We had an assembly every morning in elementary school. A teacher would come into the playground with a handbell. The ringing of the bell was our cue to line up in classroom rows. The youngest went first as we filed in an orderly manner into the assembly hall. WWII and my elementary schooling coincided. The war began when I was in grade one. Now I was in the back row in grade six. The assembly hall was in the center of the school with the classrooms down each side. the classrooms on my right were out of sight. A wall of sandbags reaching up to the ceiling ran the length of the hall, making a safe, reinforced area on the other side. The school’s air-raid shelter.
Some mornings I would find myself next to the sandbags and could see the little holes where students had picked at them. I would also poke them, but by sixth grade they had become hard it was difficult to get the sand to run out, which was the purpose of the endeavor, also to avoid boredom. The headmistress would give us the school news. We would pray for the soldiers in the war. A teacher played the piano and we sang hymns. I can’t remember the hymns but a couple of phrases still resonate in my head. “England’s green and pleasant land” and “Those in peril on the sea”. Somehow these two phrases always hit deep into me and I would sing them loud and with feeling. Why did these phrases affect me so much? Maybe by sixth grade my mind and emotions had been battered enough by constant war through my formative years, that I had built a wall of sandbags around them.
Sandbagging my emotions because no one, including parents and teachers, had no time to deal with them, each contained in their own wartime hell. These two phrases dug a hole through the sandbags into my inner core, letting me know I was still there, safe and sound in hiding.
If only we as adults could understand how many years it takes to emerge from traumatic hiding places, we would avoid causing them.