Essay of the week: Beyond the Blitz - how evacuation during the Second World War profoundly changed British society

When I'd first been evacuated, along with my eight-year-old sister, I wasn't yet three years old. We went with our mother to a crowded Ilford Station, each carrying a gas mask, food and a label with our name on it. I remember being pushed onto a train and waving to Mum until she disappeared from sight.

I felt frightened and bewildered; we didn't know where we were going. I can still see a woman bending over me and asking if I was ill. My sister cuddled me, and I did feel ill.

We got out at what I later learned was Ipswich and marched to a church hall. I remember no more, although I am told that we were greeted by local authority officials and volunteers. After having our hair examined for lice, we were lined up to be selected by the hosts, or foster parents as they were later called. My sister and I were housed with a kind, elderly couple, but our parents were never able to visit us.

By early 1940, no bombs had been dropped and my sister and I, along with around 60% of the near 1.5 million people who'd been evacuated, returned home. In September, the London Blitz began and the bombings continued for 76 nights (with one exception), killing 430 people. Our home was hit by shrapnel several times. During one raid we were slow to get out of bed and rush for the shelter. A Focke-Wulf 190 flew in low, spitting bullets and bombs, damaging our home.

We were again evacuated, to stay with our great aunt in the village of Heronsgate in Essex, and this time, Mum came too. The house was crowded and infested with rats. There was an outside tap and a toilet at the bottom of the garden. One cold day, Mum took us out for a meal but couldn't find an open cafe. So she kept walking towards the station and we boarded the train to London. Later, we joined the official system at a home in Wantage.

Mum soon walked out and our fourth placement was at Cranleigh in Kent. Here I started school, which consisted of a large hall where each class sat around a table just a few feet from the next class table.

Gradually, the RAF gained air ascendancy over the Luftwaffe and once again, many evacuees caught the train home. We were back in Ilford in the autumn of 1943 and my sister and I became regulars at school. Not for long. Hitler's planes were replaced by his secret weapons. First, the V1s or doodlebugs: pilotless planes, packed with dynamite, which crashed and exploded when they ran out of fuel. Then the V2 rockets which sped, faster than sound, from Holland, killing 2,274 people, mainly in London and the south. After our home was hit and my baby brother and mother dug out alive, we were transported for a fifth time, to Hastings, where we stayed until the last days of the war.

Our one room contained a bed in which we all slept. It was comfortable and we could come and go as we pleased. I did not enjoy school where local children and "vaccees" came into conflict. But weekends were bliss when mum took us to explore Hastings and the beaches. We also linked up with other families from London, sometimes eating together in a café on the front. On Thursday nights, we went to the cinema. Best of all, about once a month, Dad visited us. The family was safe and together, although not at home.

Planning for the evacuation of British children had begun as soon as war with Germany was deemed inevitable. The planned that all children in areas at high risk of bombing - including Birmingham, Southampton. Liverpool, Coventry, Glasgow, Clydebank - should be moved to reception zones, particularly in the countryside, hopefully accompanied by their mothers. Once war was declared, in September, 1939, the evacuation began and within three days, 1,473,391 people had been moved.

How successful was the evacuation, and what did we learn from it? The organisation of trains and buses was efficient, but as historian Richard Titmuss later commented, the reception of mothers and children was characterised by "confusion and unpreparedness". Of the 3,900,000 people the Government expected to evacuate, fewer than half actually left home. Come the day, many parents and children refused to be parted and in Glasgow, only 42% of those registered actually went.

Most evacuees were from working-class areas and some hosts complained that they were dirty, verminous, badly-behaved bed-wetters. Mothers accompanying their under-fives were said to lack parenting skills and to be too fond of pubs.

In 1941, results of the Cambridge Evacuation Survey, which studied 373 north London evacuees, concluded that only 8% of the children were unhappy. And undoubtedly, many placements were successful. During the early 1990s, while researching my book, The Evacuation: A Very British Revolution, I met several former evacuees who'd been very happy. One recalled being placed in a rural smallholding where he helped on the farm. "It was marvellous," he said. "I used to wander around and explore the countryside. I remember on a summer's day, lying in a field, looking up at the blue sky and watching skylarks."

Richard Titmuss praises the receiving householders' willingness "to ... make sacrifices in the national interest". Teachers who were evacuated with their classes and conducted many activities and outings with the children, should also be praised. And above all, evacuation saved lives. Of 7736 children killed during the war, nearly all were in the areas of bombing. Very few evacuees died.

Yet there were unsuccessful placements and I interviewed some who'd been very unhappy as evacuees. One, a close friend, had been put on the train to Macclesfield, where he and his two brothers shared two camp beds. They were often hungry and my friend told of following a man eating an apple and waiting for him to throw the core away which he then ate. The foster father showed no kindness.

The benefits of evacuation did not go unquestioned. Social worker Lucy Faithfull helped to organise the evacuation from Islington and also observed children who had endured the blitz with their families. She found that while many evacuees were very well cared for physically, some struggled emotionally. "It made me realise," she said, "what families meant to children, even if they weren't good homes. And how much damage we did to children taking them away from their homes."

After the war, she conducted research that compared evacuated children with those who had stayed home, and found that "the children who had stayed with their parents were taller, heavier, emotionally better balanced, psychologically at ease with themselves".

In her 2012 book Blitz Families. The Children Who Stayed Behind, Penny Starns writes that "city children who survived the Blitz emerged from the war years emotionally, mentally, and physically far healthier than their counterparts who were evacuated to the country". Government predictions that fresh air and a healthy diet would favour the evacuees had been proved wrong, a fact Starns attributes to the evacuees missing their parents.

As a child care officer in the 1960s, I was at one with the growing belief that, if at all possible, children and parents should stay together. But I must add three qualifications.

First, of course, children were more likely to die or be injured in the danger areas. Second, their education suffered. Evacuated children went to existing local schools, to classes from their home areas which were evacuated together and put in buildings with teachers they already knew, or to residential or camp schools again made up of school mates they knew. In the danger areas, nearly all schools were closed in the expectation that school-aged children would be evacuated. For months, blitz children ran wild with no supervision. As many evacuees returned home, schools gradually re-opened, but attendance was limited during bombing periods.

Third, some children in the blitz did suffer trauma as they experienced bomb and rocket raids - even if they did have relatives to comfort them. I can speak from memory. During periods of bombing, my mother often refused to send me to school so that, if necessary, she could rush me into the shelter. When I returned to regular schooling after the war, the headteacher told me I was backward, and I failed the 11-plus so badly, I had to stay another year at junior school.

As for trauma, I was scared of death. My best friend's parents were killed and I watched men - including my father - dig out the dead and dying from the rubble. It was 20 years before I could speak about it.

The blitz debate was about whether children should stay with their families in the danger of bombs or be sent to safety without them. In her book, Prisoners Of War, True Stories Of Evacuees, former evacuee Heather Nicholson reports that many of the children "were thrown to the wolves". Drawing upon 25 case histories of those who were "abused sexually, physically and mentally", she writes: "I think most of us would rather have taken our chances with Hitler's onslaught and the bomb shelters than the hell holes we were imprisoned in."

One of Nicolson's interviewees was regularly beaten by her foster father with a leather belt for wetting herself. Many children were starved and reduced to stealing food. Others were told wrongly that their parents no longer wanted them and never wrote to them. A male child of eight was sexually abused by the soldier son of his foster mother. Older girls were forced to have intercourse with foster fathers or their teenage sons. Escape seemed impossible as few were visited by social workers. A few complained to teachers and were punished for being ungrateful liars.

Undoubtedly, placing children with strangers can involve severe dangers - and perhaps the most important lesson from the evacuation process, is the importance of keeping families together. In Clydebank in 1939, officials, knowing that the shipbuilding town was sure to be bombed, wanted all its 7620 school children plus under-fives and mothers to be evacuated. In reality, only a third went.

Moreover, very soon three-quarters had returned. William Boyd, who helped organise the evacuation, wrote in 1944 that this was partly because the older children missed their parents and partly because accompanying mothers "needed a home of their own, not a mere share in somebody else's home".

By March, 1941, over 7000 of the schoolchildren and most of the under-fives were back in Clydebank. Then came the massive two-day bombing by the German Luftwaffe. All but seven of the town's 12,000 dwellings were damaged and many children were among the hundreds killed.

Boyd mourned that the evacuation had been a failure and advocated a new approach in which "mothers, able and willing to leave the danger towns with their families" should be helped to move to affordable homes in safe areas "for the duration of the war".

This proposal was never taken on by the authorities. The evacuation did, however, have a profound influence on children's services in Britain. The reception areas had to develop care for evacuees, and interest extended to all children separated from their parents. It contributed to the Children Act 1948 by which local authorities had to establish children's departments whose sole focus was on children "deprived of a normal home life". Significantly, as evacuees had been fostered, the departments gave priority to fostering rather than to residential care which had dominated before the war.

Further, because many evacuees came from poverty, the middle-class reception areas had their eyes opened. A 1943 report by eight women described the evacuation as "a window" through which poverty was revealed. Their book, Our Towns: A Close-Up, is considered to have moved many middle-class people into supporting a welfare state, which came in 1945.

The evacuation process also led to the foundation of residential facilities for those who couldn't be accommodated with foster families. Glasgow, which already possessed four "child guidance clinics", established more to help west of Scotland evacuees. The Nerston Residential Clinic, opened in South Lanarkshire in 1940, catered for children with very severe problems, who had been through several foster homes and required specialist help.

The Peebleshire County Council and the Society of Friends co-founded Barnes House as a hostel for boys showing difficulties in foster homes. Led by David Wills, it aimed to provide a family environment, security and discipline without recourse to corporal punishment.

As for me, there is no doubt that being evacuated was one of the formative experiences of my life. When evacuated, I identified with evacuees who were often alienated from local children, and missed their parents. While in the blitz, I knew people who were made homeless and whose loved ones were killed. In our neighbourhood, a young boy lost both parents. A couple we knew well took him into their family. It is difficult to say just how all this shaped me but my first post after leaving the London School of Economics in 1962 was as a child care officer, often taking children into care and finding foster parents for them. I moved into academic life and my PhD was on fostering. After 10 years, I moved into community projects in deprived areas, considering this the best approach to prevent youngsters being removed from their homes.

Bob Holman is the author of Keir Hardie: Labour's Greatest Hero? (2010) and Woodbine Willie: An Unsung Hero Of World War One (2013), both published by Lion Hudson