THE WAR NURSERIES STARTED ON A SMALL SCALE, INITIALLY TO PROVIDE temporary shelter for bombed-out families. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham planned this at the height of the London Blitz (October 1940), when the East End of London had been reduced to rubble and chaos. Many families spent the hours of darkness in deep underground shelters (a famous one, the Tilbury Shelter in Commercial Road, catered to eight thousand people), or they slept with their babies on bunks erected on platforms in London Underground stations, with trains passing through until midnight. Often they discovered in the morning that their houses had been made uninhabitable or destroyed.

Anna Freud had obtained the loan of a house in Wedderburn Road, a former Swedish student hostel furnished and equipped for community living, and some funding from private donors. She had brought with her some nursery equipment—cots, furniture, and toys—from the Jackson Nursery in Vienna (a crache [child-care center] that she had only been able to run for one year before the Nazis