6 minute read
air mindedness: drawings of a very young architect
STEPHANIE WHITE; proposed by David Murray, and help from a host of Hemingways: Mistaya Hemingway, Enid Palmer and Guy Palmer
Peter Hemingway was an architect in Edmonton, Alberta, well-known, well-awarded, a personality about town, political, outspoken, a fine architect.
Born in 1929, he grew up in Minster-on-Sea on the Isle of Sheppey where the Thames meets the English Channel: for centuries the front line against invasion. The Second World War was no exception, Sheppey’s north and east coastline bristled with fortified beaches and anti-aircraft installations, with a second line set back from the coast. As it flanked the route for aircraft flying up the Thames to bomb London, it was so strategically important that the island’s children were evacuated in 1940. Peter and his sister Enid were sent to Yorkshire, where he was so unhappy that he was sent back to Minster.
Was he homesick? Something tells me no. Missing the war, the excitement, the urgency of being part of something so huge – it must have rankled.
This file of drawings done by Peter Hemingway when he was 11 or 12 is from Hemingway’s archives, held by his daughter Mistaya. Are drawings play? They are undoubtedly something children do from a very early age. Is drawing different from playing with toys? Hand to eye coordination is being learned, refined, imagined. But that is neither interesting nor informative for this little book of drawings of WWII aircraft, carefully drafted, coloured and labelled in irreverent verse.
History is written magisterially, in text, by historians who paint enormous histories that document events, dates, places, protagonists, victims, economies and aftermaths. The study of material culture finds smaller stories in smaller objects; it fills in the human daily lived life on the ground which often goes unnoticed by events, politics and ideology, yet contributes to them. As On Site review is interested in architecture as material culture, it is a simple thing for research purposes to flip this to material culture as architecture, and then one must ask, what kind of architecture are we looking at?
For these drawings it is the architecture of childhood during war, specifically how a boy might fill a notebook with the fierce components of an air war.
Gabriel Moshenska writes in Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain about the ways that children directly engaged in wartime activities, from collecting and trading shrapnel, playing in bomb sites, using their cardboard gas mask cases as satchels for findings, to aircraft spotting.1 Specifically there was an air-mindedness in Britain promoted in the press, in aviation magazines, children’s books and air pageants: waves of bomber aircraft were necessary components of modern warfare. 2 The avant garde nature of such warfare was kept at the forefront of the public mind as battles were fought noisily and visibly in immediate British airspace, not somewhere else as on the high seas with the Navy, or in Europe, Africa or the Far East with the Army. Plane spotting for children was competitive and obsessive.
Identifying aircraft by the particular sound of their engines or their silhouettes in the night sky, writing down registration numbers, all was useful war effort – either information to be telegraphed to RAF bases or ARP wardens, or simply just to know. There were clubs, there were magazines, there were the Biggles stories, RAF men were heroes; Peter’s older brother was in the RAF. Children, Moshenska writes, saw themselves as active participants in wartime society:
“If we want to understand childhood and its material worlds in Second World War Britain, or indeed anywhere, we need to start from this understanding of children as people, keenly observant and aware of their environments even as they are shaped by them, and reshape them for their own purposes.”
1 Moshenska, Gabriel, Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain. London: Routledge, 2019
2 Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words. British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987
One aspect of play is the miniaturisation of the world: everything becomes small: the ditch is a river, lead soldiers are an army, the rock in the woods is a mountain. Bits of shrapnel (a bomb), medals and buttons (a soldier), model aircraft (planes exploding overhead and destroying your house) become synecdoches of the disturbance of war at the scale of a child’s hand — controllable, collectible, evidence that one is alive. So too the drawings here, amplified or diminished by the verses and commentary. That which is traumatic is neutralised by being made small while at the same time being part of something as enormous as a war. The Right to Play movement which is about child labour, might in what appears so far to be a war-torn twenty-first century, go hand in hand with being allowed to play, allowed to process what is happening by translating it into artefacts, collections, games with arcane rules, drawings and stories: a kind of material resistance. A survivalist response.
postscript
Enid writes to Mistaya:
‘It was a popular thing in teenage years to collect autographs of family and friends but Peter preferred to use the blank pages to draw aeroplanes and my father added the words to the drawings. These are pretty exact drawing of each plane as it was necessary to recognise English planes or German ones. On one occasion your Dad and Ralph cycling home across a grass track on the marsh were machine gunned by a German plane and Ralph threw them both in a ditch as the bullets hit the path. pps. Your Dad would have been almost 10 when the war started and possibly 12 or 13 when he did these drawings.’
‘We went by train to school each day and slept in our own beds unless there was an air raid siren. The raids generally stopped in mid ’41-ish and only really started again in ’44 with the V1s. Dad was out all the time in the evenings. Peter could have been drawing any time as the book was small and portable.’
MISTAYA HEMINGWAY is a freelance dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and urban thinker living in Montreal. A soloist for nine years with La La Human Steps, she holds a degree in urban planning: these are blended to focus on artistic projects that unite movement, music, film and the city. She is currently working on an immersive installation that explores the architecture of Peter Hemingway through dance, scenography and XR technologies, accompanied by original composition by Sarah Pagé. www.mistayahemingway.com
