The British Mother Who Fostered 28 Evacuee Children During the Blitz
The English Farmwoman Who Fostered 28 London Evacuee Children During the Blitz — Sending Each One Back With a Jar of Homemade Jam So They Would Remember They Had Been Fed, Yorkshire, 1940–1945.
September 1940. Harrogate, Yorkshire, England.
Agnes Hartley, 54, had raised four children of her own on a Yorkshire farm. Her children were grown. Her husband William worked the farm. Her house had four bedrooms and a large kitchen and a pantry that was better stocked than most in England because Agnes had been quietly putting things by since 1938 when she read the newspapers and understood what was coming.
When the evacuation program sent London children to Yorkshire, Agnes Hartley registered for two.
They sent her six.
She put them all in the two largest bedrooms, argued briefly with the billeting officer about the mathematics of it, lost the argument, and fed everyone supper.
The Six Become Twenty-Eight
Over five years, Agnes Hartley housed twenty-eight evacuee children.
They did not all come at once. They came in waves — as the bombing intensified, as families were disrupted, as the billeting system moved children from families who could no longer manage to families who could.
They ranged in age from three to fourteen. They came from Stepney, Bermondsey, Whitechapel, Hackney — the working-class neighborhoods of London's East End that were being methodically destroyed by the Luftwaffe.
They arrived, most of them, in the specific condition of children who have been frightened for a long time and have developed a careful blankness as protection. Some wet the bed. Some didn't speak for the first week. Some fought. Some cried for their mothers every night for months.
Agnes Hartley handled all of it with the matter-of-fact competence of a Yorkshire farmwoman who had seen animals born and animals die and children through every variety of ordinary crisis and understood that what frightened things needed was not sympathy speeches but food, routine, and the reliable presence of someone who was not going to be frightened away by their fear.
She fed them. She established routines. She was present.
She did not replace their mothers. She did not try. She made no speeches about being their family now. She simply ran a household that they were part of, with expectations and meals and bedtimes and the occasional firm word, and she let that be enough.
It was enough.
The Jam
Agnes Hartley made jam every autumn from the farm's fruit — plum, gooseberry, blackcurrant, whatever the season gave.
When each child left — sent home when the bombing eased, or when the war ended, or when their families reclaimed them — Agnes sent them with a jar of jam.
Every one. Twenty-eight children, twenty-eight jars.
She wrote the child's name on a small label in her careful handwriting and stuck it to the lid. She did not write a note. She did not make a speech.
She handed the child the jar.
She said: "That's from the farm. So you remember."
She meant: so you remember you were here. So you remember someone fed you and it was good and you were safe for a while.
The children understood this. Children always understand what is meant beneath what is said, when what is said comes from someone who means it.
What the Jam Was
Twenty years after the war, a woman who had been one of Agnes's evacuees — a woman named Doris, who had arrived at the farm at age seven and gone home at age twelve — wrote a short memoir of her evacuation years.
She wrote about the jam:
"I carried that jar from Yorkshire to London on the train and I didn't eat it for two years. I don't know why. I kept it on the shelf in our kitchen and looked at it. My mother asked why I didn't eat it and I couldn't explain. Eventually I did eat it — one morning at breakfast when everything felt ordinary again, which was itself such a remarkable feeling that I needed to mark it somehow.
It tasted like gooseberries and like safety and like a farm in Yorkshire where a woman I had called Mrs. Hartley had fed me breakfast every morning for five years and never once made me feel like a burden, which I suspect I was, and which she never let me feel.
I have made gooseberry jam every year since. My children think it is a family tradition. It is. It just started in someone else's family."
The Letters
Agnes Hartley received letters from evacuees for the rest of her life.
Christmas letters, mostly. Letters when children married, when they had children of their own, when they wanted to tell her something good had happened.
She kept them all in a biscuit tin in the kitchen.
When she died in 1967, William found the tin. Seventy-three letters. From twenty-three of the twenty-eight children — some of the youngest had been too young to write later, or had lost touch in the postwar dispersal.
William read every letter.
Then he sat at the kitchen table for a long time in the house that had held, at various points, twenty-eight children in addition to his own four, and was very quiet.
He wrote to each of the twenty-three people who had sent letters. He told them Agnes was gone. He told them she had kept every letter. He told them she had read them every Christmas.
Seventeen of them came to the funeral.
They stood in the churchyard in November Yorkshire cold and a vicar said the proper words and then a woman named Doris, who had been seven when she arrived and twelve when she left, said the other words:
"She never told us she loved us. She fed us instead. And she sent us home with jam. I have understood for twenty years that these are the same thing. I wanted to say so, because I don't think she ever knew we understood."
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