Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (16 page)

We are Fairbridge folk, all as good as e’er,

English, Welsh and Scottish, we have come from

everywhere;

Boys to be farmers and girls for farmers’ wives,

We follow Fairbridge, the Founder.

As I listened to the words and looked around me, I could see that there was tremendous joy and pride on their faces, but beneath it I could almost touch the pain and denial in some of these people.

Our table was quiet during dinner. We swapped small talk and didn’t comment on what was happening around us. I found it difficult to eat.

After the main course arrived, I saw a woman get up from a neighbouring table and walk towards me.

‘Are you the Margaret Humphreys?’ she snapped, full of anger.

‘Yes.’

‘Look at this then,’ she said, slamming the palm of her hand on the table so the plates jumped. Beneath her hand was a photograph. ‘You want to look at this. This man is a professor and he’s an Old Fairbridgian. Look at how well we’ve done for ourselves. Why didn’t you write about him?’

‘I haven’t written about anybody,’ I explained, trying to be as gentle as possible.

‘Yes, you have.’

I wasn’t going to argue. She had a right to her view. When she left, all of us just looked at each other.

We carried on eating and when the meal was nearly over, Miss Hutchinson was asked to deliver a congratulatory address on behalf of the Fairbridge Society in London.

‘It’s so wonderful to be invited here and to see so many happy faces on this special occasion. I have a surprise – a gift from the London office to mark your fiftieth anniversary. When Kingsley Fairbridge first …’

I wasn’t listening any more. It’s the files! I thought. She’s brought them their files. I knew what that would mean. Ever since these children were sent abroad, Fairbridge had kept a file on each of them. Each had his or her past locked in a filing cabinet 12,000 miles away.

Surely she must have brought the files, I thought. What else could it be?

Finally, as Miss Hutchinson finished her speech, she said, ‘Yes, I’ve brought some photographs. We’ll put them up on the walls and when we’ve finished eating, we can all go and have a look at them. I think you’ll find there will be some wonderful surprises. They are photographs of all of you as children. I’m sure your families will want to look at them too.’

We stayed at the table and later, as the plates were cleared and the band set up their instruments, I noticed people starting to get up and gather around the rear of the auditorium. I heard whispering at first, which grew louder.

David went to investigate.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked him, sensing his disquiet.

‘People are crying,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing. They’re looking at themselves as children and breaking down.’

I suddenly realized what was wrong. Many of these people had never seen themselves as children. They were gazing at small black-and-white images of youngsters gathered on the docks and on railway platforms in England. There were other pictures of them on the farm, sitting on the steps or in the shade of trees. This was part of their past and for the last five decades it had been locked away.

Fairbridge’s gesture appeared to be backfiring.

I had no way of knowing why Fairbridge had decided to open its archives and show the photographs. Perhaps it was always planned as a nice gesture on the fiftieth anniversary; or was triggered, at least in part, by the
Observer
articles.

‘I think you’d better go over there,’ said David.

The photographs were pinned to a wall. Men and women were leaning close, pointing out faces to their wives, husbands and children.

‘Look. Look. This is me,’ they exclaimed, voices choked with emotion.

To anybody else they were just ordinary snapshots, but to some of these people, the photographs represented a rare and precious link with the past. They wanted copies, but Miss Hutchinson told them that she didn’t have the negatives.

Men and women began coming over to me. Others approached David. We were surrounded by people asking us about the Child Migrants Trust and what it did. For the next hour we answered their questions.

Many wanted to meet me privately and David reassured them that I wasn’t rushing straight back to Sydney and would join them the following day at the reunion barbecue.

Next morning, I interviewed several migrants at our hotel before returning to the reunion. By the time we arrived at the barbecue the tables were set up and hot-plates were being stoked with wood.

It was a picturesque setting, in a large field surrounded by pine trees.

A small girl in a sundress came up and presented me with three pine cones. ‘I want you to have these,’ she said. ‘I want you to take them back to England.’

‘Oh, they’re lovely,’ I told her. ‘Why are you giving them to me?’

‘Because you’re going to help my grandad find his family.’

I recognized many of the faces from the previous evening. People seemed more relaxed in casual clothes. I certainly felt more comfortable.

‘Where am I going to interview people?’ I asked David. ‘I can’t sit in the middle of a field.’

‘Never fear,’ he chuckled.

Sure enough, he produced a table and chair and pointed me towards what looked like a sports pavilion.

You must be joking, I thought, but obediently settled into the room.

Meanwhile, David began mingling with the migrants letting them know that I would see them. People started queuing up.

From the very first interview, I sensed that the Fairbridgians were in a dilemma; caught between a wish to be loyal to Fairbridge and a need to know about the past. They wanted to see me but the reunion was a celebration of their time at the farm school, not an examination of past wrongs. I tried to answer their questions as best I could.

During one interview with a husband and wife, Miss Hutchinson walked in. She saw there was no spare seat and disappeared, only to return within minutes with a chair under her arm. Without being invited she sat down next to me.

‘How could you bloody well do it?’ the wife rounded on her. ‘How could you have done it?’

Miss Hutchinson was shocked. Her whole demeanour changed. I picked up my chair, moved myself to the other side of the room and left her sitting there, totally silent.

‘My husband had nothing, nothing at all,’ I heard the wife continue. ‘Nothing to give his children. How could you have done it? Where are the records?’

There were tears streaming down her husband’s face.

As she held his hand, the woman said quietly, ‘Last night he saw photographs of himself as a little boy for the first time in his life. We cried all night.’

Miss Hutchinson was dumbfounded. She could obviously sense that these people were suddenly turning on her and the Fairbridge Society. She couldn’t understand their anger. ‘Times have changed, now,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like this years ago.’

The woman replied, ‘My husband wants to find his family. He doesn’t know if he has a family. He should have been able to do this years ago.’

I felt Miss Hutchinson was fighting a losing battle. She softened when she saw the tears. Finally she told the couple, ‘When I get back to England, we’re going to do everything we can to co-operate with Mrs Humphreys and get you access to the files.’

By late afternoon the queue of people waiting to see me had dwindled but I now knew so much more about the experiences of child migrants at Molong. I was starting to doubt that any of these children had been orphans when they left Britain.

Some could actually remember parents, and a few, in the early days, had received letters from people who they thought were relatives.

Although I recognized the efforts that the Fairbridge Society had made for the migrants, I could also see that each had lost a part of their lives – it was a loss which, for many, had permeated the years since their departure from Britain.

David and I still had a long drive ahead of us, back to Sydney, and I had notes to write up. While I had been conducting interviews, David had talked to the migrants waiting outside. Among them was the woman who had stormed up to our table the previous night and slammed down the photograph in front of me.

As we packed the car to leave, she approached me. Her demeanour had changed totally.

‘I’ve been talking to David,’ she said. ‘Do you think it would be all right if I wrote a letter to you when you get back to England?’

‘Of course. I’d love to hear from you.’

As we drove out of Orange at dusk, trees were silhouetted across the horizon. I thought of something George had shown me the previous day when we drove along a dusty road towards the farm school.

‘You see that tree?’ he had asked, pointing out a lone gum-tree set back from the road.

I nodded.

‘Well, Margaret, I wanted to show you that tree …’

‘Why’s that then?’

‘I wanted you to see that tree because that’s where I used to sit every day at four o’clock, thinking about my home in Liverpool. That was my childhood in that tree. And I used to walk down this road and think, Oh, please knock me over. I want a car to knock me over. Don’t kill me, just break my legs so I’ll go in hospital. Because then somebody will pick me up … then somebody will hold me.’

I boarded the plane back to England very tired, very sad and not a little angry. The final four days in Sydney had been tough going. David did more than a dozen radio and press interviews and I had many migrants to see, including one living in Wollongong on the south coast.

Joanna, David and I sat together on the flight home.

Joanna was clearly exhausted, emotionally as well as physically. She had been working on her own for most of the time; we’d been going on ahead of her, doing the interviews and arranging for her to follow some of them up. The stress of listening to the migrants and then travelling thousands of miles alone, without the consolation of someone with whom to share her reactions, had taken its toll.

David’s face looked almost haunted, and I could sense his anger. It was beyond his comprehension that anyone could treat children in such a way. That anybody could physically and sexually abuse such vulnerable human beings. Occasionally his fury would surface and he’d say things like: ‘There’s never been anything like this. Never. The abuse of these children is on a scale that is totally unknown. The perpetrators have got to be brought to account. They can’t get away with this.’

I, too, was shattered – both by what I’d heard and by the scale of the task that lay ahead. I kept thinking to myself, How am I going to do this? I had a small study in my house, one phone, no fax, a part-time researcher and a mountain to climb.

Above my head and beneath my feet were six bags full of notebooks and migrants’ documentation. David and I had had to argue for permission to carry them on as hand luggage but I was adamant. I wasn’t letting them out of my sight because they represented all that some people had of their past lives.

‘We’ve got to tell the Government, haven’t we? We’ve got to tell the charities.’

‘Yes,’ said David. ‘They’ve got to be told. They have to know that it went dreadfully wrong for so many.’

‘What about the files? We need to get access to them. It could help us find their families.’

I had a terrible sense of foreboding as we landed at Heathrow. And when I reached up to unload the bags from the overhead lockers, I turned to David and said, ‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’

He just looked at me and said, ‘Yes.’

It was Good Friday but we had no sense of it being Easter. The tulips and daffodils were blooming but they brought little joy. Philip Bean picked us up from the airport and from the moment I saw a familiar face I knew that I couldn’t talk. He was full of questions, but I couldn’t answer. I was too shocked by what I had learned. It would take a long while before I could share the experience in Australia.

‘Where’s the rest of you, Margaret?’ Merv asked. ‘Your clothes are falling off you.’

‘I’ve lost a bit of weight.’

The house was spotless and there were flowers everywhere. Welcome-home cards decorated the hall and the mantelpiece. Rachel and Ben had made a little banner which was pinned across the front door saying ‘Welcome Home’.

They were very excited to see me, full of hugs and kisses. Ben was eight. He wouldn’t let me out of his sight. He trailed me through the house and upstairs when I went to bed. He lay on the bed beside me and prised my eyes open when I tried to sleep, saying, ‘Don’t sleep now, talk to me. Talk to me, Mummy.’

It was difficult. They kept asking me questions about what I’d seen and who I’d met. They wanted to know all about Australia. What could I say? I’d seen hotels and airports.

A week later, when the children were back at school, a teacher took me aside when I arrived to pick Ben up from the local primary school.

‘Ben’s been terribly upset while you’ve been away,’ the teacher said. ‘I saw him sitting in class one day with his eyes shut and when I asked him what he was doing he said, “I’m trying to see my Mummy’s face.”’

Swallowing the lump in my throat, I explained to the teacher that I was due to go away again within a few months. ‘We’ve tried to cushion it. Is there anything else we can do?’ I asked.

‘What about putting a photograph of you in his satchel?’ she said. ‘Ben knows you’re coming back, but three weeks seems like forever to an eight-year-old.’

For a long while I couldn’t talk about Australia. There was a barrier around me and I didn’t laugh as much. My assumptions and long-held beliefs, all those things a person relies upon, had been turned upside down. The world itself looked slightly different when I looked out the window at ordinary scenes like families going off to church.

I thought, These people are OK. They don’t know about the thousands of children sent overseas who could have been their friends and their neighbours. They have no idea how lucky they are.

‘Where do we begin?’ I asked Yvonne, as we sat in the upstairs office staring at the unpacked bags.

My main priority, I decided, was to be able to return to Australia in six months’ time, having made at least some progress with everybody I’d seen. In most cases this might mean only having found them a birth certificate.