Big Brum

We began our exploration of the impact of war on ordinary people’s lives at the same time as President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were explaining to the world the necessity for a war against Iraq. This proved to be a useful coincidence because we knew that young people would have very serious questions about this war and how it would impact upon them and their lives. This became evident during our devising. Bev Hayward, the Year 6 teacher at Pegasus School, decided to prepare her class for the project by bringing her mother Joan Bygrave, a child evacuee in the 1940s, into school. The Company sat in on the session. One young girl raised her hand and asked of Joan “What will happen to us when world war three breaks out?” It was not the last question of this type and we began to cognise that the impending war was at the forefront of these young people's minds. Joan was deeply moved that these questions are still being asked but she could only speak of her own experience that still had the rawness of a recent trauma for her. On the 31st August 1939 the order “Evacuate forthwith” was issued and within a week ‘Operation Pied Piper’ as it was, to our minds unnervingly, called moved a quarter of the population from towns and cities to places of safety in the countryside. Unfortunately for Joan it was a deeply unhappy experience:

“I had this feeling right here in the bottom of my tummy, I still get it, feeling sick even now talking to you. It was a physical pain like a depression. I wrote a letter home it said, 'Dear Mom and Dad, Fetch us home, fetch us home, fetch us home……all I wrote, pages and pages, just sayin’ fetch us home…'”

Our aim was to create a piece of theatre-in-education that developed the work of Big Brum both artistically and educationally, providing young people with a powerful learning experience through theatre and drama.

We arrived at our objectives:
· To provide the young people with the opportunity to explore the concepts of being displaced and dislocated through the role of evacuees.
· To allow them to explore their own sense of displacement and dislocation.
· To encourage the children to play through role.
· To give the children a felt understanding of what it was like to be an evacuee.
· To give them a unique experience of visiting the site of Avoncroft.

Whilst the purpose of the day was to give the young people an experiential drama it was not enough to have them wandering around for three hours bumping into actor/teachers dressed as local villagers. As with all our work, the event needed to have a specific purpose to it. There needed to be a particular task through which the young people could explore the universal. So, we created a young girl, Ruby Barker.

Preparatory Session

The class teacher was asked to dedicate a corner of the classroom to the preparatory work. An effigy of a child was created by drawing round a member of the class who were then told:

This is Ruby’s story. Ruby was eleven years old when her mother was told that she had to leave Birmingham. She was to be evacuated. These are her things. This is the box she had to carry with her at all times.

The young people began to build a picture of Ruby through exploring the objects she had to take with her. They also had to decide three personal things that they thought Ruby would take:
· something which holds a memory of her home
· something which offers comfort
· something that Ruby thinks will be useful to her

There were many responses to this task: a photo of Ruby being held by her mother when she was a baby, an old battered teddy bear which had belonged to her grandmother and her mother, a diary – so she may tell her family about her experience of the countryside.

The separation of the child from its family was of utmost concern for the young people. Through deciding which objects Ruby would take they were protecting the child into, as far as they were able, this unknown environment.

The final task was for every member of the class to create an identity for themselves, a child with a history and background compatible with the 1940s, a child to be evacuated.

The Journey to Avoncroft

One the day of their participation, the class were awaiting the arrival of the Company in costume, grasping a picnic of jam sandwiches (spending money, crisps and pop etc were specifically outlawed) and their new identity cards.

The children were met by an evacuation officer who distributed gas masks to each child and marched her charges out of the class. In the playground they were then drilled by Mr Blewitt, an over zealous ARP warden, who boarded them onto the bus (at some schools parents participated by waving their children off while the ARP exhorted the children to smile and give three cheers for his majesty the king).

Throughout the journey, which could take up to an hour, they were taught numerous do’s and don’ts, vigilance in the face of a formidable enemy, wartime songs, and Mr Blewitt held forth on why all had to dig for victory! The journey to Avoncroft was an essential element of the programme. It created space for the children to bed into the drama and suspend disbelief. The young people were fully aware that they were in a drama, but they were able to gain a felt understanding of what it would have been like to be evacuated.

Avoncroft

On arrival at Avoncroft, the children were marched through the village, stopping to engage with different roles, catching fleeting glimpses of ‘incidents’, to the village hall where they were to be billeted.

Whilst it was important to give the young people a sense of what it meant to be billeted with their new foster parents it was not necessary for them to experience the whole billeting process as this was not the function of the day. We used a variety of drama conventions to stop the drama such as thought tracking to reflect on what the evacuees were feeling and thinking or narration to move time on.

The young people were introduced to Mrs Willis, their teacher in Avoncroft. Mrs Willis was deeply troubled. She read them a letter she had received from the mother of a young girl who had been staying with her. The girl’s name, Ruby Barker. The ripple round the room at the mention of the name was very tangible and immediately the drama took on a qualitatively new dimension. Mrs Willis explained to them how Ruby had tragically died in an accident when she fell through the ice walking over the frozen Avoncroft village pond. It happened one evening. Nobody saw her. She was found the next day.

In her letter to Mrs Willis, Ruby’s mother, desperate to know all she could about her lost child, begged to know what life was like for Ruby in Avoncroft. Mrs Willis asked the new arrivals if they would help her to understand what life in Avoncroft was like for Ruby, after all “You understand what it is like to have to leave behind all that is familiar….”

And so, following a break for sandwiches accompanied by music from the radio and supplemented by plain biscuits, a slice of apple, milk or water, the evacuees set off on a journey of discovery.

With Mrs Willis as their guide the evacuees visited those places which were a refuge for Ruby: the old barn where she would seek out the company of Violet and Bessie, the landgirls; the windmill and Mr O’Grady the miller, who befriended Ruby by sharing his bread with her; the dovecot where Ruby used to go to listen to the soft cooing of the birds.

As Ruby’s life began to unfold the evacuees broke off into smaller groups to follow up numerous trails they unearthed: the earth closet where Mrs Archer sent Ruby for persistent bed wetting during her first weeks in Avoncroft; the police station where Ruby befriended a child who was not picked by any family and had to spend their first night in the cells. There were those people in the village who remembered Ruby and the things she got up to: Mrs Lonsdale the farmer’s wife, and Mr Smith the chainmaker.

Each group of evacuees were asked to bring back an object from all the places they had visited to the school room to help build a picture of Ruby’s life in Avoncroft.

With everyone assembled, the evacuees shared back their findings. Through narration, Ruby was recreated, walking those last fatal steps across the ice. The children were invited to place the significant objects they had found one by one somewhere on Ruby. They were able to encode their understandings of what life was like for Ruby as evacuees and in doing so speak as young people today about their own sense of displacement and dislocation in the world. Their comments as to why they had selected their objects were recorded and these provided Mrs Willis with the raw material to write the letter to Ruby’s mother. The following is one example:

Dear Mrs Barker……

Ruby felt like she wanted to die. She missed her parents so much. She wanted to be a normal child. She tried to make things better for her doll, to make her own special place, where she could feel special. But in Avoncroft, Ruby herself felt abandoned. It was as if the pain in her heart would split her in two.
She was breaking down, like a nervous breakdown. But then she danced and she pictured her Mum dancing with her, smiling and laughing.
For Ruby some lessons appeared as punishments. Punishment didn’t help her. She used to try to take her mind off her problems by remembering her Mum when she was alone in the dark with the smell of the pillow. She never forgot the smell of love. She held it in her arms.”

The shortcomings of our vision lay in the mixed success of pairing secondary and primary children, which would need more careful preparation in future, and too much dependence on the ability of the class teacher to take on the level of preparation for the day we required. Above all, however, Avoncroft was an unforgettable experience for all of us and has left the Company hungry for more…

Some photos: