Hope and Glory: Wartime Through the Eyes of Children

Moira Hinderer

When I introduce topics in the history of childhood to my undergraduate students, I often begin by asking a series of theoretical questions. Are children a group of people in a developmental stage or are they a class of people? How does a generation form and what defines a generational consciousness? How can we best locate the child in history? Embedded in these questions is the idea that in order to view childhood history critically we must question the seeming naturalness of childhood. 

I find that as students try to work through these questions they need a wide variety of textual evidence, texts which reflect the diversity of opinions found among historians, child professionals, social reformers, publishers, filmmakers, parents, and children.  Movie clips and other visual media are useful to this project because they provide additional voices without additional reading. 

One of my favorite movies to use in class is John Boorman's 1987 film, Hope and Glory.  This autobiographical film follows a family on the British home front during World War II, primarily through the eyes of a young boy. The movie provides an interesting picture of "children's culture," particularly in wartime. It is undisputed that World War II was an event of terrible destruction and particularly dangerous to children who were the victims of genocide, bombings, hunger, exposure, as well as separation from family and community. However, Boorman also presents an alternate narrative that explores the excitement of wartime, as his young characters exploit the disrupted authority of adults around them. Even the landscape of wartime childhood is disrupted as bombing creates seemingly endless piles of rubble where there were once neat rows of suburban homes. In Boorman's retelling this destruction becomes a fantastic playground for the young. Like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, the boys in Hope and Glory create their own society as they frolic. The danger they and those they encounter face as the boys look and sometimes play with live ammunition is presented as a wild kind of innocence.

Boorman intimates that the destruction of adult authority during wartime, particularly the authority of teachers, signals a generational shift, as the young are released from the strictures of the English educational system. In several scenes that examine the experiences of children at the local school during the War, Boorman illustrates the declining control of principals and teachers as air raids wreak havoc on lines and lessons. In a final scene, upon realizing that their school has been ruined by a stray bomb, teeming masses of children overwhelm their teacher, as one young boy yells skyward, "Thank you, Adolf!" 

When I show this clip in class, I draw parallels between children's descriptions of the experience of war with children's descriptions of labor fifty years earlier. While child labor reformers offered one narrative of the horrors faced by working children (a narrative would later become dominate in popular consciousness), children often spoke proudly of their work, celebrating the power and goods they accrued as workers.  Similarly, students of history need to consider the multiple and sometimes contradictory experiences of children in wartime. Ultimately, my goal in using a movie like Hope and Glory is to leave students with no simple answer to the question, how do children experience war?