Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

A small girl in a sundress came up and presented me with three pine cones. ‘I want you to have these,’ she said. ‘I want you to take them back to England.’

  ‘Oh, they’re lovely,’ I told her. ‘Why are you giving them to me?’

  ‘Because you’re going to help my grandad find his family.’

  I recognized many of the faces from the previous evening. People seemed more relaxed in casual clothes. I certainly felt more comfortable.

  ‘Where am I going to interview people?’ I asked David. ‘I can’t sit in the middle of a field.’

  ‘Never fear,’ he chuckled.

  Sure enough, he produced a table and chair and pointed me towards what looked like a sports pavilion.

  You must be joking, I thought, but obediently settled into the room.

  Meanwhile, David began mingling with the migrants letting them know that I would see them. People started queuing up.

  From the very first interview, I sensed that the Fairbridgians were in a dilemma; caught between a wish to be loyal to Fairbridge and a need to know about the past. They wanted to see me but the reunion was a celebration of their time at the farm school, not an examination of past wrongs. I tried to answer their questions as best I could.

  During one interview with a husband and wife, Miss Hutchinson walked in. She saw there was no spare seat and disappeared, only to return within minutes with a chair under her arm. Without being invited she sat down next to me.

  ‘How could you bloody well do it?’ the wife rounded on her. ‘How could you have done it?’

  Miss Hutchinson was shocked. Her whole demeanour changed. I picked up my chair, moved myself to the other side of the room and left her sitting there, totally silent.

  ‘My husband had nothing, nothing at all,’ I heard the wife continue. ‘Nothing to give his children. How could you have done it? Where are the records?’

  There were tears streaming down her husband’s face.

  As she held his hand, the woman said quietly, ‘Last night he saw photographs of himself as a little boy for the first time in his life. We cried all night.’

  Miss Hutchinson was dumbfounded. She could obviously sense that these people were suddenly turning on her and the Fairbridge Society. She couldn’t understand their anger. ‘Times have changed, now,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like this years ago.’

  The woman replied, ‘My husband wants to find his family. He doesn’t know if he has a family. He should have been able to do this years ago.’

  I felt Miss Hutchinson was fighting a losing battle. She softened when she saw the tears. Finally she told the couple, ‘When I get back to England, we’re going to do everything we can to co-operate with Mrs Humphreys and get you access to the files.’

  By late afternoon the queue of people waiting to see me had dwindled but I now knew so much more about the experiences of child migrants at Molong. I was starting to doubt that any of these children had been orphans when they left Britain.

  Some could actually remember parents, and a few, in the early days, had received letters from people who they thought were relatives.

  Although I recognized the efforts that the Fairbridge Society had made for the migrants, I could also see that each had lost a part of their lives – it was a loss which, for many, had permeated the years since their departure from Britain.

  David and I still had a long drive ahead of us, back to Sydney, and I had notes to write up. While I had been conducting interviews, David had talked to the migrants waiting outside. Among them was the woman who had stormed up to our table the previous night and slammed down the photograph in front of me.

  As we packed the car to leave, she approached me. Her demeanour had changed totally.

  ‘I’ve been talking to David,’ she said. ‘Do you think it would be all right if I wrote a letter to you when you get back to England?’

  ‘Of course. I’d love to hear from you.’

  As we drove out of Orange at dusk, trees were silhouetted across the horizon. I thought of something George had shown me the previous day when we drove along a dusty road towards the farm school.

  ‘You see that tree?’ he had asked, pointing out a lone gum-tree set back from the road.

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, Margaret, I wanted to show you that tree …’

  ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘I wanted you to see that tree because that’s where I used to sit every day at four o’clock, thinking about my home in Liverpool. That was my childhood in that tree. And I used to walk down this road and think, Oh, please knock me over. I want a car to knock me over. Don’t kill me, just break my legs so I’ll go in hospital. Because then somebody will pick me up … then somebody will hold me.’

  14

  I boarded the plane back to England very tired, very sad and not a little angry. The final four days in Sydney had been tough going. David did more than a dozen radio and press interviews and I had many migrants to see, including one living in Wollongong on the south coast.

  Joanna, David and I sat together on the flight home.

  Joanna was clearly exhausted, emotionally as well as physically. She had been working on her own for most of the time; we’d been going on ahead of her, doing the interviews and arranging for her to follow some of them up. The stress of listening to the migrants and then travelling thousands of miles alone, without the consolation of someone with whom to share her reactions, had taken its toll.

  David’s face looked almost haunted, and I could sense his anger. It was beyond his comprehension that anyone could treat children in such a way. That anybody could physically and sexually abuse such vulnerable human beings. Occasionally his fury would surface and he’d say things like: ‘There’s never been anything like this. Never. The abuse of these children is on a scale that is totally unknown. The perpetrators have got to be brought to account. They can’t get away with this.’

  I, too, was shattered – both by what I’d heard and by the scale of the task that lay ahead. I kept thinking to myself, How am I going to do this? I had a small study in my house, one phone, no fax, a part-time researcher and a mountain to climb.

  Above my head and beneath my feet were six bags full of notebooks and migrants’ documentation. David and I had had to argue for permission to carry them on as hand luggage but I was adamant. I wasn’t letting them out of my sight because they represented all that some people had of their past lives.

  ‘We’ve got to tell the Government, haven’t we? We’ve got to tell the charities.’

  ‘Yes,’ said David. ‘They’ve got to be told. They have to know that it went dreadfully wrong for so many.’

  ‘What about the files? We need to get access to them. It could help us find their families.’

  I had a terrible sense of foreboding as we landed at Heathrow. And when I reached up to unload the bags from the overhead lockers, I turned to David and said, ‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’

  He just looked at me and said, ‘Yes.’

  It was Good Friday but we had no sense of it being Easter. The tulips and daffodils were blooming but they brought little joy. Philip Bean picked us up from the airport and from the moment I saw a familiar face I knew that I couldn’t talk. He was full of questions, but I couldn’t answer. I was too shocked by what I had learned. It would take a long while before I could share the experience in Australia.

  ‘Where’s the rest of you, Margaret?’ Merv asked. ‘Your clothes are falling off you.’

  ‘I’ve lost a bit of weight.’

  The house was spotless and there were flowers everywhere. Welcome-home cards decorated the hall and the mantelpiece. Rachel and Ben had made a little banner which was pinned across the front door saying ‘Welcome Home’.

  They were very excited to see me, full of hugs and kisses. Ben was eight. He wouldn’t let me out of his sight. He trailed me through the house and upstairs when I went to bed. He lay on the bed beside me and prised my eyes open when I tried to sleep, saying, ‘Don’t sleep now
, talk to me. Talk to me, Mummy.’

  It was difficult. They kept asking me questions about what I’d seen and who I’d met. They wanted to know all about Australia. What could I say? I’d seen hotels and airports.

  A week later, when the children were back at school, a teacher took me aside when I arrived to pick Ben up from the local primary school.

  ‘Ben’s been terribly upset while you’ve been away,’ the teacher said. ‘I saw him sitting in class one day with his eyes shut and when I asked him what he was doing he said, “I’m trying to see my Mummy’s face.”’

  Swallowing the lump in my throat, I explained to the teacher that I was due to go away again within a few months. ‘We’ve tried to cushion it. Is there anything else we can do?’ I asked.

  ‘What about putting a photograph of you in his satchel?’ she said. ‘Ben knows you’re coming back, but three weeks seems like forever to an eight-year-old.’

  For a long while I couldn’t talk about Australia. There was a barrier around me and I didn’t laugh as much. My assumptions and long-held beliefs, all those things a person relies upon, had been turned upside down. The world itself looked slightly different when I looked out the window at ordinary scenes like families going off to church.

  I thought, These people are OK. They don’t know about the thousands of children sent overseas who could have been their friends and their neighbours. They have no idea how lucky they are.

  ‘Where do we begin?’ I asked Yvonne, as we sat in the upstairs office staring at the unpacked bags.

  My main priority, I decided, was to be able to return to Australia in six months’ time, having made at least some progress with everybody I’d seen. In most cases this might mean only having found them a birth certificate.

  I knew that Joanna was in London with a full team working on the documentary. Her priorities were different from mine but understandably she wanted to be able to finish the programme on a positive note. She wanted the reunion of a child migrant with his or her family.

  This wasn’t my concern but if my research eventually created the possibility and all parties agreed then I knew it would be the opportunity to show the world that the child migrants had been outrageously deceived. They weren’t orphans. They did have families.

  So what name did I start with? The first? The most recent? The most unusual?

  The Australian trip had generated about 300 requests for help and over the next two months Yvonne and I began research on all of them. As with most searches, the results were mixed. The birth certificates for some child migrants were easy to find, others took far longer. I knew from experience that often names had been changed, and that dates of birth could be incorrect. Some had no idea if they were born in England, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.

  The letters kept arriving, many simply expressing thanks and wishing me success. The child migrants were embarrassingly grateful.

  Among them was a letter from Christine, the woman who had stormed up to me at the Fairbridge reunion and accused me of having misrepresented the lives of the child migrants.

  Dear Margaret,

  After my talk with you and David I have done some deep thinking and soul-searching and, yes, you were right, I do want and need to know who I am and what my roots are.

  I have always wondered why I had no-one – brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, mother or father. It has never seemed logical that there should be no-one at all. I’ve often wondered why and who sent me to Fairbridge? What was wrong with me that no-one wanted me?

  Margaret, even as I write, the memories of the loneliness and rejection come flooding back and I am weeping for the lost years; the years of not belonging to anyone, not knowing anything …

  When I asked about my family, the people at Fairbridge told me that my parents were killed in a car accident, but I think they told me that to give me something to hang on to; to give me a background of sorts …

  It is a very emotional thing to start and peel back the years and face the feelings and emotions that have been buried over a lifetime. I thought it didn’t matter any more but it does. And perhaps more now that I’m in the latter half of my lifespan.

  Please try to find out who I am. Where do I come from? Is there anyone I belong to? Do I have any family?’

  It was an important letter, for Christine and for me, because it showed that regardless of how proudly the Old Fairbridgians had presented themselves at the reunion, some still had profound feelings of rejection.

  I was putting a lot of faith in the documentary, hoping that it would raise public awareness, that people would realize what had happened, for the first time.

  At the end of May I flew to Harare in Zimbabwe to begin investigating its child migrant schemes. I had never been to Africa and tried to keep an open mind about my expectations.

  15

  It was a scorching Sunday afternoon and the only breeze came from the slipstream of the cars and trucks that hurled themselves through the streets at breakneck speed. The taxi ride from Harare airport passed in a blur of loud horns and petrol fumes. Near the hotel, traffic came to a complete stop as a congregation marched past singing hymns and carrying banners.

  I had already seen the work of Kingsley Fairbridge in Australia and now hoped to see if the schemes had been any different in the former Rhodesia, where child migration had begun after the Second World War.

  Kingsley Fairbridge had spent his teenage years in Rhodesia in the late 1890s where a vision came to him one summer’s day which he described in his autobiography:

  When you close your eyes on a hot day you may see things that have remained half hidden at the back of your brain. That day I saw a street in the East End of London. It was a street crowded with children – dirty children, yet lovable, exhausted with the heat. No decent air, not enough food. The waste of it all! Children’s lives wasting while the Empire cried out for more.

  In 1909 Fairbridge gave an impassioned speech to the Colonial Club at Oxford University describing his vision. Such was the power of his oratory, all fifty of those present enrolled as members of the ‘Society for the Furtherance of Child Emigration to the Colonies’.

  On my first day in Harare, I visited the State Archives, hoping to find records about the children sent to Rhodesia and also details of the policy that underpinned the scheme. It gave me my first taste of dealing with the local bureaucracy, a nerve-racking experience, particularly when the keepers of the State Archives told me that I must refer to them as ‘comrade’.

  One of my new ‘comrades’ showed me a brochure which publicized the 1946 opening of Fairbridge Memorial College, situated in the bush outside Bulawayo. As I read the brochure, my eyes fell on several important sentences.

  It revealed that in Southern Rhodesia most of the manual tasks on farms were performed by Africans. At Fairbridge, the white immigrant children were not expected to perform the farm work or other chores, as they had been in Australia. The inference was that they were the élite and had been brought from England to join the next generation of professionals and politicians that would run Rhodesia.

  I felt quite vulnerable in the archives. I was making enquiries about a very sensitive area of the country’s history and I feared that not everybody would welcome me.

  Joy Melville, a writer from England, had come with me to Zimbabwe to begin researching a book to accompany the television documentary. The following day we took a taxi to the Fairbridge college at Bulawayo. I expected to see a rather grand-looking campus but instead found what looked like a row of Nissen huts. The actual college had once been an RAF base and Fairbridge had converted the building. The ground was dusty and dry; it must have seemed like another planet to the boys and girls who began arriving in 1946.

  The college had since been turned into a primary school for local black children, and the headmaster showed us around the classrooms.

  Before I left England, an ad was placed in a local newspaper in Harare, stating that a researcher was arriving who wanted to i
nterview former child migrants from Britain. There were nine responses.

  When I arrived I rang all of them and arranged interviews. On the second morning I had a very different visitor waiting in the lobby, a young African boy with a typewritten letter from Dame Molly Gibbs, the wife of the former Governor-General of Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs.

  Dear Mrs Humphreys,

  In case you are out when we call, I am writing this note to say that in seeing the item about the Fairbridge scheme in the paper this morning, it occurred to me that you might be interested to meet me and my husband because we used to have some of the Fairbridge boys to stay on our farm outside Bulawayo from time to time.

  The Gibbs’ residence was something from Empire days, as if time had been frozen and the sun had never set on a small corner of England. I was struck by the beautiful gardens being tended by African gardeners. Inside the house there were more African servants, each impeccably dressed.

  Sir Humphrey took us into the house which was decorated with photographs of children and grandchildren, and Dame Molly, dressed informally in a skirt and blouse, poured tea in the sitting-room.

  I still wasn’t sure why they wanted to see me, although I had my suspicions. Sir Humphrey began by asking exactly why I was in Zimbabwe, and I explained about the Child Migrants Trust.

  ‘Do you understand the politics of Zimbabwe?’ he asked. ‘Things have changed quite a bit over the years.’

  He seemed to understand my work, and that many child migrants whom I’d seen in Australia wanted to find their families.

  He said, ‘My understanding is that the children who came to Fairbridge Memorial College were all sent with their parents’ permission. They weren’t orphans. I can’t tell you how many there were but it didn’t involve thousands.’

  I listened intently, fascinated by the prospect that child migrants might actually have been sent by their families rather than the authorities. If true, this raised a whole new issue. Why would parents consent to their children being sent to Africa? And why was this consent never sought for the children sent to Australia?