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When the war broke out three thousand London schoolchildren of all ages, unaccompanied by their parents, were billeted in Cambridge under the Evacuation Scheme. But as the winter wore on many began to drift home again, in spite of the pleas of the Government, until by the beginning of 1940 more than three-quarters of them had gone back. A Research Committee, composed of child-psychologists and social workers, set out to enquire into the causes of this return and into the question of the billeting of children in general. It did this by talking with the parents, foster-parents, teachers and children themselves; by getting the children to give written answers to a carefully-devised set of questions and to write short essays on their views and feelings about their new environment; and by making direct observations.
The main conclusions arrived at, though not surprising to the psychologically minded person, are none the less highly interesting and instructive and have a very practical application as well. Apart from the most obvious reason for the return of the children to their London homes—which was that in fact no bombing did happen during that Autumn and Winter—it appears very clearly that the factors which decided whether a child stayed in its foster-home or not were of a psychological order and had very little to do with matters of finance or material well-being or health. And among these psychological factors the question of the child's own happiness was paramount. The attitude of the foster-parents and the real parents had an immense influence, too, but mostly in so far as they made the child feel that it was liked and wanted in its new home, or was only there on