“Till We Hear the Last All Clear”: Gender and the Presentation of Self in Young Girls’ Writing about the Bombing of Hull during the Second World War

On 9 February 1942, Peggy Warren, a teacher at Springburn Street School in Hull, set her class of ten- to twelve-year-old girls the task of producing an essay entitled, ‘What Happened to Me and What I Did in the Air Raids’.1 Springburn Street School was a mixed school of around 900 pupils, situated among the heavily bombed working-class terraces north of Hull's docks.2 The essays thus evidence a vivid familiarity with the death and destruction caused by the sporadic, but heavy bombing experienced by Hull in over sixty air raids between 1940 and 1945.3 The school had already absorbed a number of the children from local bombed-out schools when, shortly after the essays were composed, it was destroyed itself.4 Sixty years later, the collection of twenty-nine manuscripts was presented to Hull Local Studies Library archive by Miss Warren's nephew and survives as a snapshot of young girls’ experiences during an extraordinary period for British civilians. The essays – produced on a single day in response to a specified question – evidence how young girls made sense of their experience of bombing. The selfhoods produced through the girls’ narratives were shaped by gendered discourses on civilian service and, as such, provide a rare opportunity to investigate the constitution of wartime subjectivities among young girls living through ‘the Blitz’