Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

  It had been four years since we began the search for Harold’s and Marie’s mother. Four of the most complicated and painful years of Harold’s life. During this time he’d become a virtual founder member of the Trust, spending long periods in England, watching our workload increase and many other migrant children successfully reunited with their families.

  Each time another migrant heard the good or bad news, Harold became more disconsolate. He wondered if it would ever happen to him.

  I sat down with him, trying hard to sound confident, and we talked about the early days and what we’d been through together. He said to me, ‘You taught me how to live. You showed me how to relate to people. Before I met you, I just lived in despair. There was no time sequence to my life. Nothing concrete. There’s not even a piece of paper to say I arrived in Australia – I’m not even on the shipping list of the boat that took me.’

  Since the break-up of his marriage, Harold had drifted away from his three children. They didn’t know he was a child migrant. His daughters, both in their twenties, saw him on a television chat show with me and one of them rang me up and said, ‘That was my dad. My dad was on telly with you.’ She was shocked.

  I had to spend a lot of time helping Harold understand that he was important to his children. Even though he realized he’d abandoned them, he had to face up to his own hurt before he could begin to understand how they felt.

  After so many blind alleys and wasted months, St Catherine, the patron saint of all child migrants, finally yielded a first marriage for Harold’s mother.

  We waited three days for the certificate, although I don’t know how Harold contained himself.

  There were two daughters from that marriage, both born in Oldham, near Manchester. Neither of them was Marie.

  Harold and Marie had two half-sisters, and I hoped that if we could find them, they’d know the answers to our questions.

  Elizabeth’s husband had died, but I found an address for the house they had shared in Oldham. That weekend, Harold and I decided to drive to Manchester to have a look. Bricks and mortar are a poor substitute to finding a mother, but at least they provide something tangible.

  When we got into Oldham, Harold had the map across his knees, directing me. I remember driving up to an intersection and saying, ‘This is the road, Harold! This is the road!’

  And he said to me, ‘Don’t get excited.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You see where the road goes straight over, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s where my mother’s house used to be.’

  I don’t know how Harold held himself together. This was the umpteenth time we’d set out full of hope and found only disappointment. Harold had a look of total desolation as he stared at the four lanes of Tarmac and concrete. I wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all. I parked the car at the side of the road.

  ‘Right! You sit here,’ I told Harold. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but just sit here.’

  And I began knocking on every door in the road while Harold sat in the car or paced up and down the gutter. Northerners are very welcoming and over the next four hours many people said, ‘Oh yes, come in, come on in, dear. How can we help?’

  Eventually I found an elderly lady who vaguely remembered the family. She was sure that one of the two girls was called Barbara and still lived somewhere in the area but couldn’t say where. I didn’t find her that day but each time I returned, Harold would wait in the car, while I went from door to door. It probably seemed insane but I was prepared to check every house in Oldham.

  Finally, in January 1990, I found Barbara living in a bungalow not far from where she’d grown up. After writing her a letter, she agreed to meet with me and listened, wide-eyed as I told her she had a half-brother and half-sister.

  Sadly she knew as little about her mother as Harold and Marie. Barbara had been brought up by her father and had been absolutely devoted to him, so much so that she had never once considered searching for her missing mother. She didn’t even have a photograph of her.

  Harold’s other half-sister – his mother’s first child – had emigrated to South Africa. I started searching for her, hoping she might know where her mother had gone. I was prepared to fly to Johannesburg, if necessary, when I discovered that she’d died two years earlier.

  Again, after so much hard work and heartache, Harold and Marie were no closer to finding their mother.

  It was time to make some new assumptions. I suddenly wondered if Elizabeth Ellen Johnson had married again. Maybe that was why I couldn’t find any trace of her.

  I guessed correctly, although immediately wished I hadn’t. She did marry again – much later. She wed a curate’s son, Lionel Maulever Worsop Smith, on 21 June 1948, in Brighton. Geographically, at least, I was back where I started, only five minutes from where Harold had been taken into care as a small boy.

  Elizabeth had married a ‘Smith’ – the worst surname of all from my point of view. She had suddenly disappeared within the biggest genealogical family in Britain.

  The marriage certificate had an address, a block of flats in Worthing, so I began checking the electoral rolls all over again, trying to find somebody who might remember her. The owner of the flats was in London and suggested I contact a woman who had lived in the block for about thirty years.

  At first she couldn’t remember a thing about Lionel Smith or his new wife, but when pressed further she said, ‘I wonder if it’s the man that died? There was a man who died on his own.’

  I began searching for the death certificate and discovered that the dead man was indeed a curate’s son.

  Someone must have been responsible for sorting out his estate and the local council would have a record. Perhaps his personal effects had been kept in storage? Again, it was a blind alley.

  Then came the saddest cut – and one that I had feared from the very beginning. While trying to find members of Lionel’s family who might have known Harold’s mother, I stumbled across a death certificate for Elizabeth Ellen Smith. She died in Worthing in 1973.

  There would be no tearful reunion on a doorstep, or hugs at an airport, or long walks of discovery. Harold’s and Marie’s mother was dead. This is what I fear for all child migrants when I begin a search, and it’s their fear as well. It was still, however, essential to find out what had happened to her.

  I rang every funeral director in Worthing and Brighton, trying to discover who might have buried her. Eventually I found the right one and asked, ‘Who arranged the funeral? Was it a relative? Was it a lawyer?’

  After a string of questions that they couldn’t answer, I said, ‘Surely you must know who paid the bill?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ I was told.

  ‘Who’s in charge?’ I asked.

  ‘The boss is on holiday.’

  ‘Where is he on holiday? Please, can you get your boss on the phone? I need to talk to him. We either do this on the phone or I’ll be down tomorrow morning.’

  Fifteen minutes later, I was put through to the funeral director at his home. He told me the burial was paid for by two spinsters who lived in a large house in Worthing. He gave me their names but there was no listing in the phone book and, the next day, the electoral roll showed they no longer lived at that address.

  They were both elderly and I feared they may have died in the interim. If they were still alive, I had to find them quickly.

  I found the name of the new owners of the house they’d owned in Worthing but not their telephone number.

  ‘Ex-directory!’ said the operator. I should have guessed it. Taking a deep breath, I wrote a letter asking the occupant to please, please ring me, hoping he could sense the urgency and would not dismiss me as a crank. Two nights later, the telephone rang at home.

  ‘You sent me a letter – what can I do for you?’ he asked.

  ‘Did you buy the house from Miss Marjorie and Miss Grace Stephens?’

  ‘Yes.’


  ‘And do you know where they are now?’

  ‘Marjorie died and I bought it off her sister.’

  ‘Oh, and where’s her sister?’

  ‘In a home for the elderly. She’s quite sick. I don’t know where it is precisely.’

  I was being incredibly polite, but inside I was screaming questions. Where is this home? Give me all the names, for God’s sake!

  This man, a wonderful person, thought I was absolutely mad, but still agreed to help. He told me to hold fire while he went round the neighbours asking for more information. He rang back and gave me the name of the nursing home.

  ‘Is she still alive?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But promise me one thing: one day will you tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said, hanging up.

  I called the home and spoke to the matron.

  ‘Do you have a Miss Grace Stephens staying there?’

  ‘Yes. Are you a relative?’

  ‘No! I’m a social worker. Can I come and see her?’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid she is on medication right now and she doesn’t take visitors.’

  ‘I’ll be there on Monday,’ I told her. ‘I’ll explain to you when I get there.’

  It meant catching another early-morning train from Nottingham. I changed trains in London and arrived at the nursing home shortly before midday.

  Grace sat opposite me, pleased to have a visitor but looking slightly bemused.

  I said, ‘Did you know Elizabeth Smith?’

  ‘Yes, dear. She was a lovely lady. I knew her for a long while.’

  ‘Did you pay the bill for her funeral?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please tell me how you knew her?’

  ‘She married my nephew who was a real no-gooder. A terrible, terrible man. We managed, my sister and I, to get Betty away from him and helped her live independently in a flat. We felt sorry for her.’

  ‘What was she like?’ I asked.

  ‘She was a quiet lady, who kept to herself. I think there was something in her past that made her very, very sad.’

  ‘Did she have any children?’

  ‘I remember she talked about having a little boy.’

  ‘And what happened to her boy?’

  ‘She said he died when he was ten.’

  ‘Did you ever see the boy?’

  ‘No. We didn’t know her then. That’s all she said about him. He was a little boy who died when he was ten.’

  By now, Harold was back in Australia. I’d always told him that whenever I found his mother, whether she was alive or dead, I would never write or telephone. I would come to see him.

  On my next planned visit to Australia I arranged to meet him in the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne. Because of what I had to say, I chose a room with a nice view and filled it with flowers; white carnations and pink roses. I knew Harold would remember every detail of that day as if he were painting it on one of his canvases.

  I’d always prepared Harold for the possibility of such a sad outcome. But I also knew that he lived in hope. I guess he realized what I was going to say. He admired the view of the city but he was preoccupied.

  It was not just about revealing that his mother had died; it was telling him that there was no hope. The search that had dominated his life for forty years was over and there was nothing more he, or I, or anybody could do.

  I could see tears welling up in his eyes, each of them brushed aside by his shirt sleeve. He didn’t know what to do with himself.

  I wanted to tell the story from the beginning; I wanted to tell Harold about Elizabeth Ellen Johnson, who died a lonely, heartbroken lady, without her children. But I knew he wouldn’t last. I said to him, ‘Harold this is the day that we all dreaded, I’m afraid.’

  He looked up at me through the tears. ‘Have you found my mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered.

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ he muttered.

  ‘Yes, she is.’

  I could say no more. In a breath all hope had gone. There was no more searching; no more clutching at straws; no more turning it over and over again in my mind, trying to find the answers.

  Harold had always said that there are two levels at which people search. On the one hand he talked of searching all his life for his mother, but on the other he also knew the ‘practicalities’ that prevent people looking when they live 12,000 miles away.

  There are so many imponderables left by such a search. They are the legacy of the child migration schemes and the policy which sent children to the other side of the world, away from their families. Years of heartbreak and years of yearning for mothers, fathers and children. And to what end?

  Harold asked me whether I’d been to see his mother’s grave. ‘That’s a journey you have to make,’ I told him.

  He flew to England and I drove him to the train station.

  ‘I felt bloody sad,’ he said later. ‘I had desperately wanted her to be alive, after all those years of wishing for her and being told that I was an orphan. The longer I sat by her grave, the more confused and angry I became. I was illegally sent from my country and, like thousands of others, was the victim of a cruel conspiracy of silence and deceit, but I did feel some peace – the peace of mind that at fifty-two years of age, I finally knew where my mother was.’

  He didn’t have a photograph. He’d give anything for that. But the urgency was over.

  When the Trust opened its office in Nottingham, we had had a giant cake decorated with all the flags of the countries where child migrants had been sent. It was quite symbolic and I had cut it in pieces and sent a slice to Harold.

  He kept his piece and when he came to England to visit his mother’s grave, he brought it with him and buried it in a box beside her.

  23

  Nearly four years after the Trust had started we had several thousand clients and a workload massively beyond all our expectations. We had reunited over a hundred families.

  Yet it was only with the help of my anonymous benefactor that we were able to move out of my home in West Bridgford to suitable offices near by – somewhere that child migrants would feel belonged to them.

  My attempts to get official funding had also started to show results, but it was never sufficient to carry out the work quickly enough. Those who held the purse strings didn’t seem to understand that we were racing against time to reunite families before elderly mothers and fathers died.

  In April 1990, after several meetings and countless letters to the Department of Health, the Child Migrants Trust was awarded a one-year, £20,000 grant. We had applied for funding over three years, needing £111,000 in the first year and £92,000 in each subsequent year.

  The news from Australia had been more positive. Early in the New Year, I was surprised to receive a telephone call from the Federal Government’s Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, in Canberra. A senior civil servant in Minister Robert Ray’s office introduced himself and said simply, ‘What can we do to help?’

  This was the first time that anyone had approached me from any government. I didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘We need an office and a qualified social worker.’

  Without hesitating, he said, ‘I’ll see what we can do.’

  Within days he rang again and told me to submit an application for a grant; approval would be a formality. The Trust was given just enough to cover the salary of a social worker for three years with a small percentage for accommodation. It meant that I could start an office in Australia and appoint someone.

  While I’d been in Australia before Christmas, the trustees and Yvonne had been busy looking for an office in Nottingham. Philip Bean had resigned as a trustee due to his work commitments, and a local businessman, Manfred Dessau, graciously took up the position. He had first approached me after Lost Children of the Empire was screened and asked what he could do to help.

  Eventually, we found rooms in a large Victorian house that had been converted into o
ffices in Musters Road, near the cricket ground at Trent Bridge.

  We begged, borrowed and called in favours to get office furniture, and then loaded up my battered Renault with boxes of files and dozens of notebooks, transferring them from the house to the new office.

  The premises were neither large nor lavish, but they were warm, welcoming and homely. There were two rooms set aside for meetings and interviews, neither had any office equipment, just soft furnishings, attractive lamps and many photographs and paintings. The black-and-white photographs on the walls showed scenes of children leaving Britain on different child migrant schemes.

  The office was practical and conventional but I also hoped it would become a kind of spiritual home for the child migrants.

  Similar accommodation had to be found in Australia so I flew out with Manfred Dessau to formalize the arrangements with the Immigration Department and to look for an office.

  I decided to base the Trust’s first Australian office in Melbourne which could service the eastern states, while I would continue to focus on Perth.

  It took two trips before the right location could be found, a two-storey terrace house in Canning Street, North Carlton, an old suburb with well-established gardens. Inside, it looked almost English with its comfy sofas and the landscape paintings on the walls.

  I didn’t want a formal-looking office. This had to be somewhere that child migrants could feel welcome and at ease; where there was tea in the pot and biscuits in the tin.

  The second priority was to recruit a qualified social worker – someone with the experience and personal qualities to withstand the inevitable emotional onslaught of dealing with so many painful stories. I knew that many of the child migrants wanted a British worker as a tangible link with the land of their birth, and eventually appointed David, who was well qualified and experienced.

  David had been to Australia before and was very relaxed and easy going. He would have no support staff and could rely on my being there only three times a year. The rest of the time, aside from the telephone, he would be alone.

  Although Canning Street wouldn’t be opened officially until January 1991, David went to Australia earlier to make the final plans. I flew out in the New Year and we met in Perth so he could watch me working with former child migrants. We’d talked a lot about the problems, and he seemed confident, but I don’t think anything could have prepared him fully for the emotional impact of what he had to face within a few weeks of his arrival.