Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

Extract from the Persephone Preface by the psychiatrist Dr Jeremy Holmes.

Noel Streatfeild's purpose in Saplings is to take a happy, successful, middle-class pre-war English family ­ and then track in miserable detail the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of thousands of such families.

Streatfeild's supreme gift was her ability to see the world from a child's perspective. What makes Saplings special is her use of that skill to explore a very adult problem ­ the psychological impact of war and trauma on family life. Here she was and still is in tune with the zeitgeist.

In the mid-1940s psychologists, psychoanalysts and child psychiatrists were just beginning to address the very same issues from a scientific perspective.

Bowlby had just published his ground-breaking 44 Juvenile Thieves, showing how adolescent delinquency arises out of loss and separation in childhood. Maternal Care and Child Health, his influential W.H.O.-commissioned study of the impact of war on child mental health appeared only a few years later; and at the same time he was also starting to pioneer psychotherapy with whole families. Winnicott wrote and broadcasted about the inner world of the infant, and Melanie Klein and Anna Freud were developing child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the latter, with Dorothy Burlingham, running her nursery for orphans, most of whom were psychological casualties of war.

In the first half of the century children's well-being was mainly equated with their physical health. Novelists, among whom Dickens is the obvious example, had long been interested in the working of children's minds, and the impact of adult neglect and cruelty upon them, but science had lagged behind.

Psychoanalysis ­ an area about which we have no evidence that Streatfeild took the slightest interest ­ had established two essential themes which nevertheless underlie the thrust of her book. First, that children's minds were as vulnerable as their bodies to disturbance and illness, and second, and as a consequence of the first, that children are autonomous beings with their own needs and projects, and are not merely objects to be controlled and manipulated by adults, however well-meaning.

Evacuation was an obvious response to the threat of a war which for the first time in history directly targeted civilians, but the psychological consequences of separating children from their parents was glossed over in the rush to ensure their physical survival. War posed a terrible Hobson's choice for families, and it was only afterwards that the toll it had taken in terms of depression and despair could begin to be recognised.

Saplings is the literary equivalent of the psychological audit initiated by Bowlby and others. For Bowlby the Secure Base is the key to psychological survival, and the capacity of parents, families and nations as a whole to provide such a secure base is severely compromised at times of war. While psychological illness tends actually to decrease during active periods of conflict, the long-term effects on children are incalculable. It is fascinating to watch Streatfeild casually and intuitively anticipate many of the findings of developmental psychology over the past fifty years ...