Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (18 page)

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 without 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.

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.

‘I thought the conductor had forgotten me and I’d missed my stop,’ he said. ‘But eventually I was put off the train and this old farmer pinched my arms, seeing if I was strong enough.

‘He told me if I worked hard and behaved myself, I would have a good home. It was OK eventually. I got food and clothes. I was better off than some of the boys.’

Another migrant, a seventy-two-year-old man, described how, at the age of ten, he arrived at a huge distribution centre for child migrants where the farmers came to inspect and choose children to take back to their farms. They looked him over, and said, ‘Nah, we won’t take him, ’cos he won’t last the winter.’

He was crying as he spoke and I kept thinking, Why has nobody asked him these questions before? Why isn’t there one single office in the whole of Canada that deals with child migration? Why doesn’t Barnardo’s have an office? Why doesn’t the Catholic Church?

I wasn’t prepared for the immense distances that had to be covered in Canada. Travel had become a logistical nightmare of plane schedules and train timetables. From Ottawa we flew to Calgary on the western edge of the Canadian prairies near the American border and the Rocky Mountains. Sadly, I had no time to appreciate the scenery.

John Jones lived in the outskirts of Calgary but his first sight of Canada, fifty years earlier, had been from the deck of a ship, the
Duchess of Atholl
, that arrived in Halifax in 1937. John was seven years old at the time. He recounted how he and about twenty other children were put on a train that took three or four days to reach Vancouver on the west coast. After a ferry ride to nearby Vancouver Island, the children were bussed to the Fairbridge Farm School at Duncan. This was the Fairbridge presence in Canada, built in 1935 following a public appeal for funds in Britain which was endorsed by the Prince of Wales.