Vivante, Arturo (1923- ). "The Foghorn."
This very interesting (and brief) short story about what today we'd call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is set aboard a freighter traveling North Atlantic from Canada to England just after the conclusion of the Second World War, probably in late 1945 or early 1946. Included among the ship's small complement of passengers are a mother and her young daughter who'd been interned by the Japanese in Singapore during the War. Like the story's unnamed narrator, mother and daughter are returning home to England. A day or so out, just off Labrador, the freighter encounters thick fog and, as a standard maritime safety measure, begins blowing its foghorn at increasingly shorter and shorter intervals. This agitates the little girl (she's no more than for years old or so) immeasurably and she is soon screaming at each blast of the horn. Narrator and the girl's mother figure out that the horn sounds very much like the air raid sirens of late-War Singapore. The very sympathetic narrator writes of the child:
It seemed cruel - it seemed cruel that now that peace had come, there shouldn't be peace for her. For her the war had not ended. It was still going on. Echoes of it, out of time, out of place, like a swarm of wasps, still pursued her.
But a solution occurs to the narrator: getting down on the deck on all fours, he gives the little girl a horsey ride, galloping only when the horn sounds, as if in a horse race. Bit by bit he helps the child conquer her fears through application of another late 20th Century psychological technique: positive reinforcement. Bt y tale's end the girl has conquered her fears as the freighter moves out into the North Atlantic and home.