Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (11 page)

At four-thirty St Catherine’s closed and we all trudged to St Pancras Station. Harold looked tired. I wasn’t sure if he would be able to cope. Almost all of his life he had been angry and getting nowhere, hitting one wall after another, but at least now a small part of him seemed to be holding tight to the belief that we would finally find his mother. He said, ‘I can’t run away this time. I understand, in some way, that this is my last chance; the last chance of finding out about myself. I know that if I did run away, I would never come back.’

I told Harold, ‘If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to do it all. We can’t just take a chunk and leave the rest. It may take days or weeks or much longer, but we have to go through all the twists and turns.’

The search for his mother’s birth certificate did indeed take weeks, until we had exhausted every avenue. It was the same story with his father. We could find no record of him being born. Nor was there a marriage certificate for them at any time, anywhere in England, Scotland or Ireland.

This bothered me. I lay awake at night wondering what we had missed. The search had cost a great deal of money in train fares and copies of promising certificates, but we had nothing to show for it. Harold’s birth certificate included the names of both mother and father. They should have been relatively easy to find. What had we missed?

There were several possibilities. Perhaps both were born overseas; or neither had used their real name on Harold’s birth certificate; or maybe they presented themselves as a married couple but were actually unmarried. It could have been any of these things, it didn’t matter. The reality was that it meant more pain and frustration for Harold. If St Catherine’s held the answer, we didn’t have the key.

Harold returned to Australia in February, totally exhausted and no closer to discovering his mother. I knew I had to look elsewhere so I started trawling the various charities that might have known about his past. In particular, I went looking for the man called Colonel Hale, whose name we had seen in the admissions book at St John’s in Melbourne. I had hoped he would be a relative or godparent, but I soon discovered he was the head of the children’s committee of a local authority.

This is what amazed me about Harold’s story. He wasn’t sent abroad by a charity, he was sent by East Sussex County Council. He was in local authority care and ultimately the responsibility of the British government – so much so that the Home Secretary had personally to give his consent before Harold could be sent overseas. This bureaucratic chain of command meant that something had to have been written down. It was policy not accident. So where were the files? Where was the Home Secretary’s report?

I contacted an archivist at Sussex County Council and asked him if he could find out if they held a file on Harold Haig, a child who had been in their care many years ago.

He was very co-operative, although I doubt that he appreciated the importance of my questions. At the same time I began putting pressure on the Department of Health to reveal what the Government knew about sending Harold abroad. I needed to know why he was taken into care and who placed him there.

Harold had every right to know these things. He wasn’t adopted so parental rights hadn’t been severed by law and there was no legislation preventing him finding out about himself.

East Sussex County Council had no details of Harold or his parents, and the Department of Health continued to maintain that it had no records.

What could I tell Harold? It had been almost a year since we started the search and he was living so near to the edge that only blind hope was keeping him from falling. And then, one night, I suddenly remembered the Salvation Army, who had arranged Marie’s adoption in 1947. How had it managed, back in 1963, to find Harold when Marie had asked after him?

I rang Harold, waking him at some ungodly hour.

‘Listen! How did the Salvation Army find you? How did they know you’d gone to Australia? Write to them. Ask them if they have a file on you. Ask them how they found you.’

‘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.’

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.’