about the safety of her husband and children, her own competence and the fate of the country, particularly in the early years of the war. It’s different looking back now, knowing the outcome.

She never knew what she would find when she was called out and drove miles with only a torch strapped to the front of the car instead of proper lights because of blackout regulations. She told me, with a laugh, that once she was called out at night to a ‘pit accident’ and drove miles across the wild Welsh hills with this ramshackle lighting, imagining a major disaster. She found the mine, with just one man who had gashed his arm, needing a stitch.

On a more genuinely funny occasion, she was driving through a Valleys village and a small child dashed out almost under her wheels. She stopped and rushed to pick him up, sure that she hadn’t hit him, but as she picked him up he crackled. “My God!” she thought, “I’ve broken every bone in his body!” The child was untouched and bawling loudly. He crackled because he had been sewn into several layers of newspaper under his combies to keep him warm for the winter.

A satisfying epilogue to her work in Aberdare came to my brother John and I after my mother’s funeral, in a letter from the daughter of the GP she had replaced. Unfortunately, we didn’t keep it and I don’t remember the name. Apparently my mother’s last task in the practice had been to deliver the baby of the GP and his wife. This baby, now a young woman, wrote to say she had herself just qualified in medicine.

I also took pleasure in 1997 in speaking at my own retirement party about my mother’s work. I read a letter about “Dr Kapp, appointed by Swansea council during the war, to work some sessions with children with mental health needs”. I guess this probably made her the first child psychiatrist to work in Wales. I read out the references for her, which were good, before telling the audience that it was a different ‘Dr Kapp.’ It was from such a childhood that I was able to fully engage – later – with the experiences of exploration and loss that marked my education at primary level, and then boarding school, finally going on to study medicine.