Sent away from home

Text 1: A Letter Home from School, by Arthur Wenlock

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Dearest Mamma, I received your parcel on Wednesday and the cake was very good, though Hobday and Price had most of it, for it is the custom here that a parcel belongs to the whole dormitory, and a boy who hides his cake is called a miser and has his boots filled with water. I did not wish to be a miser. I tell you this so that you will not send another cake, or if you do, that you will send a smaller one, so that less of it is lost.

I am not unhappy, Mamma, or not very. The cold is the worst of it. The water in the jug was frozen on Monday and we washed our faces in our hands without any water at all, which Price says is the Spartan method. Dr Fairlie says that the cold makes men of us. I do not feel more of a man, only more of a chilblain. At night I count the days until Christmas on the beam above my bed, where I have made a mark for each one with my pen-knife. There are forty-one marks left, which is a great many, though fewer than there were.

You will be glad to hear I have learnt to fight, a little. A boy named Cardew called me a baby for crying in chapel, and I hit him on the nose, and he has been civil to me since, and we are now nearly friends. Papa said that school would teach me to stand on my own feet. I think perhaps it has, though I would rather stand on them at home. Please give my love to Bess and tell her she may have my rabbit until I return, but she is to give him back.

Text 2: The Label on My Coat, by Joan Ferrier

An original twentieth-century memoir.

We left from the school gates on a Friday morning in September 1939, each of us with a gas mask in a cardboard box and a brown luggage label tied to our coat button, as if we were parcels. I was nine. My mother walked beside the bus as far as the corner and then stopped, and I watched her get smaller in the back window until the road turned and she was gone. Nobody had told us where we were going. I am not sure anybody knew.

The woman who chose me in the village hall, after the prettier girls had been taken, was a farmer’s widow who did not smile for the first month. She was not cruel, only busy, and I was one more thing to feed. The children at the village school called us townies and held their noses when we walked past. I wet the bed for weeks and lay awake afraid of the silence, which was louder than any street I had known. I wrote home every Sunday and lied in every letter.

And then, without my noticing, it changed. By the spring I could milk a cow, find eggs where the hens had hidden them and walk two miles in the dark without a torch. Mrs Prosser began to save me the top of the milk. When my mother came to visit at Easter she walked straight past me at the station, because the thin, frightened child she had sent away had turned into someone brown and loud in borrowed boots. I went home in 1941, and the city seemed narrow and grey. People say evacuation made us tough. It did. But I have never quite forgiven the label on my coat.

‘Both writers show that being sent away from home made them stronger.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the writers’ experiences of being away from home
• explain how far you agree that both writers became stronger
• compare the ways the writers present their time away from home.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.