Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

  ‘This could all become very embarrassing,’ said Sir Humphrey. ‘If there is a big fuss you won’t be doing these people any favours. Most of them are very happy here. They’ve done very well for themselves.’

  The inference I drew was that Sir Humphrey was asking me to be careful. Perhaps he was worried that the new regime in Zimbabwe would learn that white children had once been brought to Rhodesia and educated in the hope that they would help sustain white rule.

  Sir Humphrey kindly drove me back to the hotel and told me about the difficulties of being a white in Zimbabwe. Warning me not to walk in certain areas of the city, he shook my hand and said, ‘Times have changed.’

  I thought I understood what he meant. Times had changed for people like Sir Humphrey and the whites of Zimbabwe. But they had changed for everyone.

  Walking back from the bank at midday the following day, I was attacked in the main street. A thief snatched at my bag, but the strap was crossed over my shoulder and unless he cut it, there was no way he could get it from me. I was determined not to let go. It contained all my interview notes, which were more important than any amount of money.

  My attacker grew more and more desperate as I fought back, and he kicked me to the ground. I was lying in the gutter and he kept kicking me in the back, almost rolling me along the street with each blow. I kept trying to stand up but couldn’t.

  Eventually, I think he realized he would have to kill me to get the bag, and decided to run. I slowly stood up, bruised and bleeding. My lip was split and my knuckles grazed. I looked around. The street was crowded with Europeans, but not a single person helped me in any way.

  I staggered back to the hotel, aching all over but feeling incredibly calm. It wasn’t until I reached the sanctuary of my room that I collapsed.

  Joy thought I should go to hospital but I declined. Merv wanted me to get on the first plane home. I was bruised but OK. The shock was the worst thing, but it didn’t seem to be a political or racist attack. A thief simply wanted my money and thieves are the same the world over.

  I didn’t leave my room again without somebody with me. The next day, the pain was worse but bearable. I wanted to discover more about Sir Humphrey’s belief that children had been sent abroad with their parents’ permission. As I reread the letters from Zimbabwean migrants who wanted to see me, I noticed that they used surprisingly different language than I had expected.

  ‘I was privileged to be selected as one of the first eighteen underprivileged children to be sent to the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College in 1946 …’ one wrote. ‘The selection process was most rigid and only those of a higher IQ were selected.’

  I finally met Tom, an engineer for a mining company, at his home in Harare. It was a beautiful house with large gardens enclosed behind high walls. The guard dogs were locked up for my arrival.

  We sat in the living-room and I began by asking him what he could remember about England, and how he had arrived in Rhodesia.

  He was raised by his grandparents in the East End of London. ‘We were living in a Victorian terrace house and were poor, poor as church mice. I was a boy scout with the local troop, and it was the scout master who told me about the Fairbridge scheme. I asked him how to apply.’

  ‘How old were you?’ I asked.

  ‘I was ten.’

  ‘Why did you want to leave England?’

  ‘I was happy but I could be a real naughty little bugger, playing in the streets. I was forever standing outside the pub asking for packets of crisps. I used to get into strife.

  ‘I jumped at the chance to go to Rhodesia and was most persistent. My grandparents signed the form. My grandfather took me up for the medical and the IQ tests. I think they encouraged me.

  ‘It was like a great adventure, I’d never even ridden in a motor car; but I know I wasn’t aware of the implications. I remember wearing grey short trousers and a hat with ‘F’ for Fairbridge on it. I was in a group of eighteen, aged from seven to fourteen. We left Southampton dock on board the Caernarvon Castle which was still rigged out as a troop ship. We had a splendid sea voyage and then a three-day train journey.’

  ‘What was your first reaction when you arrived?’ I asked.

  ‘It was summer and I really fell in love with the place. I had a cockney accent and several of the others were Scots, so we had difficulty making ourselves understood. My grandparents used to write to me and I replied up until they died in the Fifties.’

  As Tom spoke and referred to his childhood in such glowing terms, I was struck by how different his experience was to those of the migrants in Australia. Then I realized that to him, going to Rhodesia had been a little like being sent away to boarding-school. He had maintained contact with his family and, more importantly, had had a part in the decision to leave his country and his family.

  So far, none of the child migrants that I’d met in Australia had been given a choice. The decision had been made for them.

  Tom continued. ‘After I left the college, my first job was on a farm and then I followed my own career. Scholarships were very scarce. I think initially it was envisaged that most of us would become farmers but only a few ended up going onto the land.

  ‘There would have been no future for me in post-war Britain. I hate to think what would have happened to me when my grandparents died.

  ‘Needless to say I’ve never set foot in England since my departure.’

  For all Tom’s pride and sense of achievement, as I looked around at his lovely house, I sensed that he was trying to justify his life. There was a need inside him and eventually he asked me if I could help him find any surviving relatives in London.

  Over the next ten days, I met other migrants who presented a similar picture of how they had arrived in Rhodesia. There were no stories of sexual abuse or brutality here. Nevertheless, they had lost a part of their lives and wanted it back.

  Among them was a man who recalled living with an aunt and uncle in England until he was nine years old. ‘One day my uncle said to me. “How would you like to go to Rhodesia? At least if you arrange a picnic there it won’t rain.”

  ‘I was cross at the time so I said yes. Many years later when I looked at my own son who was nine I couldn’t believe my decision.’

  Another spoke to Joy and told her how he and his brother had been living in a children’s home when their father applied to the Fairbridge scheme because he wanted to give his sons a better start in life.

  ‘There were some children who came with us who were very homesick and had problems. But children of that age are very resilient and are not going to be upset for very long.

  ‘With hindsight, I think they were probably sending us out here to be part of the élite. We were brought up like any other ordinary kids, but the schooling was strictly for white children.’

  His description of leaving school and getting married indicated how much control Fairbridge had over his life. When he failed at his first job he returned to the college and slept in a building nicknamed ‘Rejects Cottage’. There was a particular table in the dining-room where such boys had to eat.

  And he described turning twenty-one, when he was handed his birth certificate and documentation by Fairbridge. He called it a ‘big stage in my life’.

  Rhodesia must have looked beautiful in the brochures – and long after my visit, I still had an image of fine, sunny weather and bright flowers against a very clear blue sky. But I couldn’t help thinking what a contrast it must have been for those from the inner cities of Liverpool or London.

  Among the last migrants that Joy and I visited was a lawyer who also recounted how he’d been given an IQ test before leaving England. He had been told that he was privileged to be sent to Rhodesia. My impression was that he still felt that he was one of the chosen few.

  He lived in a huge house in an attractive suburb of Harare and was concerned and embarrassed about my mugging. He told me how terrible it was that everything had changed; but he couldn’t leave Zimbabwe now witho
ut sacrificing his wealth. He would have to leave the house, the cars, his job, everything.

  I said to him, ‘Go. Get out. Leave with what you stand up in then.’

  But of course he wouldn’t.

  He shook his head and said, ‘I love this country. I couldn’t live anywhere else.’

  I spent all day with him and his wife, and Joy joined us for supper. I didn’t expect anything formal but was again given an insight into how these people lived. We sat in the dining-room being served by Charles the waiter, dressed all in black and white.

  I didn’t know how to deal with this. When the third course arrived, I asked the lawyer where Charles lived.

  ‘He lives at the end of the garden.’

  ‘And is he married?’

  ‘Oh yes – and he’s got children.’

  ‘Does his wife live here?’

  ‘No, we let him go and see her once a year.’

  These people were right. Their lives would have been very different if they’d stayed in England. For the most part they were not orphans or abandoned children; their families had actually agreed to their passage. The children had also played a role in the decision. They were destined to become leaders and to keep the Union Jack flying high over Rhodesia.

  But though their experiences were very different from the Australian migrants, many needed to deal with their unresolved pasts.

  16

  When I arrived back in England, I was still badly bruised from the attack in Harare and wondered if I’d damaged my liver or kidneys. I went to my doctor in Nottingham who said I should consider myself lucky.

  Yvonne and I worked frantically to trace families, aware that within a month I had to leave again to visit Canada, where our list of names was certain to grow even longer. There would be no holidays, or even relaxing weekends off for the foreseeable future.

  Joy Melville had gone directly to South Africa from Zimbabwe to interview child migrants who had moved there after growing up in Rhodesia. She telephoned me on her return to Britain and told me about her research.

  Among the people she’d found was Mrs Robinson, the wife of the longest serving headmaster at the Fairbridge College in Rhodesia.

  ‘Margaret, I asked her about the files because I know it’s important for you,’ Joy said. ‘The news isn’t good. Mrs Robinson said her husband had been told by the committee in London to destroy all the records when the school closed.’

  I couldn’t answer. Totally astonished, I wondered why anybody would do such a thing. It was just another inexplicable incident.

  What would Canada hold? I knew little about it save for having read one or two novels by Margaret Atwood and having watched several Canadian films. Its fashion and food were a mystery to me.

  Joy Melville joined me on the flight to Toronto on Saturday 18 June. By the time our taxi pulled up outside the hotel I was exhausted. I was surprised to see armed policemen on the rooftops and helicopters buzzing overhead.

  ‘Security sure is tight,’ the taxi-driver explained. ‘There’s somebody very important in town.’

  As I stepped on to the pavement a small crowd near the hotel became quite animated. Someone shouted, ‘It’s Margaret! She’s here, she’s arrived!’

  Joy shot me a disbelieving glance. I raised an eyebrow back at her, but I was so tired by now that anything would have made sense. As I gripped my suitcase and staggered towards the hotel doors I realized that the eyes of the crowd were not on my taxi but on another vehicle, a long limousine, that had pulled up outside a hotel near by.

  I watched as Margaret Thatcher climbed out and waved to the crowd. Minutes later Ronald Reagan, the American President, arrived. I’d quite forgotten that Toronto was hosting the World Economic Summit.

  It was quite ironic that Mrs Thatcher should be in town. I was in Canada to investigate what was fast becoming a terrible blight on Britain’s history and one which successive governments ought to have known about.

  I knew from Merv’s research that Canada had accepted more British child migrants than any other country. From 1880 to the Great Depression 100,000 were shipped across the Atlantic by a variety of charities and agencies. Over a quarter of this total had been sent by Barnardo’s.

  Instead of being cared for in institutions, these children were put in distribution centres where they were allotted to farmers and householders – boys worked on the land and girls were trained as domestic servants.

  Very few children were emigrated to Canada after 1930 – hence most of the surviving child migrants were well beyond retirement age. They were also spread over a wide area.

  Before I arrived, advertisements were published in the major Canadian newspapers and these brought an amazing response. I spent until midnight on the first night, telephoning migrants and arranging to see them. Because they lived so far apart, I had to start immediately. So the next day I took a train from Toronto to London, Ontario, to see a lady who was in a nursing home.

  It was a three-mile walk from the station and we arrived in time for a late afternoon tea. It was a far better welcome than this particular child migrant had received when she arrived as a child.

  Florence Aulph was eighty-seven years old and had arrived in Canada in 1913 when she was twelve and a half.

  I sat on a chair beside her bed and poured the tea as Florence told me that she was one of seven children from a mining family in Newcastle, and had been born with a deformed leg. When she was four years old she remembers being picked up by her mother and taken to a place called ‘Babies Castle’, a Dr Barnardo’s home for children with physical handicaps.

  ‘She told me that if I was a good girl they would straighten out my leg and I’d be able to walk proper. I never saw her again.’

  When her father died of TB, Florence was sent to Canada. She wasn’t asked if she wanted to go. The boat docked at Quebec and she was taken to a children’s home at Peterborough with hundreds of other boys and girls.

  ‘They had our names all down in a book and they would take a couple of us into the room at a time and ask us, “Where would you like to live, in the city or out on a farm?” And stupid me said, “On a farm.”’

  She was taken to a foster home and went to school for a year. But the British children were treated differently from the local children. They were considered to be second-class citizens.

  ‘You don’t know what that does to you,’ Florence said. ‘I have never got over it; even now.’

  Later, Florence worked as a nanny and housemaid with a nice family, but after three years she was moved to a town called Fergus. Her new boss was a brutal man who beat her regularly and paid her only a few dollars a month. She was given the family’s discarded clothes which she would mend and sew together at night.

  Finally, thanks to a friend who had been on the same boat to Canada, Florence escaped to the city and found a good job as a housemaid for a woman who treated her kindly and bought her new clothes. She had a day off every week and could go to the cinema.

  At the age of twenty-two she married but her life got no easier. Her husband was very poor and they worked their hearts out to get by, keeping chickens and packing eggs every day. She raised three children and remembers the hardship with fondness because their small wood cabin was full of love.

  ‘My mother wasn’t educated and couldn’t write but I kept in contact with my family in England until she died. I just have one sister left and she’s been to Canada to visit me. We weren’t sisters, we were strangers. There was no feeling of family or kinship, there couldn’t be.’

  I spent the following day at the University of Toronto researching the background to child migration. There were very few details but what I found was horrifying. I stumbled upon a newspaper report from the Evening Telegraph in St John’s Newfoundland on 10 January 1924.

  ‘Farmer Censured,’ was the headline. ‘Harsh and Cowardly Treatment of Immigrant Boy.’

  Holding that there was no legal responsibility to provide medical attendance and care, Judge
Maclean, sitting at Moosomin Assizes, Manitoba, Canada, acquitted George Ford, a farmer of Broadview, who was charged with the manslaughter of a British immigrant boy named John Bayns. In ordering Ford’s discharge, his lordship severely censured him for his harsh and cowardly treatment. The case excited great interest and feeling, and more so because of recent criticisms of the immigration system as affecting the placing of lads from the home country. Bayns was alleged to have been neglected and ill-treated, and to have received no medical attendance when suffering from the double pneumonia which was the cause of his death.

  Joy and I took an early flight to Ottawa and arrived shaking after a mid-air emergency threw the plane into a steep dive. Passengers screamed and coffee cups were hurled into the air as the jet dropped like a stone.

  Mercifully, the plane levelled out, but for those few seconds I thought my worst nightmare – being in a serious accident away from my family – had come true.

  Joy and I had an appointment to see a former child migrant who was now a proud grandparent. He very much wanted to tell us his story of being sent to Canada as a fourteen-year-old. He felt a considerable degree of satisfaction in having overcome a range of hardships and obstacles, especially his lack of formal education.

  ‘There was hardly any furniture, just bare boards and benches,’ he said. ‘No tables. We ate outside in the woodshed. We were there until they found a place for us. The younger ones were snatched up within a day or two. Up to fourteen, you see, employers didn’t have to pay wages. They went to school but they had to work for their keep. Any of us over fourteen did not go to school. I remember us sitting and crying after the little ones left. Even us bigger lads were very homesick.’

  The luck of the draw of the migrants’ arrival and placement was echoed by another man who described being put on a train alone and unsure of his destination. The conductor was to tell him where to get off. Confused, scared and homesick, he watched station after station pass, not knowing what the future held.