Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

  ‘I had to wash and clean for all of them. They had seven children. I got one weekend off in six and worked every day in between. It’s a hard life on a farm, I accept that, but it didn’t have to be cruel.

  ‘They paid me £1.2s.6d. a week and I had to buy clothes and everything out of that. But when I got my first wages I went and bought a little miniature made in England. I never bought anything that was made in Australia if I could help it. It took all my money. It was a tiny little English house.’

  Pamela paused and buried her hands deep in her lap. Tears hung gently in the corners of her eyes.

  ‘How long did you stay on the farm?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not long, really. Something happened and I had to leave.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The farmer had a seventeen-year-old son. He was much bigger than me. I was a thin slip of a girl. One night I left my bedroom to go to the toilet, which was outside, a little way from the house. He met me coming back and pulled me into his room.

  ‘I didn’t know anything about sex but I knew that he was trying to rape me. He was forcing my legs apart and had his hand over my mouth. I just crossed my legs and put my hands between them. I knew that I shouldn’t let him touch me, so I kept my legs crossed.

  ‘He became very angry. He was very strong and kept me in his room for two hours. I was too scared to cry out. I knew I’d get the blame. I kept pleading to him: “Please don’t touch me, don’t hurt me, don’t do anything wrong,” begging him to let me go back to bed.

  ‘The next morning at the breakfast table, his mother said to me, “Where were you last night?” She had looked in my room. “In bed,” I said, but she knew that wasn’t true. “You were not. You were with the shearers, weren’t you?”

  ‘I tried to tell her no. I looked at her son but he smirked and said, “I don’t know how she could do it, how she could go, the trollop.”

  ‘After that he tried to get me whenever he got the chance. I’d go in to make his bed, and he’d sneak in very quietly, come up behind me and pick me up. He’d throw me on the bed, but I was always quicker and crossed my legs. He wasn’t going to have me.

  ‘But I was so scared. He was so strong and I thought he would simply hit me until I couldn’t fight back.’

  Pamela was too scared to tell a priest about the son and his attempts to rape her. She feared that, yet again, somebody would blame her and claim she had tried to seduce him. But after a year of cruelty and frequent attacks she told a girlfriend in Adelaide.

  ‘She told me that I should leave the farm and find a job in the city but I knew it wasn’t that easy. I had no rights. I wasn’t free. I was sixteen years old and like a slave.’

  When Pamela finally talked to the Catholic welfare agency who had placed her on the farm, she was told that she had to stay. She phoned twice more.

  ‘They threatened me with everything. They told me I was ungrateful and couldn’t leave. I was crying and begging. Eventually they gave in and said yes, I could come back to Adelaide.

  ‘We were supposed to consider ourselves very lucky that they had found us a job and a roof over our heads; a home where we could become part of a family. Only, these people didn’t love me, they treated me like dirt, like a slave. They weren’t my family.’

  ‘Do you think you have a family?’ I asked.

  ‘There must be someone,’ she said, imploringly. ‘I must be related to someone, even if it’s an aunt or an uncle. I feel I’m a nobody, a nothing, without any roots at all. I used to lie in my bed on the farm, clutching my miniature English house, and dream of having a proper family. In my whole life, I’ve never called anybody Mother.’

  I spent a long while sitting with Pamela, explaining what I was doing and trying to help her understand that she wasn’t to blame for what happened to her in her childhood. Yet as she began to understand this, her anger grew.

  ‘I still resent the fact that someone could walk into a classroom in England, pluck you out, take you to Australia, with no prospect of ever coming back,’ she said. ‘You do that to animals – you sell them off and cart them away – but not children. You don’t do that to children.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to go back to England; to be there in April when the flowers come up and the leaves return. I remember so little. My childhood was taken away from me …’

  I saw two other people that day. They were sisters, both in their late forties, and one, the older, was very much in charge of her sister.

  They had been sent out to Australia together, and I asked them the same question that I asked everybody: ‘Does anything particular stand out in your mind about your childhood?’

  ‘Yes,’ one of them said. ‘My sister here had all her hair shaved off. She ran away and the nuns dragged her back. It scarred her emotionally. It scarred us all.’

  I had found her: the angel with the blond curly hair. She had never recovered from the ordeal and neither had her older sister, who had witnessed the attack.

  There were not enough hours each day to get the work done. David’s appearances on television and radio had triggered another astonishing response. Our diary was overflowing and we had to catch a flight to Sydney on Thursday. It was inevitable that we couldn’t see everybody and I promised many that I’d come back later.

  On the day we left Adelaide I had ten meetings with child migrants and a magazine interview, while David answered thirty-nine telephone calls and did three radio interviews. As we closed the office door and dashed for the airport, the telephone was still ringing.

  13

  Although I was concerned at having to by-pass Melbourne, there was still much to do in Sydney. The Observer articles had been reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald and had generated many letters.

  We stayed the first night in an inner-city hotel and the next morning David visited Sydney’s Community Services. They offered us accommodation in an old reform school that had been turned into a training centre for social workers. The office and accommodation were under one roof and close to public transport.

  One of the letters I had received was from Eric Baldwin, who arrived in Australia in 1939, at the age of eleven.

  I had sent Eric a reply and he wrote another short note that arrived in Nottingham after I’d left for Australia.

  ‘You might be unaware that over the weekend of the 26–27 March, the Old Fairbridgians and their friends will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. We would very much appreciate your presence there at that time, both for your own advantage in the pursuit of your worthy task, and to give some of us the opportunity to personally thank you for your efforts on our behalf.’

  I remember sighing when Merv read this to me over the telephone. The thought that I would be a welcomed guest at a Fairbridge fiftieth reunion made me both smile and shudder. I doubted if Eric had any idea what he was doing.

  My involvement with the Fairbridge Society had been very limited, but I could recite by rote exactly what Stephen Carden, their UK Chairman, had written in the Observer in response to the first articles about the child migrants.

  ‘If an advertisement of the kind shown in the article is put in a Sydney newspaper by a social worker responses are likely to be mainly from malcontents …’

  I knew that the reunion would be an emotional time for the Old Fairbridgians and I felt that my presence might be unnecessarily provocative. I’d made up my mind by the time we reached Sydney.

  ‘I’m not going,’ I told David. ‘What purpose would it serve? I’d only antagonize the Fairbridge Society. This is supposed to be a celebration. I can’t go.’

  David disagreed. ‘There are people there who need our help. They need the Trust. This is a wonderful chance to meet a large group of migrants. They are scattered across different states but are coming together for this weekend. And anyway, you’ve been invited. It’s not as if you’re gate-crashing.’

  ‘But I feel that I’m not really welcome.’

  Finally David convinced me, but not before
I’d called George Wilkins in Melbourne.

  ‘Eric Baldwin has invited me to the fiftieth reunion of the Fairbridge Society,’ I said, ‘Do you ever go to these things?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Oh God!’ I said, ‘Then I won’t have any friends there at all.’

  ‘No worries, Margaret,’ George said at once. ‘I’ll be there. We’ll drive up and meet you in Orange. I’ll book you into a hotel.’

  In the months since the Trust was founded, Mervyn had been spending his spare time researching the child migration schemes for his doctorate thesis. He’d unearthed quite a bit about Kingsley Fairbridge, the founder of the Fairbridge Society. A Rhodes scholar, Fairbridge had a dream of sending the poor and deprived slum children of Britain to the rural idyll of Australia, Canada and Rhodesia.

  He was the ultimate empire builder who wanted to populate all corners of the Commonwealth with good, white British stock.

  In Australia, the society had established ‘farm schools’, one in Pinjarra, Western Australia, in 1912, and the other at Molong, near Orange, New South Wales (NSW), in 1938.

  Orange is a quiet rural town west of Sydney. David hired a car and we drove six hours to get there on Saturday afternoon.

  As a courtesy, I informed the Community Services Department of NSW that we were going to attend the reunion, because I knew it was a sensitive issue. They, too, decided to send somebody along to ‘monitor’ events. Child migration had obviously created more waves than I expected, especially in NSW.

  The reunion involved a weekend of events including golf, tennis and a ‘Nostalgic Tour’ by bus to the farm school and local landmarks. The Reunion Dinner was in the auditorium of the Orange Ex-Services Club. Drinks at 7.00, dinner at 8.00 and dancing until 2.00 a.m.

  I had hardly got inside the main reception area when a woman came rushing up.

  ‘Are you the terrible woman who wrote all those things?’ she said. ‘You are! You are! Well, you aren’t coming in here. We’re not having journalists in here. No, no, no!’

  A man standing near by, hearing the fuss, leaned over and said, ‘It might have happened to Catholic migrants, but not to us. We’re Fairbridgians!’

  Others began to take an unhealthy interest in the proceedings and I started to feel uncomfortable. I was standing there trying to smile and wondering what to say, when George steered me into the auditorium.

  Among the guests of honour was Miss Judy Hutchinson from the Fairbridge Society in England who had flown to Australia to be at the reunion. She was dressed formally and, by comparison, I felt under-dressed. My fairly plain navy blue silk dress had been in a suitcase for a fortnight and even without the creases wouldn’t have been my first choice for such an occasion.

  Miss Hutchinson was inside the door and approached me as George and I entered. She shook my hand. ‘Now, dear, we must have a little word. You must realize that everything that was in those Observer articles was untrue and you must acknowledge now, before you go any further, that it was all untrue.

  ‘You’re going to see this evening what happy people they are. If you’d been on the bus this afternoon you would have seen their faces. They are so grateful for the opportunities offered and the farm holds such fond memories for them.’

  Miss Hutchinson seemed to be almost imploring me to agree with her. I told her, very directly, ‘That’s not right. I can’t agree with you.’

  ‘But you must, you must …’ she said, growing flustered.

  ‘I am sorry, but I can’t,’ I said adamantly, quite prepared to walk out then and go back to Sydney.

  David sensed the tension and intervened. ‘This isn’t the time or the place to talk about this. What we should do is put some time aside for the three of us to talk together. Miss Hutchinson, I don’t think you’re aware of some of the things child migrants have suffered.’

  David changed the subject and began asking about her flight and if she was enjoying her stay in Australia.

  I was surprised by how many people were in the auditorium. From what George had told me, the farm school at Molong had taken about 330 children over the twenty-five years from 1938. It seemed that a large percentage had come to the reunion.

  George and his wife had organized a table for us and I was relieved to sit down. There were two bottles of champagne on the table. He set one of them in front of me and whispered, ‘It’s really water: you can’t afford to take a drink.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I smiled, ‘but I’d love a gin and tonic.’

  Tables were arranged around the room, some seating more than others, but at the end of the auditorium was a top table with a Union Jack hanging from the front. Miss Hutchinson was sitting near the President of the Old Fairbridgians, Dennis Silver, who was master of ceremonies for the evening. Dignitaries from the Australian Fairbridge Foundation were also at the table.

  Before the meal was served, Dennis Silver stood up and said, ‘We’ve got some very honoured guests here this evening,’ and went through a roll call.

  ‘We’re also very pleased to have with us this evening Margaret Humphreys, a director of the Child Migrants Trust, and David Spicer, a trustee. I wonder if they would care to stand up?’

  In a stroke, we were identified to everyone in the room.

  Dennis Silver then asked those assembled to rise and sing ‘God Save the Queen’, followed by the Fairbridge song, ‘Follow the Founder’ …

  We are Fairbridge folk, all as good as e’er,

  English, Welsh and Scottish, we have come from

  everywhere;

  Boys to be farmers and girls for farmers’ wives,

  We follow Fairbridge, the Founder.

  As I listened to the words and looked around me, I could see that there was tremendous joy and pride on their faces, but beneath it I could almost touch the pain and denial in some of these people.

  Our table was quiet during dinner. We swapped small talk and didn’t comment on what was happening around us. I found it difficult to eat.

  After the main course arrived, I saw a woman get up from a neighbouring table and walk towards me.

  ‘Are you the Margaret Humphreys?’ she snapped, full of anger.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look at this then,’ she said, slamming the palm of her hand on the table so the plates jumped. Beneath her hand was a photograph. ‘You want to look at this. This man is a professor and he’s an Old Fairbridgian. Look at how well we’ve done for ourselves. Why didn’t you write about him?’

  ‘I haven’t written about anybody,’ I explained, trying to be as gentle as possible.

  ‘Yes, you have.’

  I wasn’t going to argue. She had a right to her view. When she left, all of us just looked at each other.

  We carried on eating and when the meal was nearly over, Miss Hutchinson was asked to deliver a congratulatory address on behalf of the Fairbridge Society in London.

  ‘It’s so wonderful to be invited here and to see so many happy faces on this special occasion. I have a surprise – a gift from the London office to mark your fiftieth anniversary. When Kingsley Fairbridge first …’

  I wasn’t listening any more. It’s the files! I thought. She’s brought them their files. I knew what that would mean. Ever since these children were sent abroad, Fairbridge had kept a file on each of them. Each had his or her past locked in a filing cabinet 12,000 miles away.

  Surely she must have brought the files, I thought. What else could it be?

  Finally, as Miss Hutchinson finished her speech, she said, ‘Yes, I’ve brought some photographs. We’ll put them up on the walls and when we’ve finished eating, we can all go and have a look at them. I think you’ll find there will be some wonderful surprises. They are photographs of all of you as children. I’m sure your families will want to look at them too.’

  We stayed at the table and later, as the plates were cleared and the band set up their instruments, I noticed people starting to get up and gather around the rear of the auditorium. I heard whis
pering at first, which grew louder.

  David went to investigate.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked him, sensing his disquiet.

  ‘People are crying,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing. They’re looking at themselves as children and breaking down.’

  I suddenly realized what was wrong. Many of these people had never seen themselves as children. They were gazing at small black-and-white images of youngsters gathered on the docks and on railway platforms in England. There were other pictures of them on the farm, sitting on the steps or in the shade of trees. This was part of their past and for the last five decades it had been locked away.

  Fairbridge’s gesture appeared to be backfiring.

  I had no way of knowing why Fairbridge had decided to open its archives and show the photographs. Perhaps it was always planned as a nice gesture on the fiftieth anniversary; or was triggered, at least in part, by the Observer articles.

  ‘I think you’d better go over there,’ said David.

  The photographs were pinned to a wall. Men and women were leaning close, pointing out faces to their wives, husbands and children.

  ‘Look. Look. This is me,’ they exclaimed, voices choked with emotion.

  To anybody else they were just ordinary snapshots, but to some of these people, the photographs represented a rare and precious link with the past. They wanted copies, but Miss Hutchinson told them that she didn’t have the negatives.

  Men and women began coming over to me. Others approached David. We were surrounded by people asking us about the Child Migrants Trust and what it did. For the next hour we answered their questions.

  Many wanted to meet me privately and David reassured them that I wasn’t rushing straight back to Sydney and would join them the following day at the reunion barbecue.

  Next morning, I interviewed several migrants at our hotel before returning to the reunion. By the time we arrived at the barbecue the tables were set up and hot-plates were being stoked with wood.

  It was a picturesque setting, in a large field surrounded by pine trees.