all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway
An anti-aircraft gun on the Isle of Sheppey, probably seen on the walk home from school.
For these drawings it is the architecture of childhood during war, specifically how a boy might fill a notebook with the fierce components of an air war. Gabriel Moshenska writes in Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain about the ways that children directly engaged in wartime activities, from collecting and trading shrapnel, playing in bomb sites, using their cardboard gas mask cases as satchels for findings, to aircraft spotting. 1 Specifically there was an air-mindedness in Britain promoted in the press, in aviation magazines, children’s books and air pageants: waves of bomber aircraft were necessary components of modern warfare. 2 The avant garde nature of such warfare was kept at the forefront of the public mind as battles were fought noisily and visibly in immediate British airspace, not somewhere else as on the high seas with the Navy, or in Europe, Africa or the Far East with the Army. Plane spotting for children was competitive and obsessive.
Identifying aircraft by the particular sound of their engines or their silhouettes in the night sky, writing down registration numbers, all was useful war effort – either information to be telegraphed to RAF bases or ARP wardens, or simply just to know. There were clubs, there were magazines, there were the Biggles stories, RAF men were heroes; Peter’s older brother was in the RAF. Children, Moshenska writes, saw themselves as active participants in wartime society: “ If we want to understand childhood and its material worlds in Second World War Britain, or indeed anywhere, we need to start from this understanding of children as people, keenly observant and aware of their environments even as they are shaped by them, and reshape them for their own purposes.”
1 Moshenska, Gabriel, Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain . London: Routledge, 2019 2 Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words. British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 . Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987
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on site review 44 : play
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