ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three adventure novels for children: Noel Streatfeild's The House in Cornwall, Mary Treadgold's We Couldn't Leave Dinah and Margaret Lovett's Family Pie. It examines the role of the home and the familiar 'home-away-home' movement often identified in children's novels. The chapter also identifies new and unexpected similarities between early psychoanalysis and the fictional depiction of fear and anxiety. The displacement of children from home, family and community contributes materially to the representation of children in wartime fiction and is a key feature of the author's analysis of Cornwall, Dinah and Family Pie. All three novels are moral adventures with a satisfying ending in which the children identify and respond to a threat, and the plots are engaging, fast-paced and exciting, with war as a background. The writer of children's adventure novels also draws into their fiction aspects of psychoanalytic theory and does so with sensitivity to feeling and to the experience of wartime childhood.
