I boarded the plane back to England very tired, very sad and not a little angry. The final four days in Sydney had been tough going. David did more than a dozen radio and press interviews and I had many migrants to see, including one living in Wollongong on the south coast.
Joanna, David and I sat together on the flight home.
Joanna was clearly exhausted, emotionally as well as physically. She had been working on her own for most of the time; we’d been going on ahead of her, doing the interviews and arranging for her to follow some of them up. The stress of listening to the migrants and then travelling thousands of miles alone, without the consolation of someone with whom to share her reactions, had taken its toll.
David’s face looked almost haunted, and I could sense his anger. It was beyond his comprehension that anyone could treat children in such a way. That anybody could physically and sexually abuse such vulnerable human beings. Occasionally his fury would surface and he’d say things like: ‘There’s never been anything like this. Never. The abuse of these children is on a scale that is totally unknown. The perpetrators have got to be brought to account. They can’t get away with this.’
I, too, was shattered – both by what I’d heard and by the scale of the task that lay ahead. I kept thinking to myself, How am I going to do this? I had a small study in my house, one phone, no fax, a part-time researcher and a mountain to climb.
Above my head and beneath my feet were six bags full of notebooks and migrants’ documentation. David and I had had to argue for permission to carry them on as hand luggage but I was adamant. I wasn’t letting them out of my sight because they represented all that some people had of their past lives.
‘We’ve got to tell the Government, haven’t we? We’ve got to tell the charities.’
‘Yes,’ said David. ‘They’ve got to be told. They have to know that it went dreadfully wrong for so many.’
‘What about the files? We need to get access to them. It could help us find their families.’
I had a terrible sense of foreboding as we landed at Heathrow. And when I reached up to unload the bags from the overhead lockers, I turned to David and said, ‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’
He just looked at me and said, ‘Yes.’
It was Good Friday but we had no sense of it being Easter. The tulips and daffodils were blooming but they brought little joy. Philip Bean picked us up from the airport and from the moment I saw a familiar face I knew that I couldn’t talk. He was full of questions, but I couldn’t answer. I was too shocked by what I had learned. It would take a long while before I could share the experience in Australia.
‘Where’s the rest of you, Margaret?’ Merv asked. ‘Your clothes are falling off you.’
‘I’ve lost a bit of weight.’
The house was spotless and there were flowers everywhere. Welcome-home cards decorated the hall and the mantelpiece. Rachel and Ben had made a little banner which was pinned across the front door saying ‘Welcome Home’.
They were very excited to see me, full of hugs and kisses. Ben was eight. He wouldn’t let me out of his sight. He trailed me through the house and upstairs when I went to bed. He lay on the bed beside me and prised my eyes open when I tried to sleep, saying, ‘Don’t sleep now, talk to me. Talk to me, Mummy.’
It was difficult. They kept asking me questions about what I’d seen and who I’d met. They wanted to know all about Australia. What could I say? I’d seen hotels and airports.
A week later, when the children were back at school, a teacher took me aside when I arrived to pick Ben up from the local primary school.
‘Ben’s been terribly upset while you’ve been away,’ the teacher said. ‘I saw him sitting in class one day with his eyes shut and when I asked him what he was doing he said, “I’m trying to see my Mummy’s face.”’
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I explained to the teacher that I was due to go away again within a few months. ‘We’ve tried to cushion it. Is there anything else we can do?’ I asked.
‘What about putting a photograph of you in his satchel?’ she said. ‘Ben knows you’re coming back, but three weeks seems like forever to an eight-year-old.’
For a long while I couldn’t talk about Australia. There was a barrier around me and I didn’t laugh as much. My assumptions and long-held beliefs, all those things a person relies upon, had been turned upside down. The world itself looked slightly different when I looked out the window at ordinary scenes like families going off to church.
I thought, These people are OK. They don’t know about the thousands of children sent overseas who could have been their friends and their neighbours. They have no idea how lucky they are.
‘Where do we begin?’ I asked Yvonne, as we sat in the upstairs office staring at the unpacked bags.
My main priority, I decided, was to be able to return to Australia in six months’ time, having made at least some progress with everybody I’d seen. In most cases this might mean only having found them a birth certificate.
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.