The Stranger House (26 page)

I took this in. My grandmother the child. My grandfather the priest.

The police had got involved, but the decked priest had shown Christian charity, or maybe just didn’t want publicity, and no charges were brought. Pa came home as if nothing had happened, except that from then on in he’d have nothing to do with the Church.

This must have been a trouble to Granpa and Gramma, but even at sixteen I guess they knew where they were with Pa. If they’d made it a stay-or-go issue, he’d have gone.

He doesn’t say much, but Pa never has any trouble getting his message across.

The same when he met Ma four years later. Within a fortnight he’d asked her to marry him. Ma didn’t go into
details but I doubt if it involved making flowery speeches from a kneeling position. They were married in another fortnight.

I asked Ma if he ever did anything more about finding out about his real mother.

She said no. After watching that play, Gramma had been very upset and had said to Ma that she hoped Sam’s mother hadn’t been one of those poor kids. This was the first Ma heard anything about Pa being adopted and naturally she hadn’t rested till she got the whole story, such as it was.

“I asked your pa why he hadn’t told me and he said, would it have made a difference? And of course I said no, and he said, well then. I reminded him of all the stuff we’d read about these child migrants and all, and asked if it didn’t bother him. He said he could see why anyone who’d grown up here, not knowing the truth about themselves, would want to dig. But he’d been born here, been brought up by good people, he’d got his own family he loved, what was in the past for him but pain, and wasn’t there enough of that waiting to jump out on you without going looking for it?”

As I listened to Ma I felt all that indignation I’d experienced in front of the telly aged eleven welling up again, only this time it was personal. I had a grandmother who’d been brought over here against her will when she was just a kid. What had happened to her then I didn’t know, but from the stuff that had come out, it wasn’t likely to be good. What was certain was that she’d been placed in some orphanage run by nuns who’d taken so little care of her she’d got pregnant and they’d let her die giving birth to my father.

I went out and found Pa and blazed away at him for
ten minutes or more, asking him how he could sleep easy in his bed knowing all this and not trying to find out who his real father was.

He listened in that way he has, not saying anything till he’s quite sure you’ve run out of steam, then he said, “I know who my real pa is. I’ve just buried your gramma alongside him. As for that other bastard, last time I went out looking for answers, I decked a priest. This time, all the stuff that’s come out about those poor migrant kids, I could end up decking the Pope. You going to cancel your career and take care of things here while your pa’s in jail?”

This was a long speech for Pa and, like most of what he said, there was a lot more in it than just the words he used, a lot of stuff about love and responsibilities and options. If Pa precis’d the Bible, he’d get it down to a slim pamphlet.

I simmered down, told myself it was Pa’s call, and I put it to him straight. Was he certain he didn’t want to know the truth? And he said, “Truth’s like a dingo, girl. It’ll run till you get it cornered. Then watch out!’

So I made the rational objective decision and decided to let it be.

Or, put it another way, I made the emotional personal decision that my work came first. Selfish? I admit it. My work means everything to me. Whether it will ever mean anything to anyone else, I’m not sure, but probably even Newton had no idea he was going to change the way folk looked at the universe when he set out. Not that he saw it that way. He ended up saying he felt like he’d been a boy playing on the seashore, occasionally finding a smoother stone or a prettier shell, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered all around him.

I guess I’ll be lucky if I can get close to picking up even one pretty shell on the beach. But in going to Cambridge I feel like I’m striking out into that great ocean. Maybe if I can hold my breath long enough, I might even get down to some new coral reef.

If I’d said that to Pa, he’d have asked if I’d been on the turps. But that’s how it feels. You said you needed religion to define who you are. I guess I need mathematics.

So I made my decision to let things be.

Then something happened. A way-out coincidence. Maybe you’d call it a divine message. No need to bring God into it. Me, I know that mathematically chance can be illusory. Often if you analyse what seems amazing coincidence, you find it was just as likely to happen as not to happen. Sometimes more likely.

Years before, Martie had upstaged my indignation after I saw that TV play by remarking her family knew all about it as her Aunt Gracie was one of those kids.

I’d completely forgotten that and when I met Gracie at the wedding it didn’t ring a bell. She was in grey. It suited her, she was that kind of woman: wispy grey hair, wide grey eyes that never quite focused in a tiny pale grey face. If the weather had been misty she’d have disappeared. But unfocused or not, I felt those grey eyes scan my face closely. And from time to time during the celebration, I caught her gaze following me.

Later as I was helping Martie get ready for her grand departure, she said, “You made a great impression on Gracie. She said you reminded her of someone. The name too. She asked a lot of questions about your family. Especially dear old Ada. I’m real sorry she’s not still around, Sam. She was a lovely lady.”

“Yeah, she was.”

I hadn’t told Martie about the revelations which had followed Gramma Ada’s death. Some time in the future maybe, not in the run-up to her wedding. But suddenly it came back to me.

“Wasn’t it Gracie you said was one of those migrant kids all the fuss was about?”

“That’s right. Doesn’t like to talk about it though. Just turns vague if it’s mentioned. And when Gracie turns vague, she doesn’t have far to go!’

We laughed, but my mind was racing.

Later, after we’d seen the happy couple off, I went looking for Gracie. Saw no point messing around. Compared with Pa, I’m a pussy-footer, but I can be pretty direct.

I said, “Martie tells me you thought you recognized me.”

She looked embarrassed.

“It was the hair mainly. And the name. But I knew it was just a coincidence when Martie told me about your grandmother. I was sorry to hear she’d died. She sounds like a nice woman. You must miss her.”

“I do,” I said, “Only she wasn’t my real gran. Pa was adopted. His ma was like you. A child migrant from the UK.”

I reckon Pa would have been hard put to be more direct. I thought I’d overdone it. I wouldn’t have thought she could have got any greyer, but she did.

“And her name … ?” she sort of croaked.

“Same as mine. And Pa’s. Sam Flood.”

She began to cry. I felt a heel. I was so keen to check out what looked like a real lead that I’d gone ploughing in without the least consideration for poor old Gracie.

But I wasn’t going to turn back now. And she proved
to be tougher than she looked. I reckon you had to be to survive what those bastards put those kids through.

We sat down together and drank whisky and she told me what she knew about my grandmother.

To start with it was a huge disappointment, like one of those calculations which starts great then suddenly fizzles out. All Gracie could tell me about little Sam Flood with the flame-red hair was that she’d been on the same boat as her from Liverpool.

I asked her when that was, expecting her to be vague. But this was one thing she was certain of. It was 1960, the year Kennedy became president. She’d looked it up. Seems Kennedy was the first Catholic president and the nuns thought it was like the Second Coming and they made the kids watch it on television, which they didn’t mind as it was about the only television they ever got to see in those days. So, definitely 1960. And Elvis singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” was top of the pops. That was the other thing she remembered. I think she thought it was dead appropriate.

On that boat, there’d been three main bunches of kids from different orphanages in the Liverpool area, but Sam Flood didn’t seem to belong to any group.

“I don’t know where she came from and, when we landed, we all got sent off to different places and I never saw her again. It was all confused. It was spring when we left and autumn when we got here. They took the summer from us. They took everything. I couldn’t make sense of it. It was very confused …”

Confused. That sums up what life had done to Gracie. I suppose everyone finds a different way to cope with shit. Gracie’s way had been to walk away from it when she got to be old enough to take care of herself.
But when there was all that publicity in the nineties, her husband persuaded her to get in touch with the new Child Migrants Trust. Turned out Gracie was right. There was nothing in it for her, she really was an orphan, so no happy reunions there. But one good thing came out of it from my point of view.

There was this other girl from the same orphanage as Gracie. Betty Stanton. Sounds like the kind of kid who gets by taking lame dogs under her wing.

Sorry, that doesn’t sound right, you know what I mean.

Well, Gracie must have been a natural candidate. And Sam Flood was another.

Betty kept an eye on her, Gracie told me. And she thought they got taken off to the same place on arrival. It sounds as if this Betty was one of the Trust’s success stories. They’d tracked down her mother who was still alive in the UK and the two of them had been reunited. And when they realized Gracie was from the same Liverpool orphanage and had been part of the same consignment, they put them in touch.

At least they put Betty, who lived over in Perth, in touch with Gracie. Gracie really didn’t want to know. The past was outback to her. You could get lost there. So after a few letters, Betty gave up and settled for being on Gracie’s Christmas card list.

And Gracie gave me her address. Betty McKillop her married name is.

I dropped her a line, told her who I was, asked if we could meet and talk. I got a letter back from her daughter saying Betty was in the UK, place called Newcastle, where her own mother was very ill. But the daughter said she’d spoken on the phone and Betty remembered my
gran very well and would love to talk with me when she got back. Naturally I said I was on the way to England myself very shortly and maybe we could meet up there. And she came back to me with a phone number to ring when I got here.

I rang a few days ago but it was a bad time. The old lady had just died. The funeral’s today and Betty’s flying home tomorrow night. I said I was sorry and maybe we could just fix a time to talk on the phone, but she said no, she’d rather see me. She said she’d be through by lunchtime tomorrow, so if I could get up to see her early afternoon before she set off for the airport, that would be fine. When I checked the map, I saw that it wasn’t that far over from Cumbria. And I recalled the last thing Gracie had said to me.

She’d gone into a kind of trance, and I was feeling real shitty for making her go back somewhere she didn’t want to be. So I got up to leave. Then she looked up at me and said, “I’ve been racking my brains for anything else I can recall. Most of us had these labels to start with, like we were bits of luggage, with our names and the address of the orphanage we came from. Sam didn’t have one of these, just a bit of paper which she kept folded up in her pocket. If anyone spoke to her, she was so shy she’d just bring out this bit of paper. That’s how we knew her name. But there was an address on it too.”

“An address?” I said, “Gracie, can you remember what it was?”

She shook her head and said, “I’m sorry. I only ever saw it once and it was all creased and hard to read. I think the place was
Ill
something. Maybe
Illthwaite,
but I can’t be sure. I’m sorry, the harder I try to remember, the vaguer it becomes.”

She was almost in tears. I calmed her down and told her she’d been great, which she had. And when I got home, I dug out my old world atlas and looked in the index.

The only thing which came close in the whole world was where we are now, Illthwaite in Cumbria, England.

Of course Aunt Gracie might have got it completely wrong. In fact, if you met Gracie, you’d put odds on it. Betty sounds a much safer bet.

But I was impatient to be doing something. I’d spent a few nights in London, crashing out on the couch of some Melbourne Uni mates in Earl’s Court, getting over the jet lag. Now I was ready to be off. I thought, I’ve got to go to Newcastle to talk with Betty McKillop, why not check out this Illthwaite place en route?

So I rented a car and set out.

And here I am. It’s been a complete waste of time. Not only that, it’s got me sitting in a hole in the ground, which terrifies me, making my confession to a priest.

OK, I know you’re not, but that’s what it feels like. Pa would have a fit!

And you were right about one thing at least.

I think it has made me feel a bit better.

Anyway, that’s me done and dusted. Now it’s your turn in the box.

My full name is Miguel Ramos Elkington Madero, though in England I am known as Michael Madero. In both countries my friends call me Mig.

So I have two names. And two passports.

Sometimes I think that in fact I am divided into two people, except that when you put the halves together you do not get a whole.

I am the elder son of Christine, née Elkington, of Hampshire, England, and Miguel Madero of Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, Spain. Jerez is where the English word sherry derives from. For five centuries the Maderos have been in the wine business, a little longer than the Floods, I think. You may have encountered our rarest fino, El Bastardo? No? Ah well. Australasia has never been one of our strongest markets.

There is little you need to know about my childhood except that from time to time, usually in the spring, I felt a certain discomfort in my hands and feet which in my teens became unmistakably, so I thought, the stigmata, which as I’m sure you know means the appearance of wounds equivalent to those inflicted by crucifixion. Not quickly, but perhaps inevitably, I decided that their message was that I should enter the priesthood.