Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

  Ten minutes later an older man appeared. His more authoritative air matched his formal blue suit. I was afraid that he was going to ask me far more questions than I would ask him. I had to think quickly and look confident despite my ignorance.

  ‘My name is Margaret Humphreys. I’m a social worker from Nottingham. Do you hold the records for all the children who were sent to Australia in the nineteen forties and fifties?’

  The man stiffened.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Those records are no longer held at Australia House. They were sent to Canberra several years ago.’

  Although he might have been taken aback by my enquiry, I was absolutely stunned by his response. There was a moment when we both just stood there looking at each other. I couldn’t gather my thoughts quickly enough to respond.

  To break the silence, he repeated himself. ‘The records of the children have been sent to Canberra.’

  I knew that Canberra was the capital of Australia, but little more. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘are there any records here in England?’

  ‘I think that’s the sort of enquiry that you should address to your own government, don’t you?’

  Long after he’d turned on his heels and left, I stood in the doorway trying to make sense of his answers. Outside, the rain had eased and been replaced by a crisp wind that tugged at the open umbrellas of commuters spilling out of offices.

  I found a coffee house near the underground station and ordered a hot drink and a slice of cake. It was my first food since breakfast. My train was at 6.30 p.m., an hour away, and suddenly I felt desperately tired. My mind flitted from half-formed images of Madeleine and Harold on a boat to the face of the Australia House official.

  I was still confused nearly three hours later when I reached Nottingham and Mervyn picked me up from the station for the short drive home. He knew me too well to start asking questions. Instead, he told me about his day and what the kids were doing.

  ‘And you?’ he asked after a long silence.

  ‘I found Madeleine’s birth entry,’ I said. ‘But I wish she was in England. There’s something more to this than I imagined. I need to ask her some difficult questions and I don’t even know what she looks like.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her to send a photograph?’ he suggested. ‘And when you get her certificate, you can send her a picture of the house where she was born.’

  Rachel and Ben were pleased to see me, both talking at once and eager to have some attention. I listened to their pleas and chatter, fighting tiredness, and later disappeared upstairs for a warm bath, with medicinal gin and tonic close at hand.

  What was it the Australia House official had said? ‘The records of the children have been sent to Canberra.’

  His openness had stunned me. I don’t know if I touched a raw nerve or sent alarm bells jangling, but every time I closed my eyes I saw him again. It wasn’t his tone of voice or attitude, it was simply the fact that, by his own admission, there had to be far more children involved than just Madeleine and Harold.

  5

  When Madeleine’s birth certificate arrived I finally knew that she hadn’t been formally adopted. On every birth certificate there is a column in which the word ‘adopted’ appears if applicable. No such word appeared on Madeleine’s certificate. One of my theories had gone out the window. There was also no reference to her father, but at least I had her mother’s full name and I returned to St Catherine’s House to check the marriage records.

  Sliding out the first green volume, I opened it on a desk and ran my finger down the names.

  I had decided to check marriages over a twenty-year period. Madeleine’s mother was called Vera, and I assumed that if she had married it would have been some time between her seventeenth and thirty-seventh birthdays. If she had remained single, of course, she could be much harder to find.

  From a researcher’s point of view, it would have been ideal if Vera had married someone with an exotic, unusual surname, never changed her address and had a child every year until the menopause. I would be facing a series of major headaches if she had married an infertile member of the Smith, Jones or Brown family.

  The first task was to remove and replace about eighty volumes which covered the twenty years of marriages following Madeleine’s birth. Each quarterly list of surnames had to be examined for any entries which might correspond to the name and other details which I had obtained from Madeleine’s birth certificate. I wrote each likely entry in my notebook and then cross-checked against the relevant surname of the husband.

  It was slow progress, but speed is less crucial than accuracy. At the end of the day my notebook contained five possible marriages; the assumption that Vera had married in the Midlands or the North of England reduced the figure to just two. I ordered both certificates.

  In the week since I’d been to Australia House, I kept reminding myself of what the official had said when I asked whether records for children might be kept in England. ‘I think that’s the sort of enquiry you should address to your own government, don’t you?’

  Right, I thought, I’ll do just that.

  None of the social services departments or professional associations could help me, so finally I rang the Home Office and asked about the records of British children sent overseas in the forties. After being cut off twice and put on hold for an eternity, an information officer told me he had no idea what I was talking about.

  There was little else I could do except wait for the marriage certificates to arrive and hope one of them would reveal a link with Madeleine.

  Friday’s post brought the answer. One certificate did indeed correspond to Vera’s full name on Madeleine’s birth certificate. There was, however, a major flaw.

  Vera had married after Madeleine had been sent to Australia. I couldn’t understand this. If Vera and Madeleine were mother and daughter, how had they become separated in this way? Why did Madeleine think she was an orphan? And who took her to the other side of the world?

  Suddenly I had more questions than answers.

  I wrote a carefully worded letter to Madeleine, aware that I was going to challenge her recollections. I still couldn’t accept that a four-year-old could have been put on a boat and sent to Australia. Gently I told her that I’d found the marriage certificate of a woman who had the exact name of her own mother.

  Her reply came within a fortnight.

  ‘Look, I was sent to Australia because I was an orphan,’ she wrote. ‘My parents are dead, so how can my mother have married after I left Britain?’

  This threw me into a state of confusion. Her version of events just didn’t appear to add up. There had to be some reasonable explanation – but where? Had I got my facts wrong? Perhaps I’d just found the marriage of a woman who happened to have the same name as Madeleine’s mother?

  I decided to check the registration of deaths for the four years after Madeleine’s birth, to see if somebody with that name had died. I found no trace of Vera.

  By now, it was nearly a month since I’d received the marriage certificate and I was frustrated at feeling so near and yet so far from real progress. I decided to telephone the children’s home near Nottingham which Madeleine remembered leaving to be sent to Australia.

  ‘I’m a social worker, based in Nottingham, and I’m interested in finding out if you have the records of a woman I believe was in your care many years ago. I understand she left your care as a young child and went to Australia in the nineteen forties.’

  ‘Sorry, but we no longer have the records for that period.’

  ‘Perhaps you still have the admissions and discharge registers?’ I persisted.

  ‘No. There are no registers. I don’t remember any children going to Australia.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Listen, unless you have some authority, what business is it of yours?’

  The conversation ended abruptly. It had been like talking to a brick wall.

  Where to now? I knew Madeleine was a Catholic,
so there should be a baptismal record. She’d been born in an area with two or three Catholic churches and I went to see the parish priest. After explaining my search, he understood Madeleine’s need to find out about her mother and helped me look through the baptismal register for the relevant dates.

  Quite quickly we found Madeleine’s name. The dates and addresses were all correct and there was one additional piece of information – the details of her godmother.

  This, I knew, was a very important new link with Madeleine’s past. Her godmother, Kathleen, wherever she might be, had to have seen Madeleine and held her as a child. She also had to have known Vera.

  A week later, I took another day’s leave and another early-morning train to St Catherine’s House. I decided to change tactics and concentrate on finding Kathleen. After checking half a dozen marriage volumes covering two or three years, I found her marriage and cross-checked it against her husband’s surname. Thankfully it was an unusual name with three Christian initials. This increased my chances of finding them.

  Late that afternoon, I visited my local library which had a full set of telephone directories for the UK. I was prepared to look through all 106 of them, but found Kathleen’s husband in the same district in which they’d married. The address was in a mining village near Doncaster but instead of a house it was a pub, The Lion and Unicorn.

  Having found Kathleen, I was moving into a different area altogether. How and when did I approach this woman? Would she remember Madeleine and her mother? Would she know what had happened to them?

  The issue was far too sensitive and personal to discuss on the telephone. I didn’t know if Kathleen and Vera were still friends; or were in contact with each other. Whichever approach I took, I would have to be careful to make it discreet and confidential.

  I waited until the middle of the week when I thought the pub might not be too crowded. Mervyn drove the car and we arrived in the early evening, shortly after seven, having map-read our way through the minor roads of Doncaster.

  The Lion and Unicorn was at the end of a narrow lane and looked to me surprisingly drab and uninviting. We walked into the lounge and could see four men in the saloon bar playing darts. A woman on her own in this local pub would have raised everyone’s eyebrows. Mervyn ordered a pint of bitter for himself and a grapefruit juice for me.

  ‘You need to keep a clear head,’ he said with a smile.

  I was self-conscious about the fact that I was in a pub and not in someone’s house. If Kathleen was here, I would be approaching her in public which is much harder. I might unwittingly embarrass her in front of others.

  As the barmaid brought our drinks, Mervyn glanced at me. We were both thinking the same thing. She was the right age, probably in her late fifties, and spoke in a local accent. She had a very open face and laughed easily with her regulars. I half hoped one of them would call her by name.

  Back behind the bar she joined a well-rounded man who I assumed was the landlord and might well be her husband. They both seemed relaxed in each other’s company and laughed easily together.

  A few minutes later, two middle-aged men walked into the bar and one sang out, ‘Two pints of best bitter please, Kath.’

  Mervyn looked at me and said, ‘I think it’s time for another drink.’

  We moved and found two stools at the bar, waiting for the barmaid to be free. When she turned to us, I leaned closer and explained that I was a social worker. ‘Can I talk to you about something private and personal that happened many years ago? It doesn’t have to be here or now. Any time that suits you.’

  I could see her cheeks flush and anxiety crease her forehead. Her voice was soft, almost conspiratorial. ‘Oh no, not now. I can’t talk now. But, if you wait, my husband will go into the other bar. I’ll come and talk to you then.’

  Merv and I sat near the bar and nursed our drinks. At every opportunity, as she cleared glasses or wiped trays, the barmaid would look across at me with an intensity that made me slightly anxious.

  After almost an hour she joined us. Merv rose and left us alone.

  Kathleen said quietly, ‘I think I know why you’re looking for me.’

  This took me aback. She was only the godmother. How could she possibly know why I’d come?

  ‘You are looking for me, aren’t you?’ she asked.

  My whole rehearsed speech suddenly fell apart. I was expecting to spend a good half an hour explaining why I was trying to locate her friend of forty years ago.

  When I mentioned Vera’s name, Kath immediately said: ‘No, it’s not her, it’s me you’re looking for, isn’t it?’

  She stared at me intensely and finally said, in a voice that was almost a whisper: ‘Are you my daughter?’

  Her face crumpled as I told her, as gently as possible, that I was sorry, but I didn’t know her daughter.

  Kath lit a cigarette and fought to compose herself. Her voice shook as she explained that she and Vera had been good friends a long time ago. ‘It was terrible then, you know, there was no help. It was an awful struggle. People looked down on you if you were an unmarried mother.’

  Kath and Vera had both been single mothers. ‘We wanted to keep our babies but it was just not possible. We did what we thought was best for them. I didn’t see my baby or Vera after that.’

  She faltered, not far from tears. ‘I’ve never been able to tell my husband about my baby. I don’t know what he’d say if he found out now.’

  ‘It’s all right, I understand,’ I reassured her. ‘Your secret is safe.’

  For twenty minutes we talked, Kath smoking one cigarette after the other. She gave me the names of places where she and Vera had stayed together, and just before we parted she brightened a little.

  ‘If you see Vera, tell her to come and see me. She had a lovely baby.’

  It was late when we returned to Nottingham. Mervyn gave our babysitter a lift home and I went upstairs to check the children. They were both sound asleep. I tried to read in bed but could not manage more than a few pages of an uninspiring novel. I was asleep before Mervyn got home.

  The most significant thing Kath had told me was that both their babies had been placed for adoption. Yet I knew in Madeleine’s case this hadn’t happened. It added a new sense of urgency to the search because I kept thinking to myself, Is Vera like Kath? Is she still waiting for her daughter to find her? Does she believe that Madeleine was adopted?

  The next day, I used my lunch-break to check the telephone directories at the Central Library. Using the address from her marriage certificate as my starting point, I began looking for Vera.

  Occasionally my prayers are answered. I discovered Vera’s name, address and number in the very first directory I picked up. She was living in Harrogate. To be certain, I called the nearest library and discovered from the voters list that she was the only adult registered at her address. The telephone directory had been printed only four months ago.

  Although I was getting closer, I felt uneasy. One of the major difficulties was distance. In the past when I’d traced parents, I always involved the adoptees as much as possible in their search. But Madeleine was in Australia. She wasn’t taking this journey with me and I couldn’t tell if she was ready for the news that her mother was still alive.

  A few evenings later, she telephoned me at home.

  ‘I’m coming to England for a holiday,’ she said. ‘Do you think you’ll have some news for me about my family?’

  ‘I hope so,’ I replied, my tone as non-committal as I could manage. ‘I’ve made some progress already.’

  It was a brief conversation, just a few minutes long and it ended with Madeleine promising to keep in touch. As I put the phone down, I thought that she seemed to be a person who didn’t give her trust easily and her voice, full of hesitancy, suggested fragility.

  I looked at the photograph she’d sent me. She was small in stature and quite slim, almost like a little girl in adult’s clothing; and I wondered whether the look in her eyes was sadness or
resignation.

  My professional training told me that I needed to find out more about Madeleine. I needed to know her strengths and weaknesses; her level of self-esteem; whether she had people around her to support her. Was she forgiving or did she harbour resentments?

  Although I had my professional skills and experience to rely on, I felt isolated and exposed. In the past I had approached a birth mother or father on behalf of an adopted son or daughter. This was different from anything I’d done before.

  I didn’t know if Vera had given her baby to people she knew and trusted; or if she realized Madeleine had been sent to Australia.

  My normal practice was to write an informal card, explaining that I was a professional social worker who was looking for a particular person about something that happened many years ago. I would give the child’s birth date but not the full name and invite the person to telephone or write to me.

  I had never just arrived on somebody’s doorstep, but this case was different. If Vera was elderly and living on her own, I wanted to ask her about Madeleine in person.

  It was almost a three-hour drive to Harrogate and I spent the time rehearsing what I’d say. I chose a weekend when I had plenty of time and left early so I could drive through the streets getting a feel for the area. Every piece of information could help.

  I parked a little way from the house and sat for a long time, rehearsing the scene over and over. It was a Victorian house that had seen better days but the neighbourhood seemed friendly. Two children were kicking a white plastic ball on the road.

  An elderly woman came out of the house with a dog, and I watched her disappear down the street and then return. She was in her seventies and moved slowly, obviously unsteady on her feet. I saw her go back into the house.

  This is it, I thought, taking a deep breath as I got out of the car.

  A light was shining through the stained glass of the front door and I heard the dog barking and footsteps in the passage.

  The door swung open and the woman stood there and almost shouted, ‘Yes, what do you want?’ The voice seemed far too loud for such a tiny figure.