Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (17 page)

I knew that Joanna was in London with a full team working on the documentary. Her priorities were different from mine but understandably she wanted to be able to finish the programme on a positive note. She wanted the reunion of a child migrant with his or her family.

This wasn’t my concern but if my research eventually created the possibility and all parties agreed then I knew it would be the opportunity to show the world that the child migrants had been outrageously deceived. They weren’t orphans. They did have families.

So what name did I start with? The first? The most recent? The most unusual?

The Australian trip had generated about 300 requests for help and over the next two months Yvonne and I began research on all of them. As with most searches, the results were mixed. The birth certificates for some child migrants were easy to find, others took far longer. I knew from experience that often names had been changed, and that dates of birth could be incorrect. Some had no idea if they were born in England, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.

The letters kept arriving, many simply expressing thanks and wishing me success. The child migrants were embarrassingly grateful.

Among them was a letter from Christine, the woman who had stormed up to me at the Fairbridge reunion and accused me of having misrepresented the lives of the child migrants.

Dear Margaret
,

After my talk with you and David I have done some deep thinking and soul-searching and, yes, you were right, I do want and need to know who I am and what my roots are
.

I have always wondered why I had no-one – brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, mother or father. It has never seemed logical that there should be no-one at all. I’ve often wondered why and who sent me to Fairbridge? What was wrong with me that no-one wanted me?

Margaret, even as I write, the memories of the loneliness and rejection come flooding back and I am weeping for the lost years; the years of not belonging to anyone, not knowing anything …

When I asked about my family, the people at Fairbridge told me that my parents were killed in a car accident, but I think they told me that to give me something to hang on to; to give me a background of sorts …

It is a very emotional thing to start and peel back the years and face the feelings and emotions that have been buried over a lifetime. I thought it didn’t matter any more but it does. And perhaps more now that I’m in the latter half of my lifespan
.

Please try to find out who I am. Where do I come from? Is there anyone I belong to? Do I have any family?
’

It was an important letter, for Christine and for me, because it showed that regardless of how proudly the Old Fairbridgians had presented themselves at the reunion, some still had profound feelings of rejection.

I was putting a lot of faith in the documentary, hoping that it would raise public awareness, that people would realize what had happened, for the first time.

At the end of May I flew to Harare in Zimbabwe to begin investigating its child migrant schemes. I had never been to Africa and tried to keep an open mind about my expectations.

It was a scorching Sunday afternoon and the only breeze came from the slipstream of the cars and trucks that hurled themselves through the streets at breakneck speed. The taxi ride from Harare airport passed in a blur of loud horns and petrol fumes. Near the hotel, traffic came to a complete stop as a congregation marched past singing hymns and carrying banners.

I had already seen the work of Kingsley Fairbridge in Australia and now hoped to see if the schemes had been any different in the former Rhodesia, where child migration had begun after the Second World War.

Kingsley Fairbridge had spent his teenage years in Rhodesia in the late 1890s where a vision came to him one summer’s day which he described in his autobiography:

When you close your eyes on a hot day you may see things that have remained half hidden at the back of your brain. That day I saw a street in the East End of London. It was a street crowded with children – dirty children, yet lovable, exhausted with the heat. No decent air, not enough food. The waste of it all! Children’s lives wasting while the Empire cried out for more.

In 1909 Fairbridge gave an impassioned speech to the Colonial Club at Oxford University describing his vision. Such was the power of his oratory, all fifty of those present enrolled as members of the ‘Society for the Furtherance of Child Emigration to the Colonies’.

On my first day in Harare, I visited the State Archives, hoping to find records about the children sent to Rhodesia and also details of the policy that underpinned the scheme. It gave me my first taste of dealing with the local bureaucracy, a nerve-racking experience, particularly when the keepers of the State Archives told me that I must refer to them as ‘comrade’.

One of my new ‘comrades’ showed me a brochure which publicized the 1946 opening of Fairbridge Memorial College, situated in the bush outside Bulawayo. As I read the brochure, my eyes fell on several important sentences.

It revealed that in Southern Rhodesia most of the manual tasks on farms were performed by Africans. At Fairbridge, the white immigrant children were not expected to perform the farm work or other chores, as they had been in Australia. The inference was that they were the élite and had been brought from England to join the next generation of professionals and politicians that would run Rhodesia.

I felt quite vulnerable in the archives. I was making enquiries about a very sensitive area of the country’s history and I feared that not everybody would welcome me.

Joy Melville, a writer from England, had come with me to Zimbabwe to begin researching a book to accompany the television documentary. The following day we took a taxi to the Fairbridge college at Bulawayo. I expected to see a rather grand-looking campus but instead found what looked like a row of Nissen huts. The actual college had once been an RAF base and Fairbridge had converted the building. The ground was dusty and dry; it must have seemed like another planet to the boys and girls who began arriving in 1946.

The college had since been turned into a primary school for local black children, and the headmaster showed us around the classrooms.

Before I left England, an ad was placed in a local newspaper in Harare, stating that a researcher was arriving who wanted to interview former child migrants from Britain. There were nine responses.

When I arrived I rang all of them and arranged interviews. On the second morning I had a very different visitor waiting in the lobby, a young African boy with a typewritten letter from Dame Molly Gibbs, the wife of the former Governor-General of Rhodesia, Sir Humphrey Gibbs.

Dear Mrs Humphreys,

In case you are out when we call, I am writing this note to say that in seeing the item about the Fairbridge scheme in the paper this morning, it occurred to me that you might be interested to meet me and my husband because we used to have some of the Fairbridge boys to stay on our farm outside Bulawayo from time to time.

The Gibbs’ residence was something from Empire days, as if time had been frozen and the sun had never set on a small corner of England. I was struck by the beautiful gardens being tended by African gardeners. Inside the house there were more African servants, each impeccably dressed.

Sir Humphrey took us into the house which was decorated with photographs of children and grandchildren, and Dame Molly, dressed informally in a skirt and blouse, poured tea in the sitting-room.

I still wasn’t sure why they wanted to see me, although I had my suspicions. Sir Humphrey began by asking exactly why I was in Zimbabwe, and I explained about the Child Migrants Trust.

‘Do you understand the politics of Zimbabwe?’ he asked. ‘Things have changed quite a bit over the years.’

He seemed to understand my work, and that many child migrants whom I’d seen in Australia wanted to find their families.

He said, ‘My understanding is that the children who came to Fairbridge Memorial College were all sent with their parents’ permission. They weren’t orphans. I can’t tell you how many there were but it didn’t involve thousands.’

I listened intently, fascinated by the prospect that child migrants might actually have been sent by their families rather than the authorities. If true, this raised a whole new issue. Why would parents consent to their children being sent to Africa? And why was this consent never sought for the children sent to Australia?

‘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.