Marjorie Her War Years

by Patricia Skidmore

  Lavinia Anderson and Marjorie Arnison at Fintry Fairbridge, 1940. Marjorie is on the right.

  “I hope everything is okay at Fairbridge. I hope Bunny and Kenny are okay. Maybe something has happened to them and they don’t want to tell me? I wrote to them a few times and they haven’t written back, not once.” Marjorie was suddenly sure something had happened to Bunny or Kenny.

  “No, it can’t be that. They would have told you.” Lavinia walked into the lake up to her knees. “C’mon, it’s lovely.”

  Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Howard paced in the office. “We have to tell the children something. We should be careful how much we tell them, though.” Mr. Thomas looked tense.

  “Yes, I think we should be very careful. Oh, God, what a wretched business. Torpedoing children makes no sense whatsoever! What kind of a person does that? I cannot seem to shake the nightmare of it all. What was it like for those poor little children?” Mrs. Howard took out her hanky and wiped her eyes.

  “Yes, it’s dreadful, isn’t it? When I telephoned the farm school, I managed to get a few more details. Not many, as these things are kept hushed up. Apparently the British government finally agreed to organize the transportation of some of the children of the poor. There was quite the clamour from the poor over the fact that wealthy parents are able to ship their children to safe houses in the United States and Canada. The working-class blokes got all up in arms, protesting that it was typical of the government to watch the children of the rich being sent to safe homes and do nothing for the poor. I supposed that Churchill was concerned that if their enemies saw the country evacuating their children they might see that as a sign of fear or weakness. War is just a nasty business, and it is no place for children. How must those parents feel now? I just can’t imagine it.” Mr. Thomas took his hanky and blew his nose.[2]

  “They must be wretched, simply wretched. Who were the children travelling with? I hope it wasn’t the Fairbridge Society. How many children were there in all, do you know?” Mrs. Howard picked up the telegram and looked at it again, hoping to find answers that she knew were not there.

  “No, I believe that they were coming over with the Children’s Overseas Reception Board. There were, I think, about ninety children on the boat. It seems that most of them were lost. Apparently six of the ten escorts travelling with them were lost, too. The ship went down very fast. They said the City of Benares sank in thirty-one minutes. Thirty-one minutes! They had no time to prepare.” Mr. Thomas paced back and forth.

  “Why did they allow it to cross if it was so dangerous? Why didn’t they have some kind of flag flying saying they were carrying children?” Mrs. Howard needed to have the details. Too little information left her feeling frustrated.

  “I don’t have much information, except it was hit on September 17, in the evening.”

  Mrs. Howard cried, “Oh, those poor little children. Those poor parents. Did they know the dangers? Such a gamble. Who can ever know what is the best thing? To sit still or run?”

  “How could they? They wouldn’t have sent them if they did. The tragedy for the parents of these lost souls is that they let their children go after being told that if the ship carrying their children was unable to be convoyed the whole way across, then the sailing would be cancelled. But they lied to them, because the convoy turned back earlier that day.”

  Mr. Thomas banged his fist on the desk. “It’s a bloody tragedy. Oh, it is heartbreaking! Mrs. Howard, this whole thing should never have happened. Fairbridge needs more children. The society has really suffered a setback. Now, there will be no more boats crossing with children. It is just too risky. We will have to wait for the war to be over before it will be safe to transport any more children.”

  “I wish this war would end.” Mrs. Howard shook her head slowly.

  “Damn, it won’t be easy telling the children. Pardon my language, Mrs. Howard, but I have never felt so frustrated.”

  Mrs. Howard understood. “No, it won’t be easy telling them. We should tell them soon, though; Marjorie and Lavinia already know that something is wrong. I think we should tell them tonight at evening prayer. That would be the best time, I think.”

  “You’re right. Evening prayers would be the best time.”

  “Yes, and we could use the prayer time to pray for the lost ones. It might give the children a positive outlet right away.” Mrs. Howard took out her hanky and wiped her eyes. How could this have happened? Those poor innocent children. What a nightmare!

  “Well, we’ll have to take care how we tell the children. I had better get some chores done or we will never have dinner tonight.” She wiped her eyes again before she left the office.

  Fairbridge Tears

  Lost and alone

  On the storm-tossed sea

  One by one

  Their little souls were gone.

  Far from home

  With no family

  One by one

  The little children passed on.

  “Marjorie, Marjorie, wake up! You’re having a nightmare.” Mrs. Howard gave Marjorie a gentle shake. Lavinia was in her cot, looking terrified. Marjorie had been thrashing around and tearing her bed apart, and when Lavinia had no luck waking her, she ran to get Mrs. Howard.

  Marjorie finally wrestled free from her nightmare. She looked wild-eyed at Mrs. Howard and then over at Lavinia. She choked out a sob. “It was a dream?”

  “Yes, it was a dream. Try to relax now.” Mrs. Howard rubbed Marjorie’s back, trying to calm her down.

  “Oh, Mrs. Howard, it was awful. I tried to swim and it was all black and the waves were huge. They were swallowing me up. I tried to breathe, but I kept swallowing in huge mouthfuls of water. I tried to climb back on the boat, but it kept moving away. There were kids all around me, clawing at the water, trying to get to safety. No one could make it.” Marjorie dissolved into sobs.

  Mrs. Howard held her; she could feel her heart racing. “There now, Marjorie. There now, take a deep breath. You’re safe now. You’re going to be all right. You’re thinking of those poor children on that boat, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I can’t get them off my mind. I keep thinking and thinking about them. Why did the Germans do that? Didn’t they know all those kids were on the boat?”

  “Well, I guess they didn’t. I don’t know. I’m sure they wouldn’t have torpedoed the boat if they knew it was transporting children.” Mrs. Howard somehow knew that the best thing for Marjorie would be to talk about the disaster. Keeping it all bottled up inside would do her no good. She had heard that Marjorie suffered from nightmares, and they had almost taken her off the list for Fintry Farm because of that. However, as far as Mrs. Howard knew, this was the first nightmare that Marjorie had had all summer. It was everyone’s nightmare, really. She recalled the look on the children’s faces when she and Mr. Thomas sat them down for evening prayers. She didn’t know how to start, so she let Mr. Thomas begin.

  “Children.” He cleared his voice and looked at the floor. “I’m afraid I have some rather bad news to tell you. It shows how far-reaching this war is. One of the boats bringing children over to Canada — it was called the City of Benares — well, it was torpedoed a few days ago. It sank, and most of the children on board died.”

  “What children were coming out? Was anyone coming from Middlemore? What if my sister was on that boat?” The sinking horrified Marjorie, but it would be a hundred times worse if her sister or anyone else that she knew was on the boat.

  “Marjorie, I’m not really sure, but I don’t think there were any Middlemore children. I am quite sure that your sister was not on the boat, though.” Mrs. Howard had no idea, really, where the children were from, but she had to do her best to reassure the children here.

  “How many children were coming out?” asked one of the boys. They had been awfully quiet up to now.

  “Well, there were about four
hundred people in all, and about one hundred of them were children. That night seventy-seven children died. Some of the children survived, but only a few, and they took them back to England. I don’t think any more children will be coming out until it is absolutely safe.” Mr. Thomas hoped that there would not be too many questions; he was simply not up to it tonight.

  “It’s a great tragedy, and I think we should say a prayer for all the children and the adults who died.” Mrs. Howard bowed her head; the others followed.

  The children quietly readied themselves for bed. Some had been at Fairbridge for a few years now, but all remembered their boat trip over. For most, the nights were the scariest. It was so dark. Could it have happened to them when they were coming over?

  Marjorie fishing off the Fintry packinghouse pier, 1940.

  The horror of the sinking of the City of Benares spread through the Fintry Farm community. News that the parents had been promised that their children would be convoyed reached them. That promise had been broken with devastating consequences.

  Marjorie watched her fishing line bobbing on the surface of the lake. Fishing off the pier gave her time to think about things. She had spent a restless night, full of nightmares. Funny how fishing relaxed her, even though she thought she should be afraid of the water. The lake was a little rough today. If she fell in, she could still swim to shore or climb up the ladder back onto the pier. What had it been like for the children? It was dark and stormy, and they were miles out to sea with someone shooting torpedoes at them. They will remain forevermore in the ocean that must have terrified them in their last minutes on earth. Why is it not safe anywhere?

  Chapter 12

  I Think I Can… Make It…

  Charles Buller, member of Parliament in Britain, argued that some periods of unorganized British emigration to the colonies entailed “little more than shovelling out your paupers to where they might die, without shocking their betters with the sight or sound of their last agony.”

  — “Systematic Colonization.” Speech in the House of Commons, April 6, 1843

  “Marjorie, will you help me? I want to try to win the prize for best costume.” Bunny walked into the playroom carrying an assortment of ribbons and cloth ends left over from the sewing classes. She dumped them at Marjorie’s feet and sat down.

  “Well, let me see what you’ve got.” Marjorie reached out for the bigger bits.

  “Are you going to get dressed up?” Bunny asked her sister.

  “Nah, I’m getting too old. I’ll just help you.” Marjorie held up some pieces. “What did you hope to do with these?”

  “I don’t know. Can you help me think of something?” The two sisters worked for a bit, snipping this piece and stitching that piece.

  Marjorie pulled out a couple of apples from her locker and passed one to her sister. The stolen fruit tasted sweet. She and a couple of the older girls in her cottage made a habit of sneaking down to the apple orchard below the chapel to pick as many apples as they could hide under their clothing and even in their knickers. They would sneak them into their lockers in the basement of their cottage to eat when their cottage mother wasn’t looking. They would devour the core and all to not leave any evidence.

  A “staged” photograph for publicity purposes. Arnison children at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, early 1940s. Left–right: Audrey (Bunny), Marjorie, and Kenny.

  “It’s getting close to bedtime. We’ll have to work on it tomorrow.” Bunny’s face fell and she was about to protest, so Marjorie reminded her, “Bunny, it’s only Tuesday. Halloween isn’t until Friday. We have plenty of time. Maybe I can find a few more odds and ends in the sewing basket tomorrow.”

  “Well, okay. Remember last Halloween, Marjorie, when we had a huge bonfire, and we roasted those hot dog things and we bobbed for apples and went trick-or-treating to the principal’s house? ’Member? Do you think we’ll get to do that again this year?” Bunny snuggled next to her sister. “I love Halloween; don’t you?”

  “I guess so. Go brush your teeth, okay?” Marjorie did remember last Halloween, but for different reasons. They had been back from Fintry for just a couple of weeks. She still remembered how sad she was to leave the lake. It was one of the magical times in her young life. Now she just wondered if she had imagined most of it.

  Deep down, she knew that she would find herself back in the same cottage with the same old cranky cottage mum, but she’d hoped and hoped that she would get placed with Mrs. Howard. She wished so hard for it that she had convinced herself that it might come true.

  As soon as she was back, she asked Bunny why she hadn’t written to her. Bunny was shocked and said that she’d written at least two letters. “I told you that I missed you so much and that I hated being at Fairbridge alone. I asked you about what duty masters the girls should avoid because we had some new girls at the farm school. I was sad when you didn’t write back to me. I told Kenny to tell the new boys who to watch out for.” Bunny’s frustration was all over her face.

  “I didn’t get any letters from you the whole time I was at Fintry.” Marjorie was furious. There was no way to communicate with her sister. What will it be like, she wondered, when I’m sent to Victoria and Bunny is here on her own for four years? “The old battleaxe probably never sent the letters. What a mean old bag. We should try to figure out a code that we could write in. It will be harder to keep in touch when I’m out at work.”

  It was difficult to understand why innocent children like the ones on the City of Benares had to die last year. Why didn’t God take her miserable old cottage mum and leave those children? Wretched old thing, she hardly ever smiled. She was just cruel, and there was nothing Marjorie could do to change that.

  Well, she was counting the months now. She would be sixteen in less than a year. She would be out of here then. In the meantime, though, there was a lot to keep her busy.

  These past few months she had done very little classroom work; instead, she did a lot of housework and a lot of work on laundry and sewing with their teacher, Tashy. And they had spent a lot of time on cooking and canning. They had been canning plums and making pickles and jams and jellies. The pantry shelves were full. Marjorie had counted 225 jars.[1] They also did what they called household management. At the matron’s house, they had learned to handle the fragile china, to polish silver, to dust and polish the woodwork, to care for the carpets and upholstery, and a hundred other little tasks, all to prepare them for when they were sent out to work. They were reminded all the time of the importance of taking care of other people’s things and of not ever expecting to have any of them for their own. That was on top of their regular chores.

  Marjorie also worked in the hospital. The new hospital had been open for about seven months now. It was a lovely new building designed for looking after patients. It worked so much better than the cottage. Marjorie was one of the first patients, admitted last April when she developed a large carbuncle on her neck. During the Earl of Athlone and Princess Alice’s visit to the farm school to open the new hospital, they had visited Marjorie in her hospital bed. A Victoria newspaper had printed a photograph of her with Princess Alice.[2]

  Now Marjorie was on morning dining-hall duty. The dining hall got a lot of use with all the kids running in twice a day for breakfast and lunch. It had been rainy lately, and even though there was a big rug at the door, the children tracked mud and dirt right across the room. Marjorie and the girls on dining-hall duty grabbed the big brooms and swept first, then mopped the floor, and finally took the huge heavy bumpers stuck onto long sticks and ran them back and forth until the shine on the linoleum passed inspection.

  One morning last week, Marjorie and her companion sat talking during their midmorning break. They knew they would have to hurry to get the floor finished before the noon meal, but they were determined to get their whole break. It seemed hard for the adults to let them rest. “Id
le hands, girls, lead to all sorts of trouble. Look busy now,” the cottage mothers would say. It seemed that they had to pretend to be busy even when it was break time.

  “C’mon, girls. Break’s over. I need some help in the kitchen before you go back to your floor.” The two girls got up. They were sure they had not been sitting down for more than five minutes.

  “Not much of a break,” Marjorie whispered.

  “Slave drivers!” her friend whispered back.

  Next week she would be on chapel duty in the morning. The last time she worked there it seemed to take forever to get everything dusted and polished. The best part of that job was they usually worked in pairs without any adults supervising. The cottage mother came over afterward to inspect their work. Sometimes they would take a break and stand up at the pulpit and pretend to be preaching to their cottage mums. The girls would preach that the mean cottage mums would go to hell unless they started being nice to the kids. Then they would look at each other and chuckle. They were surprised at their own daring, but they were feeling brave because they were sure that they both felt the same way, and besides there was no one around to hear them. They egged each other on.

  “God is all-seeing. You cannot hide from him. He will not tolerate mean cottage mothers. You must learn to be nice. He will put you in a pit full of snakes if you continue to be despicable!” The girl held up her arm and pointed at the imaginary cottage mothers sitting in the front pews. Her voice boomed throughout the room. The girls looked at each other and howled with delight.

  “That was a good sermon! My turn.” Marjorie jumped up to the pulpit. “Okay, listen up all you adults. We’ve had enough of your wickedness. We will not put up with any more of your evil ways. You are all heading to hell in a handbasket. But you belong there because you are all devils and witches. God will be watching closely to make sure you treat all the children nicely from now on. You will be lined up on Saturday mornings, and we will make you bend over without knickers on, and we will whip you with your own straps and willow switches, so then you will know how it hurts to be hit like that. We will box your ears like you box ours and see how you like the ringing and the bruises. You hit us for no reason, but we have plenty of reasons to hit you. You are mean old witches. You must give all the children more hugs and more allowance and let them have more movie nights, and you must start cleaning your own rooms, and it is your turn to get up early and start the fires so the girls will be warm when they get up, and you must serve the girls their breakfast of bacon and eggs in bed for the next year, and as punishment for your nasty ways you will get lumpy porridge without sugar for breakfast and lunch. And no more screaming at us ’cause we have had enough. Amen.”