ABSTRACT
But even this was not enough. The child came from home, and you have taken the child into your home. And home seems to get behind the idea of love. It might be possible for someone to love a child and yet to fail because a child got no feeling that he was at home. I think that the point is that if you make a home for a child you provide a little bit of the world that the child can understand and can believe in, in moments when love fails. For love must fail at times, at least superficially. There must be times, every now and again, when a child irritates and annoys and eamsan angry word, and it is at least equally true that grown-up people, even the best, have moods and times of irritability, when for an hour or so they cannot be relied on to deal with a situation with fairness. If there is a feeling of homeliness, the relationship between a child and the grown-ups can survive periods of misunderstanding. So I think we can assume that if you have kept your evacuee for a long time you have taken the child into your home, which is such a different thing from letting him into your house, and the child has responded and has used your home as a home. The child in your home came to believe in you, and gradually became able to transfer some feelings from his mother to you, so that in a sense you did become temporarily the child's mother. If you have succeeded you must have found some way of dealing with the very tricky relationship between you and the real parent, and something like the George Medal ought to be struck for the parents and foster-parents who have managed to come to terms, and even to form friendships, when there has been so much cause for mutual misunderstanding.
