We Were There at Pearl Harbor, by Felix Sutton
                                                                                                            Illustrated by Frank Vaughn
                                                                                                            New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1957
                                                                                                            Collection of the Author

As you might imagine, reading Joan Wyndham's diaries [see yesterday's post], begun when she was a teenager at the outbreak of WWII, has prompted me to reflect upon the subject of young people and war, and then, since the world has been at war more or less for as long as I can remember, to ponder the broader topic of young people and the world in general, and then, since I was once a teacher, to consider how one teaches young people about the world in general, which is to say about history and the importance of good manners.

Of course in 1904 there was only the Russo-Japanese War and the Boer War and the world was essentially only in the planning stages for total world-wide war, and so the way to prepare young people for adulthood was with tales of Never Never Land and Peter Pan, which premiered in 1904 and probably in retrospect did not do much in the way of preparing young people for World War I except to lead them to imagine it would be a great adventure, in which case the noise and death and mustard gas and the general horror of life in the trenches must have come as something of a shock.

Before 1904, however, teaching children about the world was less important than teaching them how to be good Christians, in which case the Rev. Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, (1862-63) was an enormously popular text.  Water Babies is the story of a little chimney sweep who does not know about Jesus but meets an upper class girl when he falls out of her chimney and soon afterward drowns, thus ending his pitiful and miserable existence in this world and beginning (in death, underwater) his moral education, because he clearly hasn't suffered enough, so that he can go to heaven.

 "Now," said Tom, "I am ready to be off, if it's to the world's end." 
                                                                                                       The Water-Babies, by Charles Kingsley
                                                                                                       Philadelphia: David McKay, circa 1904
                                                                                                       Collection of the Author

Although Tom the little chimney sweep must undergo some fairly arduous challenges and adventures learning to be good after death, one can't help but feel his situation underwater is a considerable improvement upon that which he endured while alive, on dry-land.  By contrast Peter Pan's life is great and glorious good fun as it involves never growing up, and Joan Wyndham's real-life experiences during wartime are by her own account full of excitement and romance and losing her virginity, although there is not always enough to eat.

  Detail, endpaper illustration to 
                                                                                                       We Were There at Pearl Harbor
                                                                                                       Frank Vaughn, illustrator

As far as teaching the young about war and the ways of the world, on the other side of the Atlantic in America, where war is big business, the We Were There book series was created to take historical events and place children in the middle of them, not to put them at danger (although they are constantly subjected to life-threatening events) but more to situate them and their impressionable minds at the very epicenter of man's inhumanity to man, thus heightening the vicarious thrill and wish-fulfillment desire the young presumably have for excitement and sensory overload, not to mention the almost insatiable appetite they so often exhibit for loud noises, things blowing up, catching fire and flooding.  I speak, in part, from my own experience. 

There is nothing like disaster and destruction to distract you, provided you know beforehand you'll survive.  Naturally, as a child, you expect to survive everything.