Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (8 page)

A car pulled up outside.

‘Don’t look up now,’ Annabel said, ‘but a Rolls Royce has just arrived.’

I laughed at her. A man alighted and strode into the foyer. He walked straight towards me. ‘Are you Margaret Humphreys?’

As Annabel and I climbed into the back of the Rolls, I couldn’t look at her or I would have burst out laughing.

George, in his late forties, had become a self-made millionaire from a string of video shops. He was ten when he left Liverpool in 1950 and arrived at the Fairbridge Farm School of Molong, along with his younger brother and sister.

‘At Fairbridge you were just a number. I felt there was no love or affection, no friendly arm on your shoulder.’

He was a bright boy and the first among his peers to be sent to the local high school in nearby Orange.

‘I will always remember my first day at high school. The headmaster stood on the top of the steps, addressing the students and said, “Who is that boy without a uniform?” I was the only child without one because Fairbridge didn’t think it necessary.

‘If there were school excursions, like sporting events, the whole school used to go and we had to have maybe 2d for the bus. It was too far to walk. So I would go up to different school kids and say, “I need another ha’penny. I have a penny ha’penny,” and sooner or later one would give me a ha’penny and ultimately I’d get a penny and go on until I got my 2d. I always got on that bus, but it wasn’t easy.

‘For lunch you would sometimes get one baked bean in a sandwich; or you’d have a mutton sandwich and the blowflies had attacked it and it would be full of maggots. But every day at recess I’d eat my lunch as I would be hungry, and the rest of the day there was nothing. I had to wait till I got back.’

After four years at high school, during which he slipped from near top of the class to the bottom, the man in charge at Fairbridge told George that he was going to be apprenticed to a local fitter and turner.

‘He told me if I didn’t take the job, I would owe Fairbridge two years’ farm work because I’d been at high school,’ George said. ‘I offered to do the farm work, but he told me to remember my sister and if I didn’t take this apprenticeship, he would make things difficult for her. That convinced me.’

George did a lot of different jobs over the next twenty-four years – very few of them fulfilling – and then at the age of forty he decided to go to university. He subsequently went into business and became a millionaire. But he refused to give Fairbridge any credit for his success. ‘I feel I owe them nothing,’ he told me. ‘I had to do something to show that despite them I could win.’

George didn’t know what had happened to his parents but he thought his sister, Rita, may have returned to the UK. He wanted to find out if he had a family.

During the next three days, I spoke to six more former child migrants. None of them had been sent to Australia to be adopted by families – all had grown up in institutions that did little to prepare them for life outside their walls.

A few consistent strands had begun to emerge from the stories. The former child migrants all told of leaving Britain on a boat and heading for a ‘new start’. One woman, who had been in a children’s home, described being summoned by the Mother Superior one evening, when she was ten years old.

‘She was a strict lady and I thought I was going to be in for some kind of telling off. “Have a seat, my child,” she said. Then she started talking about being sent to Australia. Blimey, I thought, have I been that bad to be sent away? Mother Superior said that I had been chosen, that it was a wonderful opportunity, not some kind of punishment. But that night in bed, I cried. I was so frightened of leaving the only home I’d ever had, of leaving my school friends, my sisters, of leaving my best friend Pearl and never seeing any of them again.’

Almost without exception, each person I interviewed in Melbourne insisted that their parents were dead because that’s what they’d been told. They were orphans and most, like Madeleine, had no birth certificate or documentation; no letters or photographs. There was nothing to tie them to the past except distant memories.

Marie had arrived in Melbourne the day before me and Harold had met her at the airport.

He knew from Marie’s letters that I was a British social worker who wanted to talk to him, but was totally underwhelmed by the prospect. ‘Why does this bloody Margaret want to see me? I hope when she gets here she has a good holiday.’

I arranged to meet them for supper at the Travelodge. Marie was absolutely radiant – I could barely recognize her. For the first time I saw her strong, happy and relaxed instead of timid and shy.

Harold had a tremendous presence and when I saw him next to Marie, the physical similarities between them were striking.

That evening we spoke little about the past. It was simply wonderful seeing a brother and sister together after so many years. At times I felt as if I shouldn’t be there. Harold and Marie were completely wrapped up in each other.

The next day, on a drive to the Dandenong Ranges, outside the city, I managed to see Harold alone. All morning he’d avoided me, disappearing for a cigarette whenever the conversation touched on a subject that made him feel uncomfortable.

As we walked through a beautiful garden, Harold pointed out the brilliantly coloured galahs that squawked in the trees. He told me that he had no recollection of his mother. He had no photograph or abiding memory to cling to, yet when he was a child, not a day passed when he didn’t want to find his mother. Everything in his voice and body language told me that this was still the case.

Harold had married when he was in his early twenties and had three children, a boy and two girls. But not even fatherhood could melt the block of ice inside of him. Ever since his mid-twenties he’d suffered from severe depression.

‘My wife, Barbara, was my first and only serious girlfriend. We lived in a flat for a while, and when we were expecting our first baby we bought a three-bedroom weatherboard house in a new housing estate about fifteen miles out of Melbourne. In those days this was akin almost to living in the bush. Trevor was born in 1961 and I was very proud and happy to have started my own family. Fiona, our first daughter, was born in 1965, and Cathie two years later.

‘I don’t think I was madly in love when I got married. I didn’t understand what that word meant, and still have trouble with it now. It’s as though this word, this feeling, belongs to other people, but not me. I’m not entitled to feel love.’

Harold started searching for his mother when he was about eighteen. He saw an advertisement in the newspaper – probably a detective agency – that said it could find people. The agency took his money but produced no positive results.

Then, in 1963, Marie found him through the Salvation Army.

‘That visit wasn’t very successful but it brought feelings and emotions to the surface that I had buried deeply, feelings about my parents, particularly my mother. These feelings had arisen when Trevor was born but I had kept them hidden. While I continued to control them when Fiona and Cathie were born, they kept bubbling away inside.

‘I got very depressed and felt alone and empty.’

By 1968, Harold had three lovely children and a happy marriage. He was buying a house and working as a signwriter. To outsiders he may have looked a happy and contented man. Instead, he tried to kill himself. It was a cry for help.

‘I thought about my mother a lot, but never talked about her. How can you talk about someone you have been told doesn’t exist? It didn’t make any sense to me.

‘A psychiatrist put me on anti-depressant tablets. I took these and saw him for a while, and slowly they took away my depressions, and so I stopped, and stored up the tablets that he gave me.

‘I was all right for a while, and then I started to get depressed again. I kept trying to fight it, thinking it would go away, but it just got worse. I was drinking a lot, trying to obliterate my feelings, but it just made me feel worse.

‘The first time I tried to commit suicide I had done it away from home, this time I did it at home. I didn’t want to be found in a motel somewhere. I had a few drinks and when Barbara went to bed, I started to drink more rapidly, and then I took the tablets I had stored up. I woke up, or became conscious, a few days later in hospital.’

Harold’s marriage broke up in 1970, through no fault of his wife, and they were divorced the following year. He felt guilty about leaving Barbara and the children. He’d always vowed he would never do such a thing.

‘I had no idea how to be a father, a dad, I felt so bad about this that I even stopped calling myself Dad when I talked to them. I didn’t deserve to be known by that name,’ Harold said.

‘The only woman I have wanted to find, desperately wanted to find, the one I have always wanted to hold me, and hug me, is my mother. That emptiness has been with me all my life.

‘I can’t stand Mother’s Day. Every year it’s a constant reminder, like someone twisting a knife inside me. I always stay inside that day, with my blinds down, and never answer the phone. I’ve spent years looking at families from a distance, trying to understand what it would be like to be a part of one, my own. To have my own mum and dad.’

In all, Harold attempted suicide three times and became locked in a seemingly endless round of psychotherapy and medication.

He stumbled aimlessly from one crisis to another, with the only constants in his life being alcohol and a yearning to find his mother. The only way he could express himself emotionally was through his art but his paintings were full of disturbing, abstract images of pain and anguish.

Because of his past experiences of counselling, Harold was predisposed not to trust me or have any positive expectations.

I just felt that here was a man who was so lost and lonely, so bereft of feeling, that I had to do something for him.

‘Can you take me to the children’s home where you grew up?’ I asked.

‘What for? What good will it do?’

I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t just in Australia because of Marie. If I was to search for their mother, both of them had to take the journey with me.

Harold was eleven years old when he arrived at St John’s Boys’ Home, in Canterbury, a comfortable middle-class suburb of Melbourne. He remembered being told by a welfare officer at Sussex County Council that he was going to live in a land where the sun was always shining and where he would ride to school on horseback. He left England in 1949 from a children’s home in East Sussex. They let him keep his name, and packed him off to Australia with only an entry card to prove his existence. It was still the only record that he had of his youth.

The next day Harold took Marie, Annabel and myself to the Boys’ Home. We walked along the corridors, into the church and the dormitories, with Harold telling me stories of his youth.

He explained how the large old building was used. The front of the ground floor housed the offices. At the back there was a large kitchen and dining-room on one side, and on the other, a large pantry which the boys would raid whenever possible.

‘Joined on to this was the sewing room and laundry, and a large quadrangle. The upstairs was used for the younger children – bedrooms, bathrooms and so on. The older boys – eleven years and over – had quarters next to the dining-room area. It was a large dormitory with a quadrangle in the middle. From floor to ceiling was half solid walls, and the rest covered by blinds. Great in the summer, a bit bloody cold in the winter.

‘It wasn’t meant to house migrant children, you know, but I was placed there with state wards from Melbourne.’

‘Was life strict?’ I asked.

‘There were certain rules to be obeyed and if you broke these you were punished,’ Harold said.

‘What sort of punishment?’

‘Strapped on the hands, maybe caned on the backside or given extra work to do. But the housemasters and the Revd Neale Molloy, who was in charge, were always fair. They never handed out punishment unless you had done something wrong; we were never treated brutally, or abused in any way.’

‘What was a normal day like?’ I asked.

‘Regimented, like all institutions. Get up around six-thirty, wash, dress, make your bed, and do whatever inside job you were assigned to – like sweep the dormitory, get the breakfast ready, set tables, make lunches. We would then have a ten-minute service in the chapel, have breakfast, and go to school.

‘Sunday mornings we would have Holy Communion after jobs and before breakfast. Two of the boys would be altar boys, so they’d prepare the bread, rolling out thick white slices and cutting them into squares, and prepare the wine. The stuff they used was cheap sherry, and after the service was over, and Mollie Molloy – as we called him – had departed, we would give it a go. Quite liberally sometimes. Perhaps that is where I got my love of red wine.’ Harold laughed, but, like his words, this too was tinged with sadness.

‘Were you lonely?’ I asked.

‘Let me put it this way: I had many friends, but I always felt alone. Not lonely. Alone. Particularly on visiting days.

‘When I was sent away from England they told me my parents were dead; that I had no family; that I was an orphan. I felt cold and empty. I never talked about these feelings – who could I talk to? Talking about your feelings wasn’t encouraged at St John’s. Perhaps they felt we didn’t have any, perhaps they did not see it as important – and how could I explain my feelings anyway? I didn’t understand them.

‘Love and affection are what you miss in institutions like St John’s. They don’t seem to exist. I can’t remember anyone putting their arm around me, giving me a cuddle, showing me that they cared.’

Marie stayed close by Harold’s side as he spoke, occasionally touching his shoulder.

When we reached the office of the orphanage I told him that I wanted to find out what records and documentation had been kept on him.

The officer in charge of the home invited us into his office and I asked to see the admissions register. He opened a large book on his desk and began flicking back through the pages. Harold’s name was there, along with the date he arrived and the name of a Colonel Hale from Hove in East Sussex, who had authorized his admission. Harold thought this might be his godfather or a relative.