They wandered in the quiet gloom among the tombs of the once great and powerful. She whispered ‘I don’t go in to Catholic churches any more. Never.’ They walked on. Henry V lay quietly and brownly dead, a simple crown of pious crosses about his head. ‘“Once more unto the breach,” and all that. Did you like the film?’
‘Not really.’ The romantic idea of war. Unexpectedly, the shades gathered again: Strang, Wilde, Dixon. Murray. Wise Murray could have helped him find the words, say the right things to stop her disappearing.
‘I’m sorry about your friends.’ She advanced up the aisle, widening the chasm that lay between them. Why must he lose her too, and his child? Then she looked back. ‘I’ve often thought about Edmund Tucker.’
He seized the lifeline. ‘Oh, he’s fine! He’d love to see you. Got a very nice wife you’d like. Margaret.’ They stared at each other, at possibility.
‘Let’s sit down for a minute.’ Philip slid into a pew and after a moment Rosie followed. ‘Alex. Our son.’ He reached across and took her hand. ‘You said his name’s Alex.’ She nodded, the hand in his rigid, but he held on and searched for the path. ‘The last day we were in church you lit candles and I prayed. Do you remember? What a pair of old cynics we’ve become since then.’ He faltered, felt he’d come to a dead end, clogged with boulders, but a narrow passage opened up. ‘I see that last day so clearly, do you?’
‘I remember the bluebells.’ The hand in his softened a little.
‘I remember you on the bluebells.’ A shiver of a laugh.
‘And when we went back to the quayside – Strang finding a dog?’
‘Yes. What happened to it?’
‘It died. Strang died, too.’ A thought, like a candle just lit, gathered strength, burned white. On a previous day in another location he might have called it a commonplace thought, but now it blazed in Philip’s mind with the force of a revelation. Holding on to things mattered, was in some way the only thing that mattered. ‘The dog died because it wouldn’t let go. You held on to Alex, didn’t you? As long as you could. Rosie – I know it’s hard to believe in anything, I feel it too – but there’s something about not letting go.’
Holding on. He thought of Tucker’s hand of friendship in the water off St Nazaire; of poor Rick Strang, who he’d let slide away to a terrible death; of Albert’s briefcase and all it contained of family and belief. Perversely, but somehow most powerfully, he saw Spike’s stiff little body sailing through the air, jaws clamped to the deck quoit. Philip lifted Rosie’s hand to his lips. He kissed it, rested his cheek on it. ‘I’m not letting go. If you want to get rid of me, Rosie, you’ll have to bloody drown me.’
They sat together as a verger walked around the altar extinguishing candles with a dousing rod, sending up tiny clouds of dark smoke. The verger moved on to the choir stalls and the light around them slowly dimmed, as in a cinema when the film is about to begin.
Memoirs of a Child Migrant, 2006
Frankie’s coming with me to England to look up his brothers. They’re all over the shop: one in London, another in Ireland, a third in Cornwall. I’m dragging him up to Gateshead to see my old Uncle John and hopefully a few more rellies on my maternal side who’ve stayed put. I’ve timed it so we can catch the Appleby Horse Fair, because Uncle John’s promised to introduce me to some cousins still on the road.
We fixed this all up when Frankie came for Christmas. Decided to go by boat. ‘Least you should remember it this time, Alex,’ he said, ‘long as Alzheimer’s doesn’t get to you first.’ We went on P&O cruising.com and booked it. He said he could never have afforded it without the government grant.
It turned out to be the best Christmas I’ve had for years. I invited all four of the Nazareth House kids: Frankie, Peggy, May and Joyce. Jan helped me get the house cleaned up and came over one evening as well. Left her bloke at home, thank God. Anyway the barbie got plenty of punishment and we raised a few glasses to Dan Mooney. There were lots of tears, good tears.
Watching us all pull crackers and put on silly hats and even play a game of musical chairs, I thought we looked like people learning to be children again, trying to find the essential essence of kid that’s in all of us. Among our little group of old crumblies I could still spot the dreamy boy, the watchful one, the shy girl, each of them on the search for happiness that being alive is all about.
The Brothers did their best to stamp out our child selves and you could see they nearly succeeded. You know how kids skip when they’re happy? I never remember anyone skipping at Dundrum. You either walked or you ran. We tried to skip round the chairs, but it ended up a shuffle. Frankie won. There was no stopping him, as a matter of fact. One night he even tried a slide on the parquet floor in the hall – never mind his crook foot.
I told the others about my parents meeting up at the station just after the boat left England. I’d always seen it a bit like Brief Encounter; you know, white clouds of steam providing the romantic background and then the script running something like,
‘Darling girl!’
‘My darling!’
LONG KISS
‘There’s something I have to tell you my darling… Our son…’
‘Our boy! We must stop it! We must save him!’
And then it’s Hitchcock stuff, the train rattling down the line, two faces at the open window, eyes straining through the smut and the smoke for a first glimpse of Southampton and the ship. They race through ticket barriers down on to the quay, running, running, my mother’s dress flaring out. The gangway swings away, a hooter sounds…
‘Mother! Father! Here I am!’
CREDITS ROLL
I’m pretty good at an English accent and they found it very funny because they knew it could never have been like that.
My parents looked for a child christened Seymour who’d been born on the 23rd December 1942, and no such child had been shipped to Australia. Even this amount of misinformation took some getting, since Mother Bitch of all Bitches refused to see either my father or my mother and wouldn’t even respond in writing until forced to, six months after I’d left. I’m looking at that letter now. It says my mother had
…signed adoption papers, and, notwithstanding certain delusions on her part and on the part of a weak-minded nun named Sister Frances, who is no longer in residence, the child has been adopted by an English family, whose identity, under terms agreed to by all parties, cannot be divulged.
‘More flat lies,’ Frankie said when I showed him.
I suppose my father’s years as a commando had made him good at tactics. He also had both money and access to people with influence, unlike most of the other parents – some of whom hadn’t even signed adoption papers. From Dear Reverend Mother, the letters I have address Dear Reverend Father, My Lord Bishop, and finally, thanks to Jimmy Burns’s contacts very high up in the Roman Catholic Church, ‘Your Eminence’.
But even with all that, it took over two years. I reckon the Department of Mistakes and Apologies moves slower than any other. You might have noticed. Government offices in Australia shuffled papers to other government offices, diocesan boards met, deferred discussions, referred to head office for guidance…
Eventually, though, my mum and dad were informed that a child answering my description and bearing a close resemblance to the photograph supplied, had been migrated from Nazareth House, Camberwell, and was now in a Christian Brothers’ orphanage at Dundrum, Western Australia.
When Brother Finnie came down the line of beds that morning to give me a clean pair of shorts and unscuffed shoes, I thought it meant the inspectors were coming. You wore the better stuff for a day and then had to give it all back. I was in the classroom, writing out the creeds, when Brother Macken fetched me out.
I followed him through the dark entrance hall into the brightness outside and for a moment all I could see was the silhouette of a car and beside it, two other shapes: a tall straight man figure and a shorter one that launched itself towards me, skittering across the gr
avel like a blue and yellow spinning top. To this day, I love a woman in a full skirt.
I can’t recall what was said, or whether we even touched. I’m sure Brother Macken put on his charming act, big red hands fluttering as he cracked jokes. All I wanted was to get in the car, and it’s what remains with me; the leathery smell of the inside of the car that took me away from Dundrum.
Just recently, going through all the papers, I found out there was another reason why my folks took so long to come and get me. My mother’s criminal record. Drunk and disorderly women weren’t welcome any more in Australia apparently, so that was another hurdle they had to get over. I thank my stars my mum and dad were very determined people.
I spend a lot of time now tracking down other child migrants. The reunions have become a hugely important part of my life. The cruelty some people suffered is just beyond belief. I told Frankie I felt a bit ashamed wanting to write my small story, but he said, ‘Just do it; there’s so many others that should, but won’t.’ The very saddest thing is a number still feel it was all somehow their own fault.
So this book is for them as well as for me, the seven thousand children who were shipped from Britain to Australia between 1947 and 1970. It’s in memory of Colin Greening and Daniel Mooney and all who died before they could be told, ‘None of it was your fault.’
People died. People got damaged. Even though I was rescued, it messed me up. Just ask Jan. But I certainly don’t blame my parents. They did their best and I bless them for it.
Christmas 1953, under a bright antipodean sun. We’ve had our presents and now we’re on the beach for the day with a huge picnic. Dad gives the little ones the job of digging a trench all around us, marking out our territory. He was dead against all empires, made speeches about how Australia should be free, but he called this circular ditch ‘Our Empire’ and we were only allowed to cross it if accompanied by him or Mum. It seemed strange, and when I was a teenager, downright oppressive, but I understand now why they always kept us close.
I sit under the shade of the big striped umbrella, and listen to the sounds of children in the water and playing cricket; Mum kneels on the sand, pulling towels out of a basket; my little brother and sister are still busy with their spades; and – in the midst of all this happiness – I remember Dundrum. I remember the silent kids in the dining room hung with its few loops of paper chains, and see the faces of Frankie and Dan, and I feel them, like a pain.
Mum turns her head, ‘Why don’t you go for a swim, Alex? Dad’s going in.’ But I shake my head and stay where I am, running the hot sand through my fingers, watching my mother watching us. She stands now, brown arms folded, the breeze blowing the pink skirt against her legs and mussing her dark hair. Her eyes are on the little ones, digging. Then she turns to smile at me. ‘Don’t you want to dig, Alex?’ Then she shades her eyes with one hand and looks for my father.
He runs up the beach and she squeals and tells him to get away, dripping all over her, but he grabs her in his arms and she lifts her face to him and they kiss.
I lie back on the sand and the blue sky rolls over me.
From the moment they found each other, they were hardly ever apart. Mum worked with Dad, and sometimes I came too, knocking on people’s doors and pushing leaflets through letter boxes. If I went to one house, Mum would be watching for me on the other side of the road. ‘Over here, Alex.’ It was because they’d lost each other and then lost me they worried more than most about separation. It was because they knew that in a world with few happy middles, never mind endings, how lucky you are if you’re found.
Caroline Ross on Writing The War Before Mine
Why choose combat as a subject, which is quite unusual for a woman?
I didn’t initially plan to write about combat; the experiences of soldiers in war is very far from my own much quieter life, but it was while I was in Brittany (researching a novel about ancient megalithic history!) that I ‘bumped into’ the raid on St Nazaire. The incredible daredevil plan would capture any writer’s imagination.
What made you focus on Falmouth rather than some other port important to the war effort?
As I started to read more about the raid, Falmouth’s importance became clear. It was the port the commandos set out from and where they underwent their last, intense period of training. When I visited Falmouth I discovered the raid and the 168 men who died were well remembered there.
How did you go about researching the raid and writing about soldiering from a firsthand point of view?
Shortly after this holiday I was lucky enough to meet one of the survivors of the raid, a wonderful ex-naval officer called Billie Stephens. We became good friends and he put me in touch with an ex-commando called Micky Burn, another incredible man, who after WWII became a journalist and writer. He is still writing, in his nineties, from his home in Penrhyndeudraeth. Micky had been a captain on one of the launches. He showed me a very moving letter from one of the soldiers under his command who clearly foresaw his own death. I also attended a reunion organised by the St Nazaire Society and by that time I was determined to make the raid the central event of the novel.
So you didn’t find it difficult – or intimidating – incorporating real people’s memories into fiction?
I had a lot of help from people who knew what they were talking about. I was also greatly assisted by having a husband who served in American Special Forces in Vietnam. My conversations with him and with the WWII soldiers convinced me that the portrayal of relationships between men in war, so often stereotyped as competitive and aggressive, should actually be characterised by affection, loyalty and – yes, I do believe this – love. I hope that comes over in the book.
Isn’t it unusual for a woman writer to have a central male character?
Perhaps it is, though other women have done it very successfully – Pat Barker, for instance. And of course the book is not just about Philip. Rosie is just as important. I wanted her to be from the North East, where I lived in the 1970s and 1980s. Though the poverty was shocking even then, it’s a place whose wit and energy sets it apart and I wanted some of that in the novel. I also made a very good friend there whose background is Romany. Talking to her and her family helped me a great deal and I became very interested in Romany culture and language, so that it unexpectedly became a minor theme in the novel.
What prompted you to send Rosie and Philip’s son to the other side of the world?
We do tend to forget the completely different moral climate of the 1940s, where single parents were almost unheard of. The story of the seven thousand children sent to Australia after WWII is an unbearably moving one, but I discovered it was only the most recent episode in a long and largely shameful history of child migration from the United Kingdom. There is a considerable amount of information available on what happened to the children sent to Australia, thanks to a House of Commons enquiry in the 1990s, and I have been careful to keep my account of it in this novel as authentic as possible. The lies and misinformation, the brutality and apparent sadism these children were often subjected to are hard to believe. But these things happened. Many of the children were not orphans at all, but were told they were. When their parents wrote letters to them, they were withheld. The children grew up hearing themselves repeatedly referred to as ‘nobodies’.
I was also very fortunate indeed to meet one of the migrants, Laurie Humphreys, who has written a fascinating autobiography that deals with his time in Catholic boys’ homes, and to talk to him about his experiences.
Published by Honno
‘Ailsa Craig’, Heol y Cawl, Dinas Powys
South Glamorgan, Wales, CF6 4AH
© Caroline Ross, 2008
The right of Caroline Ross to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This novel is set around events that really happened. The Raid on St Nazaire in 1942 is remembered as one of the most daring of all commando operations in the Sec
ond World War. After the war, thousands of British children were indeed shipped to Australia. However, while the characters and their actions may feel true to life, the author would like to stress that they are entirely her own invention.
ISBN 978-1-906784-85-0
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the publishers.
Published with the financial support of the Welsh Books Council
Cover image: Getty Images
Cover design: Graham Preston
The War Before Mine Page 30