Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (27 page)

Dear Margaret
,

I realize the difficulty you must face in putting the jigsaw together for those who seek your help. I would like to add my case to your already overloaded list. Thus, I seek your help
.

I was brought out to Australia at the age of nine years, arriving in Australia during 1947 on the ship
Asturias
and went to a Christian Brothers’ institution, where I remained until 1955
.

I am writing to you seeking your assistance and that of the Child Migrants Trust in the hope that I may know who I am, to whom I belong and who might belong to me
.

I am encouraged in this by the programme
Lost Children of the Empire.
The work and research you are engaged in gives me the first hope I have ever had in my quest to the answers I seek about myself. I have for the first time in my life been able to talk about my past. Prior to the screening of the programme I was embarrassed to do so. Now I am not
.

To assist you I enclose a copy of my birth certificate
.

I recall, whilst in a children’s home in Lancashire, England, in the 1940s, a lady (my mother?) visited me. I enclose a small note the nuns gave me when I returned to the children’s home in 1972 in the hope of finding my mother
.

After more than forty-two years, it would be nice to know that I belong to someone, someone belongs to me and that I can share myself with those who are mine, thus giving me a peace of mind and a joy that I have never known and, up to now, I never thought could be mine
.

A letter such as this has not been easy to write and is difficult to conclude. I close by saying what you are doing is appreciated. I hope to hear from you soon
.

Yours sincerely
,

Michael

It was a rather formal sounding letter, but I sensed an unwritten urgency between the lines. Yvonne and I began the search for Michael’s mother in St Catherine’s House. We began with a long list of birth registrations over a twenty-five year period of women with the same name as his mother. Nothing looked immediately hopeful. There was a registration for a woman with three Christian names, but Michael’s mother only had two; Michael was born in Highgate, London, this lady was born in the North of England.

The problems were compounded by the fact that Michael’s documentation contained conflicting information. His surname was spelt differently on important documents and his date of birth was also incorrect on papers he received from the agency who had arranged his migration. To make matters worse, the records contained no reference to Michael’s mother or father.

Michael recognized me when we met in the hotel lobby. He complained about the hot weather, which he still found oppressive, and I noticed he bore little trace of an Australian accent.

‘The heat hasn’t been a problem to me so far,’ I explained. ‘I usually only travel from the airport to my hotel.’

Michael was surprised that I hadn’t seen anything of Perth on my previous visits. In my room on the eighth floor, he stood at the window enjoying the view over the river and pointed out to me various places of interest. He told me how the city had changed since the America’s Cup yacht races were held off Fremantle several years earlier. It was more vibrant now, he said, there were more tourists and taller buildings.

Settling into a chair, he asked if he could smoke.

I handed him an ashtray and smiled, saying, ‘Most smokers need a few cigarettes when they come in here.’

Despite the relaxed introductions, I didn’t find it easy to get Michael to talk about his early childhood and the search for his mother. It touched a raw nerve and eventually he explained that he had decided many years ago to suppress his feelings of hurt in order to survive. This was his way of coping. However, I knew he wouldn’t be ready to undertake the painful journey to find his mother until we developed a trusting relationship.

Over tea, he told me of his interest in politics, current affairs and history – especially British history. He held firm views about his British origins.

‘Do you consider yourself British or Australian?’ I asked.

He firmly put me in my place. ‘British, of course!’ he insisted, as if there was only one possible answer. ‘I’m only domiciled here. It’s not my home, I am trapped here, my home is in England. They took our childhoods, our identity, our families. But they can’t take my nationality from me.’

His anger and sense of injustice were suddenly exposed and it gave me the opening I needed to gently explore his childhood.

He told of arriving in Australia at the age of nine and being subjected to the humiliation of being fingerprinted.

‘I felt like a criminal,’ he sighed, looking at me for some reaction.

‘It’s not the first time I’ve heard about it,’ I said. ‘I’m not surprised you remember it so clearly.’

Michael was anxious to know if I had any news of his mother. I handed him a copy of her birth certificate. ‘That’s the first hurdle,’ I smiled.

Michael was thrilled. It was the first tangible piece of evidence he’d ever seen that proved she was a real person and not just a figment of his imagination. He felt optimistic and confident that she would be found.

‘This is still only the very beginning,’ I warned him. ‘We could find no trace of a marriage for her or any subsequent children. We are now searching for other family members who may be able to help.

‘And you have to remember, your mother is now over seventy years old. There are no guarantees that she’s still with us.’

Michael nodded in agreement. When he left the hotel he looked reassured and relieved. The search was going forward and every day brought us closer to the truth.

* * *

In March, when I returned to the office in Nottingham, I was immediately given two new pieces of information uncovered while I was in Australia. They concerned the woman with three Christian names whom we were seeking as possibly being Michael’s mother.

‘Would you like the good news or the bad news first?’ Yvonne asked.

I hesitated. In our work ‘bad news’ is often a kind way of saying that someone has died.

I replied, ‘It’s not Michael’s mother, is it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

These were the very words I was dreading. A death certificate had been found which was almost conclusive; only a few minor details had to be confirmed. The ‘good news’ was that a distant relative had been located. But this relative by marriage had never met Michael’s mother and had no information to give us about her.

Michael had told me of his plans to visit the UK at the end of April. It meant that I had less than a month to establish without any doubt that his mother had indeed died. In view of the need for more personal enquiries, I decided to take over the research myself.

After meeting Michael, I knew that he would find it exceptionally difficult to come to terms with the fact that his mother had died. In fact, she’d been dead for over thirty years.

A friend, rather than a relative, had registered her death, so it was quite possible that Michael would not even meet someone who had known her. I needed to try to find someone who could at least tell him a little about the mother he never knew; somebody who could describe her as a real person, a living, breathing human being.

I telephoned three cemeteries before I managed to establish where Michael’s mother had been buried. I also made several enquiries to firms of undertakers. Eventually, I was given some details of those who had attended the funeral. I travelled by car to Leeds to find the street where Michael’s mother had been living some thirty years ago. I found the street quite quickly but to my utter dismay a small block of offices occupied the space where the house should have been. Only four houses had been demolished along this narrow winding road; Michael’s mother had lived in one of them.

I called at the main library and consulted the electoral rolls to discover which adults had been living in the house at about the same time. There were four listed. I also checked neighbouring houses to see if there was anyone still living on the street whose names appeared in the earlier records. No such luck.

It was almost dark when I left the library in Leeds. Light rain began falling and I hurried to my car. Twenty minutes later I was standing outside the main entrance to the cemetery, knowing that I would venture no further. For me, this marked the boundary of what was private to Michael and his mother.

I telephoned him in Australia and wrote to him. I didn’t mention his mother and nor did he. He knew that I wouldn’t tell him anything over the phone.

Michael confirmed his travel plans and I agreed to meet him at Heathrow Airport.

A few weeks later, I made the journey south and found Michael standing by his luggage trolley. We shook hands and he seemed pleased when I welcomed him ‘home’.

We had a cup of coffee, then took the underground to St Pancras Station to travel north to Leeds. Michael became relaxed and lively as the journey progressed, and enjoyed the changing view from the window seat. We discussed a variety of topics but Michael never mentioned his mother.

She was, of course, the main reason for his visit home; yet I knew that Michael wasn’t ready to face all the implications of our research, especially the possibility that she was no longer alive. When he was ready, I would break the news to him.

For the next two weeks, Michael visited friends and was introduced to a distant relative we had found for him. He would telephone me every couple of days and I told him that I was prepared to see him whenever he was ready.

Finally we met five days before he was due to return to Australia.

Michael came to the Trust office and when I asked him where he wanted to talk, he chose to sit in the room with the family dining table and its four matching oak chairs. He put the table between us. It was just as I expected. He needed to stay in control of his feelings and emotions and the distance helped him do that.

We faced each other and as soon as Michael had finished his cup of tea, he said, in a direct, firm voice, ‘I think you’ve been trying to prepare me for something. Come on then, tell me, I’m ready now. I can be stoic when I have to be.’

I knew that Michael’s mother had been dead for more than thirty years, but for him she would die that day. The moment the death certificate passed from my hands to his, all Michael’s hopes would be lost for ever.

‘I have a certificate,’ I said, ‘sadly, a death certificate, which may well be your mother’s – but I would like you to look at it and give me your opinion.’

Michael studied the document for some considerable time before he looked up and said quietly, ‘Yes, it’s her.’

He had several questions about how and where his mother had died and where the funeral had taken place. Fortunately, I was able to answer most of them, because I had contacted the coroner’s office to obtain all the available details.

Sadly, I had also discovered that Michael’s mother had returned to the children’s home looking for him. She went to collect him only to be told that he had been sent to Australia.

Michael was devastated. He imagined that his mother had led a lonely life as she had not married. He felt that he should have been with her. He wondered whether his mother had spent her days looking at other boys and wondering what had happened to her own son. He tried to make sense of it – why had he been sent to Australia and his mother left behind without her only child?

He seemed to hold himself together well during this discussion which lasted nearly three hours. He had booked into a comfortable local hotel, where I arranged to meet him during the evening for supper.

‘Will you come with me to visit my mother’s grave?’ Michael asked.

‘Wouldn’t you prefer to go with a friend or relative?’ I said.

He shook his head. It was clear that he’d given it a lot of thought, so I agreed to go with him.

We met at the railway station the following morning. Michael seemed shocked, but in control of himself. From Leeds station, we took a taxi to the cemetery. As the driver pulled up at the large ornamental gates, Michael leaned forward and said, ‘We won’t be long.’

There were a few dark clouds scurrying across the sky in the wind and occasionally there were splashes of sunshine.

The cemetery administrator had told me where the grave was situated and it didn’t take Michael long to pinpoint it.

‘I’ve found it, it’s here,’ he called over to me.

Not wishing to intrude on his grief, I kept well back as he stood next to the grave. After more than forty years of pain and separation, the search for his mother had ended at last.

He knelt down and I saw his shoulders shaking. I wondered over and over what could possibly have justified so much human suffering. The desolation of a nine-year-old boy, the grief of a fifty-year-old man and the lifelong pain of an estranged mother.

Just as Michael was arranging a small bunch of flowers beside the headstone, a huge clap of thunder bellowed out above our heads. It seemed to come from nowhere, catching me completely by surprise.

Michael turned round to me and shouted, ‘It’s Shakespeare! It’s my mother saying, “Avenge my death!”’

From the very beginning, when Madeleine first wrote to me and described herself as an orphan, I wondered how she could have believed such a story. Yet she insisted that on the voyage to Australia, a woman had told her that her mother was dead.

Many of the former child migrants told similar stories, including Joan Corby and Harold Haig. As I gathered more and more newspaper reports, newsreel footage and political speeches, the children were invariably described as ‘war orphans’ arriving from Britain.

Unfortunately, time and again, I had discovered that the child migrants were not orphans. Similarly, I learned that more often than not they had been sent abroad without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

When a child migrant learns for the first time that he or she has been so outrageously deceived, he usually reacts with confusion and distress. Knowledge that one’s mother is still alive comes as a shock and a relief. The anger frequently follows, with a stream of questions: Who sent me here? Who signed for me to leave Britain? Were my parents told?