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I was slow to see her. But there she was, sobbing, holding on to the hand of a teacher’s aide.

“She thought you’d already left,” said the aide. “She thought you hadn’t said goodbye.” My daughter ran to me, distressed, clinging and crying. She had lost sight of me in the roiling melee of children moving from the weekly assembly in the schoolyard to their classrooms. I had waited to find her, realized she had gone ahead and was the last parent to get to the room. “Oh for God’s sake.” I wanted to say. “I was only a few minutes behind you. You’re 6. Get over it.”

I was shocked by the dismissive voice in my head. But I knew where it came from. My own mother had been sent away from her mother when she was 3½. She saw her mother only once a month for the next four years. Yet this wasn’t the Holocaust. There was no death in the family, no illness, no financial disaster. She had simply had the bad luck to have been born in London in 1937 — two years before World War II broke out. By 1940, when the German Blitz began raining bombs over major British cities nightly, my mother was a preschooler, sheltering in the cellar with my grandmother.

The Blitz was devastating to London. Over eight months, more than a million homes were destroyed. Tens of thousands of people were killed. The government offered the population the option of leaving and moving to safer areas, the countryside, small villages. But many refused to leave, opting instead to send their children — resulting in millions of children being shipped out to the countryside, to stay with volunteer families or at institutions.

Initially my grandma resisted this separation, but after a bomb fell at the end of their street (miraculously not exploding, saving their lives), enough was enough. She couldn’t leave — she had to run their drugstore, while her husband was away in the army. So my mother was sent to a children’s home in the Essex countryside.

My mother’s memories of this time are grim. Going to the bathroom was allowed only at certain times. She remembers being the youngest, and being bullied, chased until the older boys covered her in algae from the local stream. And she loathes peanut butter to this day because of its prevalence at meals.

I asked her if anyone had hugged her while she was there, or shown her affection. “No, of course not” she answered, with a dismissive shake of her head, in that voice devoid of any emotion, a voice she seems to slip into when she talks of this time.

Today we would be talking about unprocessed grief. About the break in attachment to her mother. How her fundamental trust in the world had been shattered. There would be therapists. Grief counselors. Oprah.

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But then, there was simply British stoicism, a resilience that helped them get through the war. “Keep calm and carry on” has become a widespread meme. For my mother, it was a survival mechanism. Never reflect, never become introspective.

Instead, just keep going. “Well, you just did,” is what my mother says when I ask her about it. “You just got on with it.” It’s something that should be on her epitaph.

At 7, she returned home, to a mother she had barely seen and a father who had been in barracks for most of the war. And people everywhere got on with their lives. No one complained. No one wanted to revisit the unfairness that had caused them to receive their children back as strangers, or their husbands to die on D-Day, or the lack of food, or the affairs many women had become involved in at home. To dismantle the carefully built wall of silence would have compromised the entire social structure. Britain got on, had a stiff upper lip, and moved into the ’50s and ’60s.

And here I am today, in an American schoolyard, irritated at a 6-year-old who has become upset after we had become separated for a few minutes.

This is my mother’s voice, I tell myself. This is her pain. It’s normal behavior for a 6-year-old to panic about her mother’s absence. I bend down and look at my daughter directly in the eyes. “I’d never go away and not say goodbye,” I reassure her, trying to bore my love into her eyes. “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever.”

My mother says each time my grandma would come to visit her she would ask, “when am I coming home?” And my grandma would answer, “next time, darling, next time.”

I continue holding her tight, until she finally tries to detach herself. But I don’t let her go. “Never, ever, ever. … ” I continue, teasing, turning it into a game, until she smiles and begins laughing. The mood has shifted. I release her. She turns and runs into her classroom.

And I am left, watching her leave. My heart is breaking. For my grandma, who had to leave her child. For my mother, the child that was left. And for me, trying to ensure their pain is not passed on.