The Forgotten Children (4 page)

We finished our primary education in a school built as part of the Langney village, then went on to Bishop Bell Secondary Modern, which was also built to cater for the increasing number of postwar baby-boom children.

By the time Dudley, Richard and I reached secondary school our eldest brother, Tony, was in the Royal Air Force. Britain still had conscription in the 1950s and Tony, who as a boy had been a member of the boys’ Air Training Corps, decided to do his national service in the RAF. He signed up for five years instead of the standard two. Conscripts were paid only a tiny allowance, but by signing up for a longer period, Tony was able to earn enough as a regular to continue to send money home to help Mum. Nevertheless, as the rest of us boys were getting older it was becoming increasingly obvious that Mum would not be able to afford to keep us at school beyond the minimum school-leaving age of fifteen.

Some years before, a woman who lived out the back from us in Dersley Road and who was struggling on her own had sent her three boys out to Australia with one of the child migration schemes. She was able to boast that her sons had done well for themselves: the eldest had become a policeman and where we came from that constituted considerable social mobility.

Several things were weighing heavily on Mum’s mind. There was a recession in Britain in the late 1950s and jobs were hard to get, so she was concerned about our poor prospects if we stayed in England. At the same time, Australia was promoting itself as the land of golden opportunity where jobs were plentiful. Years later she would reveal that she was also concerned about conscription and the risk that we would have to go to war. In the mid to late 1950s Britain was involved in the ‘troubles’ in Malaysia, the Suez crisis, and one of the boys we knew had been killed while a national serviceman in Cyprus. Mum’s family had been split up in World War I, her own family fell apart during and after World War II, and she didn’t want to see further family disruption.

When the day came for us to go around the village and say our goodbyes to all our friends and neighbours, it was very sad. It was the first time I recall having to say goodbye to people I was close to, knowing I would probably never see them again.

Then I was on the train with Mum and my two brothers to Knockholt in Kent. Fairbridge owned a house there, at which children would gather in a group before sailing out to Australia. We were a little anxious about our journey into the unknown, but as young boys we were also excited about embarking on an adventure, sailing to the other side of the world. I remember Mum being filled with sadness when she left us that night to go back home. She would remain unsettled until our little family was back together three years later.

We were all amazed at our magnificent new home in Kent, as we had never experienced such fineness and luxury. We were told that Fairbridge had bought the house with money donated by a woman whose son had disappeared after being parachuted into German-occupied France in World War II with the British Secret Service. It was presumed he had been captured and executed. His mother had wanted the house named in his memory, so it was called John Howard Mitchell House.

It was an imposing two-storey mansion, with an attic and cellars, gardener’s lodge, squash court and stables. There seemed to be countless rooms, including a large library, banquet room, billiard room and bathrooms upstairs and downstairs. Outside there were orchards and vegetable gardens and rolling green fields that seemed to go on for ever.

There was a matron and her assistant, a cook, a gardener and a cleaner who came every day. Between them, they catered for our every need. They cooked our meals, ran our baths, bathed the smaller children, laundered, ironed and laid out our clean clothes, and made our beds. We spent three weeks at Knockholt in beautiful springtime weather. We played all day, as we were not sent to school and not assigned any work.

Ian ‘Smiley’ Bayliff was at Knockholt in 1955 as an eight-year-old, with his three brothers, and remembers it as the best time of his life:

Richard, Dudley and I were joined by eight other children. At fifteen, Paddy O’Brien was the oldest in the party. His sister Mary was thirteen and his sister Myrtle was eleven. Billy King from Cornwall and John Ponting from west London were about my age. Beryl Daglish was about eleven and Wendy Harris ten. Wendy’s six-year-old brother, Paul, was the youngest of the group. We were all a bit older than the average children going to Fairbridge and most of us were going to Australia as part of the One Parent Scheme.

Once all the children in our party had arrived at John Howard Mitchell House we were taken up to London by bus for the day and fitted out with wonderful new summer and winter clothing, the likes of which none of us had ever seen before. The girl’s kit included a raincoat, a ‘pixi’ hood, a linen hat (‘for journey’), two gingham frocks (one ‘good enough for best dress’), a coat, one tunic, a pair of grey flannel shorts, a woollen jumper, a woollen cardigan (‘colours should blend with each other and with skirt’), skirt with bodice, two aertex blouses, two pairs of lightweight knickers, two woven knickers, two lightweight vests, two interlock vests, a pair each of best shoes, sandals and plimsolls, a pair of best socks, a pair of fawn socks, three pairs of pyjamas, a bathing costume, face flannel, sponge bag, brush, comb, toothbrush and paste, and a Bible.
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The boy’s kit included a raincoat, a woollen coat, khaki, flannel, corduroy and sports shorts, two khaki shirts, a white shirt, tie, belt, black shoes, three pairs of socks, three summer singlets, a winter singlet, three pairs of pyjamas, a dress jumper, a play jersey, a pair each of sandals and plimsolls, a pair of bathing trunks, a drill sun hat, brush, comb, toothbrush and paste, face flannel, sponge bag and a Bible.
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Interestingly, the standard boy’s kit did not include underpants. This otherwise wonderful outfit, which was provided to us by the London Fairbridge Society, had been a feature of the Fairbridge scheme since the beginning in the 1930s. Len Cowne remembers as a ten-year-old being taken and outfitted in London in late 1937 before sailing to Australia in the first party of boys sent to the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong in early 1938.

On the last Sunday before we left, Mum came to Knockholt to spend the day with us. It was one of the saddest days of my life. It was wet and miserable. We went in to the larger town of Sevenoaks, where we sat silently in a Lyons teahouse drinking tea and eating cakes before going to a cinema to see Rosalind Russell in
Auntie Mame
, which was supposed to be fun but in my eyes was a very sad movie. We hardly exchanged any words that day and I remember walking slowly in the rain back up the road to John Howard Mitchell House as it was getting dark, to say goodbye amid uncertainty as to when we would see each other again. We loaded Mum up with more daffodils than she could carry – we had picked them in the fields below John Howard Mitchell House for her.

A couple of days later the bus came to take us to London and to the ship bound for Australia. We were all excited and a bit anxious. Mary O’Brien says she remembers as a twelve-year-old feeling the anticipation of the bus trip to Tilbury Docks as we drove under the Blackwall tunnel and through parts of the East End of London, where she had lived.

We arrived late on a wet and miserable April afternoon at Tilbury Docks. None of us had ever been in a tall building before and we were overawed by the sight of the eight-decked S.S.
Strathaird
, which was to become our home for the next six weeks.

There was no band or streamers or cheering crowds and no family to wave us goodbye. I felt the excitement of the adventure giving way to sadness as I began to grasp the significance of leaving. During the evening one of our two adult escorts, a New Zealand nurse, came into our cabin with her guitar. While she had every intention of cheering us up with a singsong she made us all even sadder when she sang ‘Botany Bay’ and the words, ‘We’re leaving old England forever …’

The S.S.
Strathaird
was a grand old P&O liner built in 1932. After being used as a troopship to carry Australian and other Allied soldiers in World War II, it had been beautifully restored to its original splendour, which included oak-panelled walls, stained-glass windows, ornate ceilings, parquet floors, Persian rugs, and antique furniture and artworks.

None of us kids from poor backgrounds had ever been near the luxury we were to experience on the S.S.
Strathaird
. At home the food was very basic: most of the meat was minced; a big cooked meal was likely to be sausage and mash; and our evening meal might consist of a fried-egg sandwich. All of our furniture was second-hand. Our bedside tables were made of upturned wooden orange boxes; our floor coverings were mostly offcuts of linoleum; and almost all our clothes were hand-me-downs. Having already spent the previous three weeks in Fairbridge’s grand country mansion in Kent and been taken to London to be outfitted with the finest summer and winter wardrobes, we were to spend the next five and a half weeks being treated like royalty.

The
Strathaird
had been converted from a three-class to a one-class ship for the carriage of migrants to Australia, but many of its first-class features remained. We were assigned two former first-class state cabins on the preferred D Deck. Both of these large cabins had six bunks and an ensuite bathroom. The girls in our party and the youngest boy, six-year-old Paul, who was to commit suicide a few years after he left Fairbridge, were in one cabin. The older boys were in the other. We were lucky to have ended up on the P.O.S.H. side of the ship: in the days before air conditioning you paid extra to travel on the port side travelling out and the starboard side home – Port Out, Starboard Home – thus avoiding the hot afternoon sun of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Our other escort for the journey was an Australian primary-school teacher. The Fairbridge Society in London would have recruited her and the New Zealand nurse because they came from good families and had excellent references. Having completed their customary ‘grand tour’ of Europe the young women were given a free trip home in return for being our carers on the journey to Australia.

After leaving Tilbury we headed across the North Sea to Cuxhaven in northern Germany, where we picked up around 600 German migrants also destined for Australia. Almost as a reminder of who won the war, they were allocated the less inviting cabins on the lower decks because the British migrants had already been allocated most of the former first-class sections of the ship.

After Cuxhaven we steamed back through the English Channel and south through the Bay of Biscay with its huge waves and gale force winds, which made most of the passengers seasick. I recall going to the front of the top deck with my brothers and we could lean almost forty-five degrees into the strong headwind without falling over. Ten-year-old Wendy Harris kept a diary of our voyage out:

After a couple of days we passed into the relative calm of the straits of Gibraltar in the early dawn, and we entered the beautiful, sunny Mediterranean.

Of course we missed our mum. We were able to send postcards home from the ship, and posted the first one when the mail boat came alongside us as we sailed past Gibraltar. Not until we reached Australia would we receive our first letter from home.

I was fascinated by the deep blue Mediterranean Sea, which some years later would become one of the great loves of my life. Wendy’s diary records the day we approached Egypt and the Suez Canal:

The
Strathaird
was a fabulous adventure for a boy and we spent days exploring, and uncovering all of its secrets: its eight decks from A to H, its lifeboats, games rooms, cinema, swimming pool, sundecks, library and reading room, smoking rooms, lounges and staircases.

We had our own cabin steward who woke us each morning with an orange juice, or a cup of tea and a biscuit, in bed. He did everything for us, including making our beds, and organising the washing and pressing of our clothes.