Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (31 page)

‘All right. First thing in the morning, I’m picking you up. We’re going straight to the hospital.’

‘Look, Susan, I have to be at work on Saturday. I can’t cancel the—’ I stopped. There was no point in arguing, Susan was adamant.

The consultant sensed immediately that I was a long way from my home and my family. He tried to be reassuring as he gave me a thorough medical.

‘How long are you going to be in Melbourne?’

‘Nine days.’

‘Well, I want you in hospital.’

‘I can’t. I’ve got work to do. People to see.’

I was determined, but the doctor wasn’t about to be overruled.

‘You’ve lost a lot of blood. I need to know what’s going on inside you. You have to be admitted.’

I tried to protest.

‘Listen, Margaret, you’re bleeding to death. Do you understand me? You have no choice. I’ll arrange your admission.’

The next morning I was admitted for tests and allowed to go home that evening with Susan. Again and again I stressed to her that I didn’t want any of the migrants to know. They had their own problems. This was mine.

For the next nine days, at meetings in Melbourne and back in Perth, I was constantly asked what was wrong. I told people that I was tired and nothing more. But they knew it was more serious. For the first time I realized that I was very important to them and that they cared deeply about me.

* * *

When I arrived back in England at least the bleeding had stopped but my problem was one of sheer exhaustion. I was half a stone lighter and my hair was falling out in large clumps. After five years of working long hours, my body was trying to tell me something.

My family and colleagues were obviously concerned, and for the first time I began to feel despondent. I had failed to convince the British government of its responsibility toward the child migrants. The trustees convinced me that it was through no fault of mine, but I kept asking myself how much longer the Trust could struggle to survive financially.

I was at home only a few weeks, and still catching up on my sleep, when Penny Chapman, the television producer, telephoned. Her drama,
The Leaving of Liverpool
, was to be broadcast nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on 8 and 9 July.

‘No!’ I cried. ‘You can’t mean it. I’ve only just left Australia. What about my family? The office?’

I knew it was pointless complaining. Penny had no idea what I’d just been through. I simply would have to drop everything and go back. Merv smiled weakly. This would be my fourth trip to Australia in twelve months. If this went on, I’d come home one day and he’d ask, ‘Have you had a nice year, dear?’

Shortly afterwards, the head of drama for the ABC called and said there was going to be a major launch for the television drama in Sydney and they’d like me as a guest. I told her, ‘Hang on, I deliberately kept right out of this. I don’t know anything about the drama.’

She said, ‘The tapes are on their way. You can look at them before you arrive.’

Sure enough a courier delivered the video cassettes to my home. I didn’t want to look at them, especially when the kids were around, so I had to find a time when they were out of the way. Finally, two days before my departure, I got up at five o’clock on a dark, cold morning and turned on the television.

I knew I couldn’t sit through five hours, I had no time, but I thought I’d watch enough to get a feel for the drama. Unfortunately, ten minutes was all I lasted. I couldn’t bear it – the music, the laughing kids skipping through the streets of Liverpool carrying a Union Jack, the playground scene where they were beaten with canes.

I knew all those children – I knew them now as adults. But here, vividly portrayed, I saw their childhoods. They were singing familiar songs in the streets, and skipping just as I had done as a child. It was no different. The same as all of my generation.

I ran upstairs, trying to get as far away as possible.

‘I can’t go! I can’t!’ I said.

Merv grabbed me by the shoulders, looked at me and said, ‘Don’t snivel! Don’t you dare snivel. You’re going on that plane. You’re going.’

And he was right. I shouldn’t snivel. How dare I get upset when I think of what the former child migrants have been through.

‘OK!’ I said. ‘I can’t watch the rest of it, but I will go.’

Merv smiled. ‘Good. But not on your own – not this time.’

Until then, I hadn’t even considered how I was going to get to Australia. This was an unexpected trip and the Trust simply didn’t have the money to pay for the air fare.

Nottinghamshire County Council had generously renewed my secondment for another two years but the Child Migrants Trust had received no funding from the Department of Health, or any other department, since the £20,000 they had provided in 1990. Every application since then had been refused.

I argued that for the first time in over 100 years the child migrants and their relatives now had an agency specifically designed to meet their needs, but the Trust had only managed to provide ‘a basic level of service to a particularly disadvantaged group of clients’.

When all else failed, I asked the British government to match the commitment of the Australian government which had provided us with £23,000 a year since 1989. We were only asking to employ one social worker for a year.

Again we were refused.

I wrote to the Department of Health in April 1992:

Time is running out for many thousands of former child migrants if they are to be enabled to meet their relatives before their parents die …

The history of child migration is not one which casts either governments or voluntary agencies in a positive light. It is a history which few wish to repeat and its many flaws and occasionally tragic consequences are often explained away as the result of a mixture of good intentions and ignorance.

This sad chapter in our history of child care policy can either be extended or reversed. It is clear that the Australian government has made a positive commitment to confront the results of a policy which failed to protect the interests of this vulnerable and disadvantaged group of children. The opportunity for the British government to make a similar commitment is in your hands.

On 13 May, the application was refused.

Eventually, I approached my local bank manager, explained the situation to him, and he allowed me to take out an overdraft to pay for the flight to Australia.

The trustees were worried about my workload and were relieved when John Myles, the Trust’s most experienced researcher, volunteered to accompany me and managed to find the money to buy himself a ticket. Everyone at the Trust had been working horrendous hours and few had taken any leave for over two years. We all knew that
The Leaving of Liverpool
would trigger another barrage of enquiries from former child migrants and increase the workload.

From my point of view, I was more worried about the pain and anguish it would cause when the migrants saw the horror of their childhood dramatized before them. They would grieve for the child within each of them.

Before I left, I had a call from Frances Swaine, a lawyer working for Leigh, Day & Company, in London. This was the firm that had been preparing a case on behalf of a child migrant and had since had many requests for legal advice.

Frances intended to go to Australia to interview migrants, and wanted her trip to coincide with the screening of
The Leaving of Liverpool
. The publicity for the drama would help raise public awareness that a legal campaign was underway.

As always, I left for the airport when the children were at school. I never want them to see me leave. I say goodbye in the morning and by the time they get home from school, I’m gone and Merv takes them out for dinner as a special treat.

John and I caught the three o’clock train from Nottingham to St Pancras and then the underground to Heathrow.

We flew direct to Melbourne and stayed that first night at the house in Canning Street. There was no social worker there because David had finished his contract and I was still looking for a replacement.

That night, I managed to watch a little bit more of
The Leaving of Liverpool
.

The story is told through the eyes of two children, Bert and Lily – played by Kevin Jones and Christine Tremarco – who meet in the Star of Sea Orphanage in Liverpool in the early 1950s. Bert believes he’s an orphan but Lily has been placed there by her mother, who promises to come back within six months once she is on her feet financially. Before she can return, Lily and Bert are packed off to Australia.

The first half of the drama follows Bert as he arrives, tired, hungry and frightened, at a rural quarry where he’s set to work cutting and carrying stone that is destined for a new church. Brother O’Neill, the man in charge, is a bully who breeds bullies.

Although the ABC stressed that the drama was set in New South Wales, the media pointed out the similarities between Brother O’Neill and Brother Keaney of Bindoon, and also the depiction of children hauling stones and making bricks as they had done at Bindoon.

Meanwhile, Lily is sent into domestic service in the outback, where she is exploited by her employers.

Sustained by their friendship, both eventually rebel against the brutality and find each other, but their escape is tinged with sadness. Although Lily does eventually find her mother, there’s no salvation for Bert. Embittered and angry, he lashes out and ends up in prison.

John watched the programme with me and was incredibly moved. Often he shook his head in disbelief. ‘What is this going to do to them?’ he asked.

I shared his reservations, but told him, ‘We mustn’t look at it like that. It’s not what it will do to them but what it can do for them.’

Before we left England, John had insisted that during our trip we were going to eat three proper meals a day, sleep regularly and not work too hard. He wasn’t going to let me fall ill again. On the first morning in Melbourne, he went out to buy utensils for the kitchen and stock up the cupboards. I came downstairs and walked into the kitchen to find the table beautifully set with fruit juice in glasses, and bacon and eggs frying on the stove. I couldn’t help laughing.

It was the last proper meal we had in the next fortnight.

* * *

On Friday, John and I flew to Sydney, ready for the launch. I had no idea what was planned. I thought there’d be a few people, the obligatory case of warm white wine and some sandwiches from the ABC canteen. Then I’d stand up and say, ‘Yes it really happened, it’s all true,’ and sit down to watch a preview of the show.

Not quite!

The Intercontinental Hotel in Sydney has one of the finest locations in the world. Perched on one corner of Circular Quay, it stands guard over the ferries that fan out across Sydney Harbour. The hotel offers views in all directions; over the Opera House, the Bridge, the harbour sweeping up past Fort Dennison towards Watson’s Bay and Sydney Heads. This is where the ABC chose to launch
The Leaving of Liverpool
. That evening, a specially invited audience arrived, many of the men in dinner jackets and the women in their outfits from David Jones or the boutiques of Double Bay. There were celebrities, drama critics, ABC executives, journalists, old Fairbridgians and Catholic clergy. John Hennessey was there, a child migrant and former deputy mayor of Campbelltown, he had written to me years earlier. So was Harold Haig, looking decidedly uncomfortable in such a large crowd.

Stunned by the scale of it all, I was handed a glass of champagne and ushered between fully laden tables. A teenager came up to me with a Liverpudlian accent. It was Kevin Jones, who plays Bert in
The Leaving of Liverpool
. Many of the cast had been flown over for the launch, and Kevin was very excited.

‘Everybody talked about you. I couldn’t wait to meet you.’

Eventually, I found my place card at a table. I remember sitting down and then glancing at the cards around me. Somebody with a very warped sense of humour or a grasp of the absurd in the ABC’s promotions department had decided, not only to invite a prominent churchman to the launch, but to sit him next to me.

I thought of Merv, back in Nottingham. ‘Just you wait!’ I muttered. ‘You talked me into this.’

When Penny introduced me to the minister, she said, ‘This is Margaret Humphreys, the director of the Child Migrants Trust …’ but before she could finish he said, ‘I know who she is.’ He didn’t even raise his eyes to meet mine. That was it. We didn’t exchange another word through a four-course meal and coffees. It felt a little like the Last Supper on our table.

The ABC were paying and it must have cost them thousands. I just kept thinking about the money being spent and the Trust’s pitiful finances.

I sat there through this astonishing evening, with people telling me about this wonderful drama that would win all the awards, and all the while I was thinking about what a painful impact it would have on the child migrants. But the show was artistically brilliant, and it was courageous of the ABC to confront the shameful issue head-on.

Penny Chapman gave a speech about how difficult the programme had been to make and then she said, ‘May I introduce Margaret Humphreys, who’s going to tell you all about it.’

I could see John looking at me and thinking, Wrong!

He could see I was angry. I stood there watching all these people drinking champagne, eating their free meals and talking, laughing and joking. Among them, was Harold. Our eyes met and I thought, This is appalling! This isn’t right! This room should be full of politicians not celebrities. We should be in Parliament House in Canberra or the Houses of Parliament in London. Those are the people who should have been watching this drama.

I cleared my throat and said I thought the ABC had shown enormous courage in making the programme. Immediately, I sensed that the audience understood my disquiet.

I told them, ‘This would be enjoyable if it were only a drama, but unfortunately it depicts the lives of thousands upon thousands of British children. And although it shows young Lily finally meeting her mother, there are still thousands of people who are yet to meet their families, who are yet to go home, who have yet to get so much as a birth certificate to confirm who they really are. This isn’t a period drama, it’s real. These people are still suffering today.’ I wanted to say, ‘Now get on with your duck and lamb,’ because that’s how I felt.