On ‘WAR CHILD’ by Dione Venables

Guy Loftus describes his mother’s memoir

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If you don’t like clowns (perhaps you even find them a little scary), then try not to look at them directly. Look closely instead at the face of a child watching, because then you will understand better what clowning is all about. You can apply the same legerdemain to war: we and future generations may never know what it is like to live through a world at war. But if you look closely at the life of one child whose existence was distorted by wartime, you will understand better what war is all about.  Overlay that external conflagration with the child’s own internal turmoil and you get closer to what War Child is all about.

War Child is Dione Venables’ poignant and often shockingly candid memoir growing up in World War II from the moment Britain declared war in September 1939, to the celebrations of VE Day in May 1945.  The Child, Dione (pronounced dai.uh.nee – to rhyme with Hermione), takes us through eight vivid chapters, each offering unique perspectives as she is chivvied around London in an often futile attempt to shield her from the war’s reach.  We see the war initially through the eyes of a spirited nine-year-old desperate for her mother’s approval, emerging five years later as a war-weary 14-year-old adolescent filled with new hope and fiery independence.  She takes us through a global conflict expressed as a deeply personal journey of survival.   In effect, War Child explores the collision of three wars: the external horror of global war, the domestic turmoil within her family, and her private, internal war of identity and puberty.  With each collision, a piece of her childhood is lost forever, sometimes violently (Dione narrowly escaped with her life three times in this period).

Guinevere Buddicom standing next to Jacintha (right) behind “Auntie Dee” (seated) and the young Jennifer in 1940, the year before Dione arrived at Shiplake.

One of those collisions occurred at the Shiplake home of Jacintha Buddicom, who had experienced her own ‘collision’ with the young Eric Blair just two decades earlier.  As adolescents in Shiplake, Jacintha and Eric had delighted in imagining farmyard animals with human traits, like Beatrix Potter’s Pigling Bland, whom Jacintha later believed had inspired Animal Farm.  When the ten-and-a-half-year-old Dione created the character of Edward Wigg (who was “a very good pig”, and who lived in a world not dissimilar to that of Pigling Bland and his pig-wig), the forty-year-old Jacintha was enchanted.   In the same year that George Orwell began writing Animal Farm, Jacintha published Edward Wigg in a pamphlet supporting the British war effort.  But Jacintha didn’t know who George Orwell was in 1943.  The reason that Dione’s experience at Shiplake was so fractious, however, had nothing to do with Orwell or Jacintha, but with Jacintha’s mother, Laura Buddicom (called by the young Dione “Auntie Dee”).  In 1934, Laura effectively cut ties with her much younger brother Alan (Dione’s father), despite their earlier closeness. But young Dione remains unaware of the estrangement; she only feels its effects.  The moment that she arrives at Shiplake, Dione is confined to the estate, not even allowed to attend the local school. For 18 months, she is effectively a prisoner of the Buddicoms.  But at ten-years-old, you take things as they come and adapt to your situation, until, that is, something breaks.  Just like ten years and twenty years previously, the reverberations of unresolved conflict resonate for many decades making us all vulnerable, until, that is, we are given permission to share.   Dione was thrown out of the family home at Shiplake in 1942 and never returned.

Dione Venables 2016

Of course we all know Dione Venables as the founder of The Orwell Society in 2011.  Five years later, she withdrew from the committee aged eighty-six and immediately embarked on writing Dione’s War, which she released in 2017. Reaching into childhood at that age coherently and accurately was not easy for her, requiring some encouragement, particularly reliving the awful events covered in chapter 6.  What emerged was a very poignant and often intimate account written for family and close friends only, with a lot of familial references both historical and contemporary.  As with Jacintha Buddicom before her, there was content that Dione didn’t wish to share more widely when she was alive, but actively encouraged for publication when she had gone.  War Child is an editorial adaptation of Dione’s War, with care taken to preserve her voice but with a degree of resequencing and deletions to maintain narrative flow.  War Child also includes some insertions from an earlier account written by Dione in 1996, hurriedly put together to exorcise her grief when her then husband, John, had just died.  I was her editor in 1996 and 20 years later in 2016 and am her editor for War Child, so accountability stops with me.  What I hope has emerged is a much tighter account of her war experiences without the loss of authenticity or impact.  Her very candid story is ultimately about resilience, about how Dione asserted herself in a world where her identity was constantly under threat, a journey many of us can identify with.  In a very real sense, her formative experiences in World War II set the rhythm for the rest of her life.  Her journey is both harrowing and hopeful but demonstrates that you don’t have to be a hero to be heroic – you only have to choose not to be a victim.

Dione died in 2023 at the generous age of 92.

For expediency and with sadness, I chose not to include photographs in this edition of War Child, which was hurried out to coincide with VE Day commemorations in 2025.  A subsequent print run will be issued with photographs but only by popular demand.  For now, Dione’s War is available and on sale as an ebook.

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A short video of the presentation to Dione on her leaving the Orwell Society committee can be viewed here.

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