On Christmas Eve, we all went to the big dining hall. They put up a huge Christmas tree, and all the kids helped decorate it. We put paper chains and strings of dried berries and popcorn all around it. Then after we finished dinner, a telegram from Santa was read, which meant he was on his way. While we waited we all sang carols at the top of our lungs, even me, and when Santa finally arrived everyone cheered so loud. Then Santa removed the presents from his sack and put them under the tree. It looked so grand to see the mountain of presents. Then he called out the names one at a time until all the presents were given out. After that, the little kids had to go back to their cottages and get ready for bed, but they allowed the older kids to stay up. We cleared the tables, and then we had a dance in the dining hall. Sometimes they allowed us to stay up until midnight. Those were the best nights. Even the cranky cottage mums were usually nice to everyone on Christmas. Oh yeah, on New Year’s Eve we would have a dance, too. Those were fun times, and now that I’m not there anymore, I really miss them.
I’m trying to understand everything, like why I had to go away and why I have a new brother and why Joyce is back home and I’m not and why you never came and got me, and I will have to just keep trying to understand, I guess. Right now I have to work on my problems here so that I can work on these other things later. I have to go now. I hope you are having a merry Christmas Eve.
I love you, Mum, and Joyce, Fred, Norman, Phyllis, Lawrence, Jean, and the baby … wherever you are.
Your daughter always, Marjorie
P.S. I almost forgot to tell you about the last cross-country race. Kenny came in first, and he had the best time ever at thirty-one minutes and five seconds. It was in the Fairbridge Gazette from June 1942. I will try to get a copy and mail it to you.
Marjorie folded her letter and sealed it in an envelope. She wiped away a tear. She held her letter up and looked at it. Her letter! She thought this was the best letter she had ever written. No one could tear it open and read it. It was just for her family. She would get a stamp and put it in the mailbox herself.
She went to touch her radio but hesitated. Every Christmas Day at noon, the farm school would sit quietly and listen to the king’s Christmas speech. Last year’s speech was about family, and it had stuck in her mind. The king said we should remember those who must spend Christmas away from home. What about me? she had wanted to scream. Do you mean me? Do you care? He said we all belong to each other. What rot! I don’t belong to anyone. The speech had distressed her, so she’d put her head on the table and her hands over her ears.
She wouldn’t listen tomorrow. He was not her king anymore. She was truly on her own and must make her way somehow. She pulled out her nightdress and got ready for bed. She brushed her hair and, almost without realizing it, she was humming again. “There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover …” Marjorie could hear the tune in her head, but she couldn’t remember the words. Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm, hmmm, “and peace ever after when the world is free.”[9]
That night she made a promise to herself that one day she would see those famous white cliffs of Dover. One day, she, too, would be free. She just knew it.
Chapter 15
Why Would I Go Back? My Country Didn’t Want Me
Did we not know that justice, when employed in the cause of the poor, is always a one-sided hobbling beldame.… We are well aware that many of the supporters of this society [Children’s Friend Society] would willingly transport all the children and half the adult population of the land to the most unhealthy portion of the globe, if by so doing they could increase their own security and get rid of what they impiously term the “surplus population” of the country.
— “Transportation and Sale of Children of the Poor, Defence of the Children’s Friend Society,” The Operative (London), May 5, 1839
“I never dared to dream that I would actually be standing on the Whitley Bay sands with you,” I said, and turned to my mother with a smile.
“I never ever thought I would see Whitley Bay again.” She grinned back at me. “I never wanted to come back to England. Why would I? No one wanted me here.”
“But it’s different now, isn’t it? Are you glad you came back?” I asked.
“Yes, I think so,” Mum answered with a slight hesitation in her voice. “It will take a while to process it all. Imagine! I played on these sands so very long ago. I lived here with my family. My family! I went to school here. I liked the Rockcliffe School because it was so close to the sands. How could we resist skipping school to play on the sands when we could see the beach from the school playground? Once we were taken away, I lost everything that defined my life up to that point. We didn’t have much, but we had each other. I was loved. It took me forever to get over losing my family. Well, maybe I never got over it. I don’t think the people who were shipping kids out to the colonies realized just how much they were taking away from us. Perhaps they didn’t care. We were just ‘material’ to distribute around the colonies. Just numbers to them.”
Sisters Joyce and Marjorie at Whitley Bay, 2007. Joyce is pointing to the periwinkles that they used to pick for their dinner. St. Mary’s Lighthouse is in the background. Memories flooded back as the two sisters walked around Whitley Bay for the first time since leaving in 1937.
“You children were an Imperial investment. It was important to keep a steady flow of white stock to the colonies. Unemployment made England feel crowded with needy people, while the colonies were ‘man-hungry’[1] by comparison and desperate for settlers. Children would not find it easy to come back. They gave you a one-way ticket. I really can’t imagine what it was like living in poverty in England in the 1930s, but you had each other and, really, it wasn’t much better in Canada at that time.”
“I was born at the wrong time. If I was one of the older ones in our family or one of the younger ones, I would have stayed home.” Mum sighed. She was quiet for a long time. We stood on the beach, her beach. “As we left Liverpool, I wondered why we were going,” she began again. “I remember covering myself up emotionally; it was almost a physical feeling, heavy, like whatever I covered myself with had a lot of weight to it. Eventually, we were told we were going to Canada, and we were told that was where the Indians fought the white man.[2] The boys were frightened, but the girls weren’t as frightened because we didn’t think they went after little girls. I was frightened for Kenny, though. It nearly drove me to distraction that I couldn’t protect him.”
“He was kept from you?”
“Yes. I will never understand why we weren’t allowed to look after the little family that we had left. They took so much.” Marjorie’s voice trailed off. “It became too heavy to carry, so I had to try to chop that part of my life away and just look ahead. I needed to go into the unknown as light as possible. My future was so uncertain. While living with my family in Whitley Bay, I had no worries. In my heart, I knew when I left England that I wouldn’t see my family again. My time at Middlemore Emigration Homes in Birmingham assured me of that. I hadn’t heard a word from my mother. She just disappeared as if the past ten years of my life meant nothing to her. I had no way of telling her that she meant the world to me. I held up hope that she would come for me, for us. I hated her for letting us go like that. I knew if I let my fear and despair have its way, it would take over. I needed to have my wits about me. I needed to take care of me now, and Kenny. He had no one else. I had to be the one. Then later, I needed to look after Audrey when she arrived.”
“And at first you didn’t know whether Audrey or Joyce would follow you out to Canada, did you?” I asked.
“No, I couldn’t count on ever seeing them again. I checked every busload of kids landing at the school, hoping to see them again. But at the same time, I also hoped that somehow they got away. Nevertheless, it was a happy day for me when Audrey arrived. But then I felt guilty because I was being selfish, and I knew it wasn’t the best day for her.
” Mum picked up a rock and tossed it into the North Sea. “Thinking of my family just drove me crazy, so by chopping that part away, I could survive. What I didn’t realize at first was how much I actually lost. Really, I lost so much. I lost my stories. You lose part of who you are when you lose your stories. I didn’t like the story I was given at the farm school. I fought it, and they labelled me as rebellious and uncooperative. Imagine that! You get a new identity crammed down your throat, and when you resist and fight back you get called names and are treated like you are the problem.”
“Children don’t have the experience to separate themselves from that type of abuse.” I suggested, “They internalize that they are a problem, that they are bad, and they have no other stick to measure themselves by, especially on your isolated farm.”
“Oh, we couldn’t fight back. Our voices had no power. We had no power. We were taught early on that if we complained it could get a lot worse. And believe me, they used sticks and straps to hit us, and they made certain we knew to follow their rules.”
“I guess that was important to instil in you right away. After all, the children outnumbered the adults. Control of you children would have been a high priority. A child who feels powerless is less likely to fight back. Children who fear those who have power over them fight back in other ways, which is probably why the bully system was so firmly entrenched in institutions like the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School.”
“Bullies, yes. The boys could be mean to each other. Some of the older boys from the first group were the biggest bullies. They were a-holes, and they thought they were King Shit. Everything had to be done around them. They were pushy, and for some reason they were favoured.”
“I guess Kenny didn’t avoid being bullied,” I said.
“No, he couldn’t avoid it. I know that for a fact.” Mum tossed another rock into the sea. I sensed she was hoping I would let this go, toss it away like her rock, leave her be, and find something else to write about, to worry about.
“I wish I had been able to spend more time with my mother as an adult. I wish I’d had a chance to tell her that I mostly forgive her and that I understand better now. I still have a feeling, though, that she didn’t fight hard enough for us. But maybe she had little choice. Maybe she didn’t just toss us aside.”
“I don’t think she did. Remember the letter we were given that stated that it was to your mother’s ‘eternal distress’[3] that she had lost her children to Canada. I am quite sure she never got over losing you.” We continued to walk down the beach, lost in our own thoughts for a moment.
“By the time I was out on my own, and then married with you children, my past was firmly set behind me. By the time I was in my midthirties, it was just a dim memory. That is why when you started asking me about my English family, I couldn’t really answer. What I had lost was still too painful to look at. I didn’t know how to tell you this. You were such an angry child, and I suspected you were looking for answers, for good stories about where I came from, and I had none to give.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. I probably was looking for good stories. Perhaps hoping for a surprise, something showing that we weren’t such an isolated family all alone in the world. I needed an anchor, some roots, and I didn’t have any.” I wondered how to tell my own mother that I was sorry or that I forgave her before it was too late. Forgave her for what, though? She had hung on to us. She had never tossed us away. Perhaps I should ask her to forgive me for being such a difficult daughter.
“You had me. Wasn’t I anchor enough?”
“But I didn’t realize that. And so, no, it wasn’t enough back then.”
“Is it enough now?”
“Yes, I believe it is.”
“Coming back here to where you were born completes the circle, at least for me,” I mused. “Imagine, you played on this beach as a little girl. You searched for treasure and for periwinkles. This was your home. This is what they took from you. I have heard it said that the first few years of a child’s life are the most formative. Perhaps your strength came from your time here, growing up in these beautiful surroundings. It sounds like you had a lot of freedom.”
“We did. There were days when we felt free as the birds. I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d stayed here, with my family. If I grew up in England, where would I be now?” Mum looked out to sea. The wind blew through her hair.
“Well, we wouldn’t be standing here together. I would not have been born. And I guess I wouldn’t have spent the last several years researching your past and the ins and outs of British child migration.”
“No, I guess not. But it makes me wonder, you know, to look back and see how it all could have been so different.” Mum looked at her sister Joyce, who was walking ahead, lost in her own thoughts. “I missed Joyce for years and years. I would have liked to have had my family around me.”
“Life can take so many turns. Some we take, some are taken for us, and some are taken from us. I think it’s easier to go with the flow, but that’s not always the path that gives us what we want or need.”
My sister, Joan, and our mother’s youngest brother, David, and his wife, Marion, walked ahead of Joyce. This visit to Whitley Bay was a family adventure. David was the last of Winifred’s children, Marjorie’s youngest brother. He was born near London in 1943, six years after my mother was sent away. It was a blow to her when she first learned of her brother Richard’s birth in 1939, then of David’s birth, but those were the days when she buried everything, so she had no real emotional investment in either of them. She didn’t meet David until 1986; they were both nervous about the initial meeting, but it was love at first sight. There was an instant bond with her brother, and getting to know the members of our English family has enriched our lives.
“What do you think, Aunt Joyce?” I asked as we caught up with her.
“Think?” Joyce turned to me.
“About being here?” I said. “Being back in Whitley Bay.”
“Well, I never thought I’d see the day when I would be back standing on the sands at Whitley Bay with Marjorie. It was seventy-odd years ago that we played on this beach and ran through those streets.”
“So much has changed, but so much has stayed the same.” Mum looked out to sea, then along the beach. Her eyes stopped on the lighthouse — St. Mary’s Lighthouse. “We weren’t allowed to go past St. Mary’s Lighthouse, but we ended up going so much farther. We were so far from Whitley Bay.”
“I was so mad at you for leaving me at Middlemore. My heart nearly broke when I heard you and Kenny were gone. They didn’t tell me you were going. I watched you go down the path, and we waved to each other, remember? And you didn’t come back that night. You and Kenny just vanished.” Joyce stared out to sea, her eyes moist at the edges.
“They didn’t let me say goodbye. I didn’t know I wasn’t coming back. I thought we were going on a day trip somewhere.” Mum looked at her sister.
“Well, we are here together now.” Joyce smiled. She grabbed her scarf as the wind whipped around her.
“They say you can’t go back, but we have, haven’t we, Joyce? And we have found something to take back with us. Memories to always keep with us, and no one can take them away,” said Mum.
“Yes, our shared memories can keep us close to each other even when we live so far apart.” Joyce looked out to sea.
“I was so mad at you for getting to stay,” Mum said so softly that I didn’t think Joyce could hear her.
A pair of seagulls swooped by, their raucous calls, not to be ignored, forced a change in the conversation.
“Look. They’re still nesting up on those cliffs.” Joyce laughed. “We tried to get their eggs, but the cliff was too steep.”
“Are those the cliffs that Uncle Kenny fell from?” I asked.
“No,” both sisters answered and both pointed south. “It was those rock
s just past the walkway there.” Marjorie and Joyce laughed at each other.
“There was a lot of blood. I remember that,” Mum said.
“Yes, and our mum nearly had a fit when you brought Kenny home. She blamed me, and I wasn’t even there.” Joyce laughed at the memory as she watched the waves touch the toes of her shoes.
The sisters stood for a moment, watching the waves.
Joyce turned away from her sister. “Look, you can see the Spanish City Dome from here. It’s a shame that they’re tearing it down. It was the life of the town.” Joyce pointed north up the beach. “Shall we drive up to the lighthouse tomorrow?”
Marjorie Her War Years Page 21