The Right Stop

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be small differences between the text and the audio you hear above.**

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory, and we’re talking about the history of children being separated from their families to start new lives in America. We just heard about a large-scale effort to rescue American Indian children from their parents’ cultures, an effort that was conceived by its creators as a humanitarian one. We’re going to turn now to a story about a very different kind of humanitarian effort to save kids.

PETER: In 1940, the city of London was facing the very real threat of German bombs and a possible invasion. You may have heard of how some families responded to this threat by evacuating their sons and daughters to the English countryside. What’s less known is that in May of that year, the United Kingdom also began a program to send children abroad. The Children’s Overseas Reception Board, as it was known, sent evacuees to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.

BRIAN: The program was short-lived. On September 17, 1940, a German U-boat sank the City of Benares while it crossed the Atlantic. The ship was carrying 85 child refugees. 77 drowned, and the authorities decided any more overseas evacuations would just be too dangerous. But during the few months the program operated, around 2,600 children left British shores for safety abroad. Among those who did make it to America were the Barlow siblings.

SHEILA BARLOW O’BRIEN: I’m Sheila Barlow O’Brien, and I was 10 when I came. And my little brother was five.

MALCOLM BARLOW: Hi, I’m Malcolm Barlow, and I’m now 79.

BRIAN: You’ll notice that Sheila and Malcolm don’t sound very British. That’s because they, along with their siblings, Susan and Brian, never went home. But we’ll get to that. First, I asked them what they could tell me about their lives in England during the war.

MALCOLM BARLOW: Our lifestyle was very British, a little bit like Downton Abbey. The only time we saw our parents was for an audience before dinner. We would be presented to them and have maybe five minutes. They’d pat us on the head and send us off. So we had a very English background and upbringing. And Sheila, you might just describe what our father said to you and our brother and sister when the war started.

SHEILA BARLOW O’BRIEN: Well, he took my sister and I outside and said, now, things are going to get very bad. And there’s one thing I’m telling you you must never do, and that is cry, because nobody has time for crybabies.

MALCOLM BARLOW: Now, it’s important to realize that for children, war often is not scary. The adults know the danger, but children don’t. Of course, what happened in London– the Blitz started. And we had the hell bombed out of us every day three times a day, 11:00, 4:00, and 11:00, with airplanes flying over every day. And I think it was due to the fact that we were under such pressure in London that our father decided he should try to evacuate us if possible.

BRIAN: Tell me about your move to your new mother’s house. Where was it, and how did that go?

MALCOLM BARLOW: Well, what they tried to do– which was really clever of them– if you lived in the city, they tried to put you with a city family. If you lived in the country, they tried to put you with a country family. In our case, there was this couple who lived in Muncy, Pennsylvania, who had a large farm and said they would be interested in taking in a large family.

He suddenly died while we were in New York. And so his widow came with her husband’s aunt to interview us. And they were dressed in mourning clothes, which in 1940 was wide-brimmed hats with veils and black everything right down to their shoes. So she literally buried her husband on Monday and took us in the next Monday.

And this farm is 200 miles due west of New York. And we were put on trains and took the train right to the town of Muncy. And then Sheila can describe what it was like arriving at Muncy.

SHEILA BARLOW O’BRIEN: Well, being October, it was dark already when we got there because it was about 7 o’clock. And this little station is out in the middle of nowhere and not even in the town. And we were the only people getting off. And we got off, and there was a young man who was standing under a light bulb. And he was blonde and tall and had a crew cut.

And I said to my brother Brian, I think we’ve gotten off at the wrong station because he looks German to me. Which of course, he had the German background. And anyway, so he had been sent to pick us up. Mrs. Brock, who we called the whole time we were there Aunt Peg, had decided that we had been in darkness at night because of the blackouts. So she lit the whole house up, which was a very large stone house, and every window had a light in it. And that was our first impression of Muncy Farms.

MALCOLM BARLOW: With four of us, we were sort of our own unit, but our guardian was rather unique, for us, anyway, because our parents were very serious. And she was a person that had a wonderful sense of humor. And as my oldest brother said, he had never seen our parents laugh, and our guardian liked to laugh all the time. So she treated us immediately as her children, even though she had never had children and she was 45 years old, and what you might say a very fresh widow. Absolutely a remarkable woman.

BRIAN: It would be unusual if you weren’t a bit homesick. Were you, and was there anything you missed about your home in England?

SHEILA BARLOW O’BRIEN: I missed my two friends, Squeaker and Mole.

MALCOLM BARLOW: Life on the farm was pretty exciting. We did keep track of the war news, and our guardian kept us aware of what was happening in England. And we had really constant correspondence with our parents. At the same time, that correspondence could be 8 or 10 weeks late, because it came by ship. Sometimes it wouldn’t arrive at all if the ship was sunk.

But they never really complained. Our letters from our mother were incredible. She was writing one day and said, oh, there go the sirens, I’ll have to stop. And she was living at the country at the time. Then the letter starts up again, and she said, well, they missed. They hit the garden, not the house, fortunately, with the bombs. It was amazing, the acceptance and adaption to the war situation. That life became fairly routine.

BRIAN: And when did you realize that this was going to last a lot longer than perhaps you thought, that this might actually entail having a whole new family, not to mention a whole new country?

MALCOLM BARLOW: Oh, we learned much later. We didn’t learn until the war was over. I never thought that we would ever go back. It just didn’t dawn on me, because I was 5 to 10 during the war. My home was now America, was now the farm we lived on.

The adoption process we had always thought started at the end of the war, because our father died during the war, not of war injuries. And our family business was gone, and the house up in the country was gone. And so through letter writing, our guardian and mother decided it was best for us to be adopted, to stay in this country.

BRIAN: How did you feel about that?

MALCOLM BARLOW: Three of us thought it was a great idea to stay. Our sister Susan was upset. She was 12 years old when she left England. And leaving a family at 12 years old as a girl probably is different than for the rest of us. We all thought it was a great adventure, and I think she felt a closer tie, especially to our father. And she really struggled the rest of her life with emotional problems, and I think some of it was dealing with the emotional attachment to our guardian and also to the US.

BRIAN: Do you think, ultimately, the huge change in your life was primarily the product of growing up in very different country, different culture? Or the product of growing up with a different family?

MALCOLM BARLOW: Well, it’s probably a combination of both. There’s no doubt that the environment here in America is so different than England. There’s just so much opportunity and openness and friendliness among people. In England, especially in our time, was in the late stages of the Victorian era. In fact, our mother’s first marriage was an arranged marriage. And it wasn’t until our grandparents died that she could divorce her husband and then marry our father years later. So the whole society was so different. So from a personal standpoint, I’m absolute ecstatic to have been brought up in America.

BRIAN: Sheila, what would you say?

SHEILA BARLOW O’BRIEN: I feel the same way. I am so happy that we came to America. My personality would not have been very great for some of the things you have to do when you’re in England, which was don’t talk.

BRIAN: Well, thank you very much for joining us on BackStory today.

MALCOLM BARLOW: Well, it’s our pleasure. Thank you for having the interest.

BRIAN: That’s Sheila and Malcolm Barlow. They inherited that farm in Pennsylvania, and Malcolm still lives there today. Sheila lives in Florida. But the siblings are never apart for long. They spend their summers together at Muncy Farms.