From the role played by the hundreds of thousands of horses pressed into service during World War I, movingly described in Michael Morpurgo’s ‘War Horse’, to the conflict between regugees from rival East African clans in twentieth-century east London in Bernard Ashley’s ‘Little Soldier’, the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition explores the recurring and evolving themes of children’s war literature.
A vast photographic wall panel evokes the woods of the Welsh valleys that were so frightening to the newly arrived London evacuees in Nina Bawden’s ‘Carrie’s War’ and a map winding its way around three walls traces the dangerous journey from ravaged Warsaw to neutral Switzerland undertaken at the end of World War II by four unaccompanied children in Ian Serraillier’s ‘The Silver Sword’. A nice touch is the ‘library’ where children can browse the featured books and others.
Short recordings of each of the authors illuminate the inspiration behind their stories and among the authors’ original manuscripts on display is the school exercise book – with a note offering the reward of £1 should anyone find the book and return it – in which in 1972 Robert Westall wrote ‘The Machine Gunners’, reading it aloud to his 12-year-old son as he went, ruthlessly changing any passages that proved less than gripping.
In the section devoted to Morpurgo’s ‘War Horse’ is a full-size wooden horse, used to show World War I soldiers unused to their mounts. There’s also a letter to Lord Kitchener from two children begging the secretary of state for war to spare their pony – and a reply from the War Office in Whitehall reassuring them that no horse under 15 hands was to be requisitioned.
Children can crawl into a recreation of the fortress, complete with (miniature) bunk and vintage comics, made by a gang of kids in ‘The Machine Gunners’ and open the kitchen dresser in Hepzibah’s kitchen from ‘Carrie’s War’ to discover a skull among the blue and white china, but this is really an exhibition to appeal to bookish kids of around nine upwards who are already familiar with at least some of the stories – and to adults fascinated by the writing process.