Eighty years ago, in September 1939, Operation Pied Piper—a World War II effort to evacuate Britain’s most vulnerable citizens from areas deemed most vulnerable to German attack—was put into effect. In the first three days alone, 1.5 million people, most of them children, left their homes. As trains roared out of the station every day, every nine minutes, for nine hours, parents said their goodbyes, wondering if it would be the last time that they saw their children. The loss of a parent or separation from family is a trope in children’s literature, but in the decade following the war, several children’s writers drew particular inspiration from their wartime experiences.
