Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine) Read online

  ‘The good old Salvos,’ Harold said. ‘They won’t let us down.’

  A fortnight later he received a short note bluntly informing him that no records existed. Nor was there any evidence of the Salvation Army ever having found him for his sister. He could, however, rest assured that they were saying a prayer for him.

  When Harold blows, he just blows, and this was like a flame to the fuse. He screamed down the phone to me: ‘I’m getting on a plane. They can’t do this – not to me, not now. How can they get something this important wrong?’

  By the time Harold arrived in England I had decided that he should go to the Salvation Army on his own. I had become a red rag to the charities because of the growing reputation of the Child Migrants Trust. Harold was articulate and could deal with the issues; they would surely see and feel his pain.

  Sadly, however, the answer was the same. There were no records at all. Harold recounted the meeting and said that, initially, they denied ever finding him for his sister, but later went on to say, ‘Well, if we did – aren’t we wonderful?’

  ‘But how did you know I was in Australia?’ Harold pleaded. ‘You have to have known my mother, because you placed my sister for adoption. Please tell me, what did you do with me? What did you do?’

  Later that day, feeling very depressed, Harold told me about a recollection he had carried with him since childhood. He remembered being a small boy and seeing a woman in a Salvation Army uniform walking up a hill holding a little girl’s hand. The little girl was Marie being taken away.

  It was obvious to Harold that the charities offered nothing – some wouldn’t and some couldn’t. Because he was sent to Australia as part of a Government scheme – a fact that hurt him deeply – he decided to approach the politicians. He wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, asking for his files.

  Four months later he received a reply from the Community Services Division of the Department of Health and Social Security which stated:

  Dear Mr Haig,

  Thank you for your letter to the Prime Minister … I have made enquiries with our Records Office and have been advised that unfortunately there are no longer any individual case files in existence concerning post-war emigration of children to Australia. I am sorry that this means I cannot provide you with any information about the circumstances surrounding your emigration …

  Harold later wrote to Kenneth Clarke, the Secretary of State for Health, and explained to him the horrors of exporting children. Mr Clarke’s reply infuriated Harold. He felt the Minister couldn’t even be bothered to look up a simple detail about one of his predecessors.

  … I am not quite sure which Secretary of State had responsibility for the [child migration] policy in the 1945 Government. If you could obtain from the Child Migrants Trust that information it would make it possible for the successor Department to be asked whether records of the kind which you are seeking have been kept.

  … I know that you will find this deeply disappointing, but I would be misleading you if I raised your hopes that Government archives somewhere have the kind of information you are looking for.

  Sadly, this is just the kind of response that reinforces the view of many child migrants that they were exported, abandoned and forgotten.

  Harold’s emotional ups and downs mirrored our search. I saw him more or less every day through some really bad times when he would lock himself away for days on end at the small house he rented in Nottingham.

  Harold celebrated his fiftieth birthday during that time. With his long grey hair and wild beard, he looked quite striking, although out of the ordinary.

  I made a conscious effort to help him feel part of my family and when he asked me, on his birthday, if he could take Ben to the park to play football, I didn’t think twice about it.

  ‘And what about his little friend next door?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘If they want to go.’

  On the way back from the park, some friendly neighbour had rung the police and said, ‘There’s a strange bloke with these two kids, holding their hands.’

  A police car appeared out of nowhere and pulled up next to Harold and the boys.

  ‘Who are you?’ they demanded. ‘Are these your little boys?’

  ‘No.’

  Harold had not had the world’s best experiences with authority, and it was clear to everyone present that the situation was going to escalate. One of the policemen put a hand on Harold’s arm and Harold grabbed it.

  Suddenly, Ben said, ‘This is Harold and he’s fifty today. This is my mum’s friend from Australia. My mum’s working with him, you can’t talk to him like that!’

  Not many small children would have had the maturity to step in and defuse such a situation but Ben, aged seven, was already learning about the realities of life.

  Harold’s birth certificate mentioned that he was born in a place called Twyford Lodge in Willesden, London, on 24 February 1938, but his family home was in Acton. It was a large house in which his parents had rented rooms. I wondered if it was possible to find anybody who had lived there in 1938 and 1939. If so, perhaps they would remember Harold’s family. It was a very long shot, but I was running out of ideas.

  I went to the electoral office for the borough and began making a list of everybody who had lived in the house. There were no new electoral rolls collated for the war year of 1939, which only left 1938.

  Eventually I had a short list of people who had lived in the house, including several married couples. Although I knew there was little chance they would still be alive, I concentrated on the couples because I hoped they might have had children who would remember Harold’s and Marie’s parents.

  From marriage certificates I moved to the birth certificates of their children and then the children getting married and eventually having children. It was a search down three generations that stretched me beyond imagination. I took the search as wide as it would take me – even to the other side of the Atlantic.

  Finally, after months of work and countless applications for birth, death and marriage certificates, I discovered a woman who had been eleven years old and living with her parents at the house in 1938. I found her address through the London telephone directory and wrote a letter, hoping she would confirm her old address. She rang me at home, terribly excited, one evening.

  I was desperate. So much time and effort had gone into finding her, she had to be the right one.

  I remember her words: ‘Yes, we lived at the house. What’s this all about?’

  I hardly dared ask. ‘Do you remember a Mr and Mrs Haig living there?’

  ‘Oh, you mean Betty and Harold.’

  ‘Did they have any children?’

  ‘Oh, yes – two. A little girl and a little boy. Little Harold and little Betty.’

  It was ten o’clock at night and I was jumping up and down excitedly, and wanting everybody to hear the news. At long last I’d found somebody who’d known Harold’s family. I’d never tried so hard to find somebody – learning as I went – and I knew that we’d earned this. I opened a bottle of wine and drank a toast.

  I arranged to meet Harold the next day. I told him about the new lead and, along with Marie, we arranged to go to London and have lunch with the woman who was the first link to their past.

  We sat outside at an Italian restaurant in Hammersmith on a lovely summer’s day. Food was the last thing on anybody’s mind. The meeting was astonishing – desperately sad in many ways – because this woman could remember Marie and Harold as children. She was nervous at first and I could see that she was taken aback by the desperation in Harold’s and Marie’s questions. She described how Marie used to sit in a high chair in the kitchen and how she herself used to bounce baby Harold on her knee.

  I watched Marie and Harold experience something that most of us just take for granted. They couldn’t believe that they’d ever been children. They were totally spellbound, simply frozen to the spot as this woman described them as babies.


  ‘Tell me what my dad looked like?’ asked Marie.

  ‘And what was Mum like?’ said Harold.

  It just went on and on as this woman, who was only eleven when she knew them, tried to pull everything out of herself. Harold, in a way, felt he’d never been born but now he had confirmation that he did have a family. The four of them had lived together – Mum, Dad and two children – with Dad going off to work each day and coming home in the evening like a normal father.

  Although in her sixties, the woman had an amazing memory for that time and could say that the family was probably from the North of England. The father sounded Scottish and their mother had a northern accent, but she didn’t know what happened to them afterwards. She looked across the table at Harold and Marie and asked quite innocently, ‘Where are your mum and dad now?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Marie.

  ‘Well, what happened to you both?’

  Marie explained how she was in care and later adopted. Harold didn’t mention Australia.

  The woman looked horrified and said, ‘Oh, no – there must be a mistake. The mother I knew would never have parted with her children. No, no. You’ve got it wrong. She would have died for her children. Nobody could have taken them away from her.’

  10

  Of the hundreds of letters the Child Migrants Trust had received from all over the world, there were a surprising number from Perth in Western Australia. Domino Films had been researching the documentary and Joanna Mack decided to tackle the Australian leg first – beginning in Perth and then working our way across to the eastern states.

  David Spicer and I discussed the trip and decided well in advance that the workload would be far too much for one person to manage. He offered to take annual leave and come with me. We had worked together before, normally on child protection cases that came to court. Some of the children in those cases had suffered horrendous abuse, but David had shown his toughness and determination. He is very precise and doesn’t let go.

  ‘I’m a lawyer, not a counsellor,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know how to conduct an interview.’

  I told him not to worry. ‘You visit the charities and handle the publicity. I’ll talk with the child migrants.’

  We left England in March 1988 and flew via Hong Kong to Perth.

  Landing early in the morning, I was struck by how almost clinically clean the airport was. The staff wore shorts and white, knee-length socks – which looked quite odd until I walked outside and the heat hit me. By mid-morning it was 42° Celsius, 120° Fahrenheit; I’d never felt anything like it.

  To save the Trust money on accommodation Philip Bean, a trustee, had contacted former colleagues at the University of Western Australia. They offered to let us stay in the halls of residence. My small room was in a building ironically called St Catherine’s College – a large modern building.

  The university also offered us a small house in which to work, away from the campus and relatively central. It had a small lounge area with comfortable chairs, a kitchen and an office. Although not air-conditioned, there were large desk fans.

  Early next morning, David was interviewed on a local radio station and while he was still on the air, the telephone rang.

  It seemed strange to be thousands of miles away from home and to be saying ‘Child Migrants Trust’.

  A rather angry voice, asked, ‘Who sent you?’ Before I could answer he continued, ‘And what took you so long?’

  I smiled, thinking he meant that I’d been slow in answering the phone.

  ‘I want to know why it’s taken you so long to come and see us? The British government sent us here years ago. They didn’t want us. Just left us here to rot. They don’t answer my letters.’

  I tried to explain that I wasn’t from the Government and, what’s more, I felt sure that it wasn’t the British people who didn’t want him.

  ‘I doubt whether anybody even realizes you’re here,’ I said kindly.

  My caller, Bill, became very tearful and distressed.

  ‘I’m almost seventy-five years old,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been home but I’m still British. I’ve been here more than sixty years.’

  I tried to explain why I was in Perth, but Bill wasn’t listening. He was too upset and I could hear his wife in the background trying to calm him down.

  There was a knock at the door and I asked Bill to hold the line for a moment.

  David was still talking on the radio – answering callers’ questions. I was expecting him back to help me but he had become an instant talkback star.

  I opened the door. A woman asked me, ‘Are you the lady from England?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ I smiled.

  ‘You must be with that pale complexion. So what’s the weather like in the old country?’

  ‘The old country?’ I asked.

  ‘Much colder than here,’ she said. ‘Oh, it was cold when I left.’

  ‘And when was that?’ I asked.

  ‘November 1950. We had gloves and scarves.’

  ‘We? How many were you?’

  ‘Oh, there were about sixty of us on the boat. We were collected from all over England. And there were kids from Scotland and Ireland. It was very hot when we arrived here. A bit like today.’

  Outside it was already forty plus.

  ‘You’d better keep out of the sun,’ she said. ‘My God, we burnt. Our arms were burnt raw within days.’

  I told her to come inside. Bill was still on the phone and I made arrangements for him to come and see me later that day. Then I began arranging furniture in the sitting-room for the first interview.

  There was another knock on the door. This time a man stood there.

  ‘Is this the place the man spoke of on the radio? I’ve had a hell of a time finding you.’

  Graham was in his late forties. ‘I’m an orphan from England. God, it’s taken years. Have they forgotten about us?’

  Before I could answer him, the door rattled again.

  ‘Good morning,’ I smiled at the six people who were now standing in front of me. ‘I think we’d better get organized here.’

  By the time David arrived back from the radio station there must have been more than twenty people waiting. The veranda and garden were full with people, sitting, standing, talking, smoking and waiting their turn. Some were on their own, others with husbands and wives. Some recognized each other from long ago.

  David made cups of tea and cold drinks in between answering the phone. He was making appointments for later in the day or the following day, but many said they’d wait, regardless of how long it took.

  ‘I’ll wait all day if necessary. I’ve waited all my life,’ said one woman.

  The desk fans were humming but offered little respite. Perspiration trickled off me.

  I arranged a settee and two armchairs in the sitting-room and began the first interview by trying to explain what I was doing.

  ‘I’ve come to Perth to talk with people who were child migrants; people who arrived in Australia without their parents.’

  ‘You mean you’ve come all this way to see us?’ the first woman asked.

  ‘Yes, I’ve come to see you.’

  As soon as I said it I could see the physical relief on her face. She asked, ‘Can I hold your hand?’

  I was taken aback but went over and sat beside her on the settee. She took my hand.

  ‘Where do you want to start?’ I asked.

  ‘Do you think I’ve got any family? Cousins, anybody? I’m not fussy. Anybody. They told me that my parents were dead. Do you think that’s true?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I can find out. I’ll need your help.’

  ‘How can I possibly help you? I don’t know anything about myself.’

  ‘Well, let’s start with your name.’

  ‘Ann Theresa.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have a family?’

  ‘Two children. They’re teenagers now.�
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  ‘When did you marry?’

  ‘Getting married was very painful for me. I couldn’t tell people who I was. I didn’t have a birth certificate. I felt ashamed.’

  The tears just flowed down her face.

  ‘What did we do wrong?’ she asked. ‘Can you find out why they sent me? What did I do wrong?’

  ‘You did nothing wrong, Ann.’

  She looked at me as if I was being kind to her.

  ‘Do you know how old you were when you came to Australia?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘What could an eight-year-old possibly have done that was so bad?’

  She smiled a little.

  ‘Can you remember when your own children were eight years old?’ I asked.

  ‘I remember them at every age.’ She paused and squeezed my hand.

  As she wiped away tears, I explained to her, ‘We have to view this like a journey. You have to help me understand, somehow, the milestones of your life so far, and from there we will take another journey. Neither of us knows where it’s going to lead. I know it’s going to be painful but you have to help me.’

  Ann nodded her head.

  I asked, ‘What are your earliest memories? What can you remember about England?’

  ‘I can remember a lady visiting me. I was in a room and this lady came with a man who used to put me on his shoulders. Sometimes they took me for bike rides.’

  ‘Was she elderly or young?’

  ‘I think she was young. She used to sit me on her knee.’

  ‘Who do you think this lady was?’

  ‘I think she was my mother.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘She had a fur collar on her coat and I used to like to put my cheek on it. And then she would put her hand on my bottom and give me a nice pat. Only mothers do that to their children, don’t they?’

  Ann was describing an intimacy. She didn’t know where or why, but it was the physical closeness that she remembered.

  ‘Did you like those times?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. But I’ve never had them since. Do you think it was my mother?’