War’s Long Tail

One vivid May morning eight years ago, the hawthorn hedgerows of Sussex effervescent with blossom, I took my younger son to help a group of volunteers restore a patch of woodland near Sedlescombe. Turning off the A21, we drove up a tree-lined drive to the meeting point, an old manor house surrounded by low, brick-built dormitories. A large sign saying ‘Pestalozzi International Village’ stood out in front. As my son got out of the car, some childhood memory began to tug at me. When I turned the car round to leave and saw a red and black ladybird logo on the corner of the sign, the memory crystallized. A woman selling ladybird badges on the high street; a school assembly on refugee children; 1970s-era Blue Peter fundraisers; and, yes, The Silver Sword.

The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier (1956) is notionally a children’s book. In reality, it’s very grown-up. Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and a hit pretty much from the day it was published, it tells the story of a Polish family – Ruth Balicki, 13, her sister Bronia, 3, and their 11-year-old brother, Edek – who first narrowly avoid being murdered by the Nazis in Warsaw during the Second World War, and then, as the conflict ends, travel across Europe in an attempt to find their missing parents. Along the way they pick up the novel’s most memorable character: Jan, a stray, ageless boy with a passion for abandoned animals, who steals anything he sees and whose sole possession is a small wooden box. The box’s full contents are revealed only in the final pages, but it’s no spoiler to say that among them are the titular silver sword – not a weapon of war but a small letter-opener that Jan is given, early in the plot, by the Balickis’ father. It transforms, in the four children’s imagination, into a powerful totem of hope. It’s also no spoiler to say that their hope is not vain: they do eventually find safety, at a series of chalets built for refugee children in Switzerland. This is clearly based on a real place, the Pestalozzi Children’s Village, founded in Trogen in 1945, and itself the inspiration for the British Pestalozzi International Foundation (PIF). PIF’s ladybird logo and fundraising activities were well-known to children growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, a familiarity that made the book’s plot seem to us young readers all the more believable. As you might expect in a story about unaccompanied children surviving war, starvation and the constant threat of internment, their journey to Switzerland is full of event and derring-do. But the book is also completely clear-eyed about the emotional and psychological costs their travails exact from the children, and is part of an honours list of mid-twentieth-century children’s novels – Goodnight, Mr Tom, Carrie’s War, Fireweed, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit – that allowed young people like me to imaginatively inhabit what the war did to those who lived through it. Those like my father who, in 1945, was plucked out of university to be a medic in the RAF. When he died, almost eight decades later, I found an old brass letter-opener among his belongings. I thought of The Silver Sword, of what those like my father had fought for, and took the letter-opener home to keep on my desk. The odd thing about a book so evocative of conflict is that its author never took up arms. Serraillier, skinny, bespectacled and bucktoothed, was a Quaker, a lifelong pacifist who believed in the power of education to create understanding, promote healing and prevent conflict. Born in London two years before the First World War, he was a conscientious objector in the Second. No coward, by night he worked as an air-raid warden in the blitzed towns of the Black Country, and by day as an English teacher at Dudley Grammar. Children surrounded him for much of his life: he had four of his own and for twenty-five years taught at schools in the Midlands and south-east. (The Silver Sword, his daughter Jane remembers, was written across five consecutive school summer holidays.) In 1949 he and his wife Anne co-founded the New Windmill Series, an imprint of Heinemann Educational Books, providing schoolchildren between the ages of 11 and 15 with well-printed, thoughtfully illustrated editions of quality fiction and biography. The series was a great success, and husband and wife remained as its editors for thirty years. Despite the demands of New Windmill, Serraillier stuck with teaching until 1961, when, five years after The Silver Sword was published, he finally switched to writing full-time. Much of his future work remained equal parts schooling and entertainment: he edited and published poetry collections for children, wrote accessible retellings of classical myths and legends, and was a frequent contributor to educational programmes on BBC Radio. His was a bookish, schoolmasterly life. But to read The Silver Sword ’s descriptions of the shattered ruins of Warsaw, of refugee families huddled in the freezing wagons of goods trains trundling across Germany, of children sewing smuggled cheeses into their jackets and wrapping reeds around their shoeless, blistered feet, you’d think he’d been part of the Allied relief columns that wound their way into the weary cities of Europe in 1945. These soldiers were some of the first witnesses to the horrors war had wrought, but it was journalists who provided Serraillier with a good part of his inspiration. Serraillier subscribed to the pioneering UK magazine Picture Post, which throughout the 1940s used unflinching photo-features to document what it called ‘Chaos in Europe’. Serraillier’s notebook for the plot of Silver Sword is filled with its cuttings, including pictures of a shirtless blond boy – a model for Jan? – standing on a mound of rubble in Berlin and holding half a loaf of mouldy bread, and a feature documenting the founding of ‘a village where the world is one’: that first Pestalozzi home. His daughter attests that he constantly returned to a UNESCO photobook of the period, Children of Europe, which includes a picture of a little girl Bronia’s age, a ribbon in her hair, chalking swirling pictures of destruction on a schoolroom blackboard. Accuracy was important to Serraillier: he based all four of his fictional characters on real children – albeit from different families – whose lives were documented in Red Cross records of the time. An eyewitness description in the book East Wind over Prague (1951) gave him the basis for the astounding section where the children watch the Red Army marching towards Czechoslovakia, followed by columns of uniformed housekeepers and nurses, looted staff cars honking their horns, lorries stuffed with caviar and stolen refrigerators, and, last, hundreds of ragged children, there ‘because they were hungry and the Red Army was ready to feed them’. Not all his sources were external. Serraillier’s father had died when he was just 6, and while he was a schoolboy, his mother suffered badly from asthma and spent long periods recuperating in Switzerland. As the eldest child, Serraillier had to take his three younger siblings, unaccompanied and by rail, across Europe to visit her each summer; his sense of what it means to be a child separated from its parents, to have to take on responsibilities that shouldn’t be a child’s to bear, must have been bone-deep. Many of the landscapes he describes he knew directly. As a teenager he climbed in the Swiss Alps; while at university he holidayed regularly in Austria and canoed on the Danube – an experience that fed directly into the children’s thrilling, terrifying river escape from a German mayor intent on returning them to Poland. Though I said earlier that The Silver Sword isn’t really a children’s book, it shows a sensitivity towards just how much darkness young readers should be asked to face. The camp where the Balickis’ father is interned is not one with gas ovens; although the children escape being blown up by Nazis, and are fired on by Americans, we see no bodies. Instead the violence of war is implied by its after-effects: Edek’s rifle in the attic, left over from his time as a boy-sniper during the fall of Warsaw; the photos of two dead sons on the mantelpiece of a German farmhouse; the shocking moment when a queue of starving children break ranks and nearly suffocate each other in the scrabble for a single bowl of soup. The result manages to balance honesty about war with a quiet belief in the essential goodness of human nature. Crucial players slip away, then are found again without fanfare. Edek fails to return from a smuggling run but reappears months later, suffering from tuberculosis in a camp for the displaced. Those you might expect to be baddies turn out to be, if not quite good, then at least good enough. A Russian guard is attacked by Jan but gives the children food, pencils and paper for their makeshift school; a German farmer complains about refugees but then houses the children; Jan, jealous of Ruth’s affection, fights constantly with Edek but gives up his beloved dog to save Edek’s life when he nearly drowns during a storm. And this is the heart of it. In the end it is a story not so much about war as about how families survive: their squabbles, their love, their care for and rivalry with each other, and most of all their need to be and stay together. That desire for unity is what drives the children across Europe, and is why, when Jan finally meets Mrs Balicki and asks her to be his mother, I defy anyone to remain dry-eyed. But Serraillier is no sentimentalist, and in the epilogue he lays out a further, not quite happy, ending. Post-rescue, brave and resourceful Ruth retreats into childishness, losing years of her early adulthood to post-traumatic clinginess and fear; Jan, wayward and troubled, continues to steal from those who would be his friends. In real life, the boy that Edek was based on didn’t survive his tuberculosis. I remember how shocked I was by the fact that the children’s lives were, while improved, still troubled. War has a long tail. The Pestalozzi story, too, hasn’t had an entirely happy end, at least not in Britain. The village I drove up to that May morning opened in 1959. Initially it educated refugee children from Europe; by the 1970s it was home to displaced children from Tibet and south-east Asia. In the 1990s it provided scholarships for older, economically disadvantaged children from the developing world who stayed at the village to study for the International Baccalaureate. But times changed, and with them views about cultural colonialism; two years ago the village closed. And what of Serraillier’s vision, expressed throughout The Silver Sword, of a world where despite violence and fear, human kindness prevails? Like many, I watched the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with horror. Images of crammed platforms at train stations, of ribbons of people trudging down roads, trailing suitcases, toddlers in their arms, had a chilling familiarity. In Trogen, the original Pestalozzi village had to open its arms to a new generation of refugees. In May three years ago, the hedgerows effervescing again, Ukrainians began to arrive in our part of Sussex. Many had visas sponsored by 50-something empty-nesters with spare rooms, myself and my husband among them. The family who came to us walked into our lives carrying only sleeping mats, a few plastic bags stuffed with clothes, and a single pair of shoes for each of their children. They had no books. It was a scary moment. But I had a brass letter-opener on my desk and a 1965 edition of The Silver Sword on my bookshelf, and that told me what needed to be done. For that, Ian Serraillier, we owe you all our thanks.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Isabel Lloyd 2025