When Jim Loach first asked to make a film based on Empty Cradles, I was concerned that the lives of former child migrants should be captured on the big screen in all their complex humanity. I must confess that I dreaded seeing myself, my family and my colleagues twisted out of shape to suit the drama. My fears were unfounded. I would have been its fiercest critic if it had fallen short, but Jim’s film, Oranges and Sunshine, is sensitive, compelling, finely crafted and absolutely true to the spirit of this book.
Inevitably, revisiting that time has been a bittersweet experience.
We were so very hopeful then.
The Child Migrants Trust survived on a shoestring, sometimes on less, and we knew that we were engaged in a race against time – to reunite child migrants with their elderly parents before it was too late.
I believed the publication of Empty Cradles in 1994 would be a major step forward in our campaign. I thought the scandal of what one British MP described as ‘war crimes without the war’ could no longer be swept under the carpet. There would be sufficient funds to achieve our objectives. The churches and charitable agencies involved would admit the devastating consequences of their past policies and, as far as possible, set out to make amends. There would be public recognition of the wrongs these remarkable people had suffered – first as children then as adults – at the hands of a succession of governments which seemed to have forgotten them. That recognition was hugely important both to them and to their families.
We really hoped that our struggle had passed the tipping point. I vividly remember sitting in the waiting area at Edinburgh airport in May 1997, having shared another remarkable and emotional reunion. After a telephone call promising a Westminster Health Select Committee inquiry, tears of relief rolled down my face – surely, now, they would be believed; surely now they’d be granted their birthright.
Sadly, my optimism was short-lived.
Twelve long years were to pass before the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a public apology. Early in 2010, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown followed suit in the House of Commons, for ‘this shameful episode … this failure in the first duty of a nation: to protect its children.’
These were milestones indeed, and I salute the courage and stamina of those who remained true to the cause. Sadly, for many, it was already too late. And for scores of others, the dark shadow of what happend to them in those terrible so-called Children’s Homes still weighs heavily upon them and their loved ones.
Our work has taken us on a long, hard, bumpy road. And as I write, the journey is far from over.