Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (19 page)

John was part of the second wave of child migrants sent to Canada between 1935 and 1948. They were fewer in number and had an entirely different upbringing from the children who preceded them. Instead of being sent to isolated farms, they grew up in an institution. Fairbridge operated a series of cottages each housing about twenty-five children under the care of a cottage mother.

‘We were segregated, the girls at one end of the school and the boys at the other; and until we were twelve we wore short blue pants and horrible sweaters. You would get up in the morning and go to this gigantic dining-room and have your breakfast. Then you went to school. It was a whole self-contained community: the school was there, the farm was there.

‘There was no time to ourselves. After farming work, there was the cottage mother to contend with and what she wanted us to do. The seniors picked on us worse than anybody else. And they used to make us fight each other. There was bullying from the old kids to the new kids.

‘There was always total authority around you at all times. One time, they said everyone had to have their tonsils out and the whole school was sent off.

‘The cottages were like army huts and the daily routine of eating, washing and working was like a prison regime.

‘The cottage mother would beat you if you did something wrong. It was a way of life. I had to rake the yard one day and I did not finish it, maybe I was slow, and that was enough to get the strap in the morning. Your cottage mother had complete control over you, she answered to nobody, she was our keeper.’

John was still bitter about the experience. Halfway through the interview he looked up at me and asked, ‘Why am I here?’

He knew I didn’t have an answer.

‘I’ve tried hard not to be bitter,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to let it ruin my life. Survival was the most important thing.’

Family life was a mystery to John. His only experience of it came from the infrequent trips outside the farm when he’d see families together. He told the story of one Christmas when he was overheard telling other kids that Santa Claus didn’t exist.

‘There was a catalogue and you had to pick your gift prior to Christmas. You could have one up to three dollars. When I got down on Christmas morning, I got a piece of coal and that was it. All the other kids got oranges and nuts. I cried that day, but I started believing in Santa.’

John left the farm school when he was fifteen and got a job on a chicken farm. Later he worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway and joined the Army. ‘There were times when I was down-and-out, living in the seediest parts of Vancouver. Most people have a family to go to when things get rough but I had no-one. Fairbridge was my only home.

‘My birth certificate, the short version, just arrived in an envelope on my twenty-first birthday almost to the day. I was always told my birthday was 24 June and then I found it was 7 June. Fairbridge must have had some records, but we were not privy to them at all. They were a closely guarded secret.’

John told me that Vancouver was a beautiful city with a natural harbour ringed by gardens. I soon discovered he was right when Joy and I flew to the west coast to interview more child migrants.

These were a mixed group. Most were like John and had been sent out during the inter-war years.

I didn’t get to meet Charles Devonport, but he wrote his story down and sent it to me, describing his childhood and the sad search for his mother. It came as a shock to learn that Charles had been sent from my home town, Nottingham, which was involved in one of the smallest of the early schemes, sending mostly teenagers from youth clubs to Nova Scotia.

Charles had been living in a workhouse for a year because of bronchitis and an intestinal problem caused by malnutrition. Then the Child Welfare Society took him away from his mother who couldn’t look after him and placed him in a foster home.

‘Just outside Nottingham there were orchards, but they were surrounded by iron railings, and we would gaze at the lovely apples. One evening we jacked the railings apart and got in and this big chap with leather leggings on and two dogs caught us. Then this huge bobby came on his bicycle and I wound up in front of the magistrate. I was sentenced to one year probation and had to go to a branch of the Nottingham Boys’ Brigade two days a week for a year in lieu of going to reform school.’

At the club, twelve boys were asked to volunteer to go to Canada. Forty applied and Charles was one of those chosen.

‘Two weeks later, we were given instructions to pack our clothing and be on the railway platform of the London and Midland Railway. I was sitting there on my little suitcase and I heard footsteps and my mother was walking along the platform towards me – she spotted me right away. I was sitting there with my head in my hands and she said, “You’re leaving me!” I said, “Yes, Mother, I’m going to Canada.” So she says, “I’ve brought you something,” and I stood up, of course, and my mother gave me a five-pound note and a box camera. She told me to save my money and be a good boy and write to her, and then she kissed me again and started to cry. She wrote me one letter. I answered that letter faithfully and I wrote another one later on to the same address. She replied once and after that there were no more letters, ever.’

Charles spent forty years trying to find his mother. Unlike other child migrants, he knew he wasn’t an orphan. ‘I always told myself that I’d go back and find her. Even when I joined the Army during the Second World War, I thought that it was a chance to get to England and look for her.’

It was a long, unrewarding search, involving great disappointment and soul-searching. Genealogists were hired, neighbours and former workmates were found. There were seven Nellie Devonports born in 1888 – and each had to be researched.

Charles eventually found his mother but it was too late to meet her. Nellie had died six years earlier. ‘I knew she’d be very old, but I never stopped hoping that I’d find her alive.’

Having organized a gravestone and a memorial service, Charles made the painful journey back to England and visited the cemetery. Kneeling beside her grave he said, ‘Mother, I wish I’d found you were living. We could have exchanged views. I could have told you what I’ve been doing and we could have got to know each other; and you could have told me who I am – that’s important to me, to know who I am.’

It has been estimated that there are about a million Canadians descended from the child migrants – an astonishing figure that I’ve never heard disputed.

The children transported before 1920 were collectively known as the ‘Home Children’ – a label which they now associate with feelings of stigma, inferiority and being second-class citizens.

‘The first winter I was there,’ one elderly woman said, ‘I wore my summer coat and straw hat until the end of January. The temperatures were below freezing, but I had to wait for the January sales before she bought me a winter coat and hat. I remember wearing that straw hat in an open sleigh for nine miles. I remember that trip so well as I had to stable the horse at the hotel and the man who was helping her said, “Who is that you have standing there?” And she said, “That’s just the girl from the Home.” And he said, “They’re pretty poor trash, ain’t they?” And she said, “Yes, they are.”’

Another former child migrant summed up her bitterness in a letter to me.

I was one of the so-called Home Girls who, in the space of one morning, was torn away from my school, my home and all my playmates at the age of eleven
.

A man came and took me and my sister away in a bus to a children’s home. It was nothing short of a prison – nothing short of a disgrace to the name of England
.

There were many girls there and about two months after we arrived, we were told we were going to Canada and shown slides that created a picture of this wonderful land waiting for us across the water
.

On an April day in 1912 or 1913, we were marched crying to the port and put on a boat. It took us two weeks to cross the ocean and most of us were seasick. We couldn’t keep our food down, but the meals were so disgusting it was a blessing
.

We finished up in Montreal. My sister and I were separated on that first day and I didn’t see her for many years after that. I was sent out with a man and wife to a farm. They had two children and another on the way. I’d never been on a farm
.

The wife was always angry, insulting and scolding me. She would continually tell me that the English were no good; that we’d never been any good. I ate too much, I was slow and lazy. Nothing I did was right
.

I spent six years putting up with this before I told them I wanted to go back to the Home in Montreal. I left the farm with ten dollars and a few old clothes
.

I have never forgiven England for sending me away. How can a country have no rooms or food or shelter for its helpless children? Oh the shame!

When my eldest son was of age, they called him to fight for them. This country that had no room for us. I tried to explain to him that I’d already lost my father and four of his brothers in the first Great War and look what they’d fought for – a country that sent its children into slavery.’

In all, I interviewed about forty people throughout Canada. The heat was tremendous; the distances were enormous; and it was a merry-go-round of trains, planes and buses.

The child migrants were very welcoming and hospitable, inviting Joy and me into their homes. Many had survived periods of enormous hardship with their integrity and their sense of humour intact.

They would ask me questions about Britain, wanting to know about everything from pub opening hours to the prices of food. Others wondered whether I’d ever been to their places of birth, naming cities and villages across the whole of Britain.

Like their Australian counterparts, these people had no documentation, save for perhaps a short birth certificate. Some had been told their parents had died and others simply assumed that the decades in between had ensured that they were truly orphans. Not surprisingly, all wondered why Britain had sent them abroad with so few effective safeguards.

But most of the children sent to Canada were now in their seventies and eighties. Age increased their longing to find their families, but it also robbed them of any chance that their mothers and fathers were still alive.

Their own children – the next generation – now adults themselves, would ask me about their parents. ‘You know, the one thing Dad would never give us was information about his childhood …’

The longing and pain and hurt had never gone away, even though they were grandparents now. How sad to be seventy years old and not know who you really are. And how desperate, because they knew that their mothers and fathers had gone for ever.

One man said to me, ‘You know what you can do to help?’

I said, ‘No. What can I do?’

‘Just help me to die knowing who I am. Let me have a birth certificate.’

Canada was immensely sad for me because it represented a generation of people I knew I could do little to help; it was far too late for them. I’d do what I could, of course, by finding their birth certificates and locating where their parents were buried.

However, I had a difficult decision to make. Thankfully, the former child migrants of Canada helped make it for me. I told them about what had happened in Australia after the Second World War and how many children were involved.

Many Canadians replied, ‘Margaret, do something for them, because it’s too late for us. Make sure they get to know their families.’

These people touched my heart, and helped me make the decision. Events in Australia were so recent and appalling, and my resources were so limited, that I decided I would immediately focus my attention there.

On the Saturday before I flew back to England, I caught the car ferry to Vancouver Island and drove to Duncan looking for the Fairbridge Farm School. There was a wild beauty to the landscape.

The architects of Britain’s child migration movement had been very determined and dedicated individuals. Despite many setbacks and difficulties they had persisted and established the machinery for sending many thousands of children overseas.

The Fairbridge farm at Duncan was a perfect example. The fundraising that built the institution was a tribute to the society’s ability to sign up the great and the good in support. Nearly every patron was either a lord, an earl, a marquess or a countess. The Prince of Wales had donated one thousand pounds towards the target of one hundred thousand pounds sterling when he launched his appeal in 1934 with a full page of
The Times
, featuring pictures of children from British slums enjoying their new and happier life abroad.

I wondered how many earls, countesses and sirs would support my appeal. How many would give money to the Trust to help find a birth certificate for these former child migrants, or trace their families?

There was nobody at the farm when I arrived. In truth, I could see little except a small wooden chapel surrounded by trees.

Before I wandered inside I noticed the foundation stone. The inscription was attributed to the Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia. It read:

To the Glory of God and the
Children of the Empire.

Yvonne had continued working on the family searches while I was away. Some yielded results quickly while others, I knew, would take longer. Already it was beginning to look as if many of the Australian child migrants were not, as they believed, orphans.

The search was beginning to make sense for one of them, Pamela Smedley from Adelaide.

Pamela turned out to be an only child, as her mother had been. There wasn’t a huge family tree, but the search was made more difficult by the fact that her mother had lived for a time overseas.

The final piece of evidence fell into place only ten days before I was due to return to Australia for the filming of the documentary. It meant that I had very little time to uncover Pamela’s history.

St Catherine’s had yielded her birth certificate and a marriage certificate for her mother. Then after a long trawl through the electoral registers and phone books I had managed to find somebody in Hastings who I thought might be this woman.