Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine) Page 6

  ‘Not having a family makes you feel as if you don’t belong to the human race,’ she went on. ‘I never told anyone about my past until I was forty. I would love to discover that I have a family. It would make me feel I was not alone in the world.’

  As I listened, I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable.

  For the first time I was hearing about the conditions and experiences of these British children. Sandra was telling me far more than she could have imagined. For one thing, she remembered that she didn’t come on her own. There were other children on the boat. She also recalled coming from an orphanage in the Midlands, which suggested that the local authorities must have organized, or at least known of, her departure.

  My mind couldn’t grasp this. It seemed totally unreal. I couldn’t understand why anybody would send a child from one institution in England to another in Australia.

  ‘Were any of you adopted or fostered?’ I asked Sandra. ‘Did you ever live with a family? Did anybody tell you why you were being sent to Australia? Did they ask you if you wanted to come? What did you know about Australia?’

  Sandra shook her head. She had no answers. In truth, she hoped I would be able to provide them.

  Before I said goodbye, I made a commitment to her that if she wanted me to find her family or investigate her background, I’d do this. I would piece together her past and try to give it a meaning.

  Syd Stephenson was another who had answered the advertisement. He ran a lawnmower shop in Sydney and remembered being ten years old when he left a children’s home in Birmingham and voyaged to Australia. He and his brother were sent to the Fairbridge Farm School, at Molong, near Orange, in western New South Wales.

  Unlike Sandra, Syd remembered his childhood with a degree of fondness, calling Molong tough but fair, but he could not forgive Britain for deserting him. Also unlike Sandra, he knew something about his family. His brother had gone back to Britain and to Manchester where they both remembered spending part of their childhood. He discovered their mother had died of cancer at the age of 54.

  Syd didn’t blame her for what had happened. She was a single mother trying to feed and clothe two boys. When she couldn’t cope, she gave the boys to their father who placed them in the children’s home.

  ‘He didn’t know we were going to be sent to Australia,’ Syd told me. ‘They did it without telling anybody. I’ll never forgive them for that.’

  While I continued the interviews, Annabel dug through newspaper archives and began collating a list of the various charities and agencies that had links with the child migration schemes. Some organizations no longer existed, or had been merged and renamed.

  Finally she found somebody who might be able to explain the child migration schemes to us and invited me along to the interview.

  Monsignor George Crennan was a former director of the Australian Federal Catholic Immigration Committee, who became involved with immigration schemes in 1949.

  When we arrived at his office he immediately asked to see our credentials, and I gave him an introductory letter from the British Association of Social Workers (BASW).

  Annabel began asking a series of questions. How many children were brought out to Australia? What was the reasoning? Have you kept in touch with these people? Did they come out with their parents’ consent?

  I could see Monsignor Crennan suddenly realize that this was no soft interview and that Annabel wasn’t about to be fobbed off with waffle and hot air.

  In general, the Monsignor said the child migration schemes were a legacy of poverty and overflowing children’s homes in Britain. The opportunities for children were thought to be better in Australia.

  Annabel explained that we’d talked to some of these migrants who didn’t appreciate the ‘opportunities’ of which he spoke. They had described being very poorly treated and were now desperate to learn about their families.

  Monsignor Crennan admitted that he had received enquiries from people trying to trace their families. He normally referred them to the Crusade of Rescue Agency, which had sent them out.

  ‘Do you feel you have a responsibility towards these people?’ Annabel asked him bluntly.

  I was surprised at her directness but even more surprised at his answer.

  ‘Most certainly not.’

  ‘I’d like to put that to you again,’ Annabel said, pen poised over her pad. ‘Do you feel you have any responsibility for these people who were brought out here as young children?’

  ‘Certainly not. I don’t feel any responsibility for them at all. We didn’t arrange for them to come. We were nominated by the Children’s Department to find places for them. I have no information about them. On the whole, it was a positive experience for the children. I would venture to suggest that if these people had remained in England, they might not have made such progress. They would have become bell boys and other such things. It was eventually stopped because people felt it was wrong for a country to export its children. Now let me ask you: what kind of country is it that sends its children 12,000 miles away? You want to ask yourselves that.’

  Thankfully, not all of the charities we approached felt this way. Annabel and I arranged to see Louise Voigt, Executive Director of Barnardo’s, Australia, who admitted quite openly that the child migration schemes had led to massive problems. ‘These people lost touch with their roots, with their siblings, and their social milieux. There were many human tragedies.’

  On my last afternoon in Sydney, I left the hotel and went looking for a place to sit and think by myself. I had no thoughts of sight-seeing; time was too precious, but there was one particular place I had to visit. I began walking through the Botanical Gardens, enjoying the sunshine. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, or listen to tour guides, or write postcards. This was my time for peace and reflection.

  I walked for a long while, until I came to a rise, and almost unexpectedly I found myself looking across Sydney harbour. My spirits immediately lifted. The Opera House, with its graceful sails, looked ready to break away from the shore and sweep up the harbour in the breeze. This was what I’d come to see. Whether it was the love of music instilled in me by my mother or simply an image from a long-forgotten postcard pinned to my kitchen wall, there was something that had made me want to see the Opera House.

  I found my way to the forecourt and walked around it slowly, leaning on the railings above the lapping tide. Then I sat down on the steps and watched the Japanese tourists, laden with cameras, feeding the seagulls. Periodically, green-liveried ferries pulled away from Circular Quay, some of them heading for Manly, others for Mosman and Taronga Park Zoo or for Balmain further up the harbour.

  Closing my eyes I imagined that I could hear the great operas and orchestras playing inside. For a while it made me forget. It wasn’t long, but it was long enough.

  Melbourne reminded me more of England. The parks and gardens were full of deciduous trees and, in places, the architecture was quite Victorian. Perhaps the city founders had been homesick and had sought to create a slice of the familiar in a distant corner of the Empire.

  There were more people to see – in particular, Harold Haig who had come in from the wilderness to see Marie. In the meantime, I arranged to see George Wilkins, whose letter had arrived on the day I left England.

  George agreed to pick us up from the Travelodge Hotel in Parkville.

  ‘I’ll bet George owns a motor bike and sidecar,’ joked Annabel, as we waited in reception. ‘Or a battered old Land Rover.’

  A car pulled up outside.

  ‘Don’t look up now,’ Annabel said, ‘but a Rolls Royce has just arrived.’

  I laughed at her. A man alighted and strode into the foyer. He walked straight towards me. ‘Are you Margaret Humphreys?’

  As Annabel and I climbed into the back of the Rolls, I couldn’t look at her or I would have burst out laughing.

  George, in his late forties, had become a self-made millionaire from a string of video shops. He was ten when he lef
t Liverpool in 1950 and arrived at the Fairbridge Farm School of Molong, along with his younger brother and sister.

  ‘At Fairbridge you were just a number. I felt there was no love or affection, no friendly arm on your shoulder.’

  He was a bright boy and the first among his peers to be sent to the local high school in nearby Orange.

  ‘I will always remember my first day at high school. The headmaster stood on the top of the steps, addressing the students and said, “Who is that boy without a uniform?” I was the only child without one because Fairbridge didn’t think it necessary.

  ‘If there were school excursions, like sporting events, the whole school used to go and we had to have maybe 2d for the bus. It was too far to walk. So I would go up to different school kids and say, “I need another ha’penny. I have a penny ha’penny,” and sooner or later one would give me a ha’penny and ultimately I’d get a penny and go on until I got my 2d. I always got on that bus, but it wasn’t easy.

  ‘For lunch you would sometimes get one baked bean in a sandwich; or you’d have a mutton sandwich and the blowflies had attacked it and it would be full of maggots. But every day at recess I’d eat my lunch as I would be hungry, and the rest of the day there was nothing. I had to wait till I got back.’

  After four years at high school, during which he slipped from near top of the class to the bottom, the man in charge at Fairbridge told George that he was going to be apprenticed to a local fitter and turner.

  ‘He told me if I didn’t take the job, I would owe Fairbridge two years’ farm work because I’d been at high school,’ George said. ‘I offered to do the farm work, but he told me to remember my sister and if I didn’t take this apprenticeship, he would make things difficult for her. That convinced me.’

  George did a lot of different jobs over the next twenty-four years – very few of them fulfilling – and then at the age of forty he decided to go to university. He subsequently went into business and became a millionaire. But he refused to give Fairbridge any credit for his success. ‘I feel I owe them nothing,’ he told me. ‘I had to do something to show that despite them I could win.’

  George didn’t know what had happened to his parents but he thought his sister, Rita, may have returned to the UK. He wanted to find out if he had a family.

  * * *

  During the next three days, I spoke to six more former child migrants. None of them had been sent to Australia to be adopted by families – all had grown up in institutions that did little to prepare them for life outside their walls.

  A few consistent strands had begun to emerge from the stories. The former child migrants all told of leaving Britain on a boat and heading for a ‘new start’. One woman, who had been in a children’s home, described being summoned by the Mother Superior one evening, when she was ten years old.

  ‘She was a strict lady and I thought I was going to be in for some kind of telling off. “Have a seat, my child,” she said. Then she started talking about being sent to Australia. Blimey, I thought, have I been that bad to be sent away? Mother Superior said that I had been chosen, that it was a wonderful opportunity, not some kind of punishment. But that night in bed, I cried. I was so frightened of leaving the only home I’d ever had, of leaving my school friends, my sisters, of leaving my best friend Pearl and never seeing any of them again.’

  Almost without exception, each person I interviewed in Melbourne insisted that their parents were dead because that’s what they’d been told. They were orphans and most, like Madeleine, had no birth certificate or documentation; no letters or photographs. There was nothing to tie them to the past except distant memories.

  Marie had arrived in Melbourne the day before me and Harold had met her at the airport.

  He knew from Marie’s letters that I was a British social worker who wanted to talk to him, but was totally underwhelmed by the prospect. ‘Why does this bloody Margaret want to see me? I hope when she gets here she has a good holiday.’

  I arranged to meet them for supper at the Travelodge. Marie was absolutely radiant – I could barely recognize her. For the first time I saw her strong, happy and relaxed instead of timid and shy.

  Harold had a tremendous presence and when I saw him next to Marie, the physical similarities between them were striking.

  That evening we spoke little about the past. It was simply wonderful seeing a brother and sister together after so many years. At times I felt as if I shouldn’t be there. Harold and Marie were completely wrapped up in each other.

  The next day, on a drive to the Dandenong Ranges, outside the city, I managed to see Harold alone. All morning he’d avoided me, disappearing for a cigarette whenever the conversation touched on a subject that made him feel uncomfortable.

  As we walked through a beautiful garden, Harold pointed out the brilliantly coloured galahs that squawked in the trees. He told me that he had no recollection of his mother. He had no photograph or abiding memory to cling to, yet when he was a child, not a day passed when he didn’t want to find his mother. Everything in his voice and body language told me that this was still the case.

  Harold had married when he was in his early twenties and had three children, a boy and two girls. But not even fatherhood could melt the block of ice inside of him. Ever since his mid-twenties he’d suffered from severe depression.

  ‘My wife, Barbara, was my first and only serious girlfriend. We lived in a flat for a while, and when we were expecting our first baby we bought a three-bedroom weatherboard house in a new housing estate about fifteen miles out of Melbourne. In those days this was akin almost to living in the bush. Trevor was born in 1961 and I was very proud and happy to have started my own family. Fiona, our first daughter, was born in 1965, and Cathie two years later.

  ‘I don’t think I was madly in love when I got married. I didn’t understand what that word meant, and still have trouble with it now. It’s as though this word, this feeling, belongs to other people, but not me. I’m not entitled to feel love.’

  Harold started searching for his mother when he was about eighteen. He saw an advertisement in the newspaper – probably a detective agency – that said it could find people. The agency took his money but produced no positive results.

  Then, in 1963, Marie found him through the Salvation Army.

  ‘That visit wasn’t very successful but it brought feelings and emotions to the surface that I had buried deeply, feelings about my parents, particularly my mother. These feelings had arisen when Trevor was born but I had kept them hidden. While I continued to control them when Fiona and Cathie were born, they kept bubbling away inside.

  ‘I got very depressed and felt alone and empty.’

  By 1968, Harold had three lovely children and a happy marriage. He was buying a house and working as a signwriter. To outsiders he may have looked a happy and contented man. Instead, he tried to kill himself. It was a cry for help.

  ‘I thought about my mother a lot, but never talked about her. How can you talk about someone you have been told doesn’t exist? It didn’t make any sense to me.

  ‘A psychiatrist put me on anti-depressant tablets. I took these and saw him for a while, and slowly they took away my depressions, and so I stopped, and stored up the tablets that he gave me.

  ‘I was all right for a while, and then I started to get depressed again. I kept trying to fight it, thinking it would go away, but it just got worse. I was drinking a lot, trying to obliterate my feelings, but it just made me feel worse.

  ‘The first time I tried to commit suicide I had done it away from home, this time I did it at home. I didn’t want to be found in a motel somewhere. I had a few drinks and when Barbara went to bed, I started to drink more rapidly, and then I took the tablets I had stored up. I woke up, or became conscious, a few days later in hospital.’

  Harold’s marriage broke up in 1970, through no fault of his wife, and they were divorced the following year. He felt guilty about leaving Barbara and the children. He’d always vowed he would
never do such a thing.

  ‘I had no idea how to be a father, a dad, I felt so bad about this that I even stopped calling myself Dad when I talked to them. I didn’t deserve to be known by that name,’ Harold said.

  ‘The only woman I have wanted to find, desperately wanted to find, the one I have always wanted to hold me, and hug me, is my mother. That emptiness has been with me all my life.

  ‘I can’t stand Mother’s Day. Every year it’s a constant reminder, like someone twisting a knife inside me. I always stay inside that day, with my blinds down, and never answer the phone. I’ve spent years looking at families from a distance, trying to understand what it would be like to be a part of one, my own. To have my own mum and dad.’

  In all, Harold attempted suicide three times and became locked in a seemingly endless round of psychotherapy and medication.

  He stumbled aimlessly from one crisis to another, with the only constants in his life being alcohol and a yearning to find his mother. The only way he could express himself emotionally was through his art but his paintings were full of disturbing, abstract images of pain and anguish.

  Because of his past experiences of counselling, Harold was predisposed not to trust me or have any positive expectations.

  I just felt that here was a man who was so lost and lonely, so bereft of feeling, that I had to do something for him.

  ‘Can you take me to the children’s home where you grew up?’ I asked.

  ‘What for? What good will it do?’

  I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t just in Australia because of Marie. If I was to search for their mother, both of them had to take the journey with me.

  Harold was eleven years old when he arrived at St John’s Boys’ Home, in Canterbury, a comfortable middle-class suburb of Melbourne. He remembered being told by a welfare officer at Sussex County Council that he was going to live in a land where the sun was always shining and where he would ride to school on horseback. He left England in 1949 from a children’s home in East Sussex. They let him keep his name, and packed him off to Australia with only an entry card to prove his existence. It was still the only record that he had of his youth.