The Forgotten Children (8 page)

We qualified for the same cooked breakfast that was given to the trainee boys, which was lucky because from 7.30 a.m. till the evening meal back at Fairbridge more than ten hours later, we had to survive on the two-sandwich ration given to all the Fairbridge secondary school kids.

While we were on the bus to Orange, the other Fairbridge school-age kids either went back to their cottages to wash up their breakfast utensils or back to work, before getting ready to go to the local schools. The primary-school children normally went barefoot to school but the secondary-school children wore shoes.

The primary-school children walked to school over the hill at the back of the village to a small four-room construction built in 1939, shortly after Fairbridge was opened. At lunchtime they walked back to Nuffield Hall for a cooked lunch with the village staff and some of the trainees, then went back to school for the afternoon. As with breakfast, a child from each cottage went into the kitchen and brought out the lunch on a metal tray, which the cottage mother served onto a steel plate for each child at the table. The cottage lunch tray had three sections: one for the meat, which was invariably mutton, one for potatoes, and one for other vegetables grown in the village gardens.

The secondary-school children assembled at about a quarter to nine outside the principal’s house to catch the bus for the six-kilometre trip into Molong. One or two were responsible for carrying a big basket containing the sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and sometimes a sugarbag of shrivelled oranges that had been donated to Fairbridge. It would all be left under the stairs outside the classrooms until lunchtime.

The Fairbridge children disliked their school sandwiches and envied the nice lunches the other kids brought to school. Daphne Brown recalls how Fairbridge children scrounged leftover food from the town pupils:

Fairbridge was not geared up to care for the very young children, some of whom were only four. These little ones, who weren’t old enough for school, were sent out after breakfast on their own to pick up small twigs, called ‘chips’, to help light the cottage fires and boilers.

Stewart Lee arrived at Fairbridge in 1955 as a four-year-old, with his three older brothers. He recalls being left each day as the older children went off to the little school at the back of the village:

Daphne Brown remembers she had to pick up chips with the other small children when she arrived at Fairbridge in 1948 as a seven-year-old girl:

After school all the children changed into work clothes for assigned labour around the village or the farm. On Monday and Friday afternoons we all had to present ourselves for ‘village muster’ behind the Nuffield Hall kitchens, near the village bell.

The bell dictated our lives. It rang to wake us up, to tell us it was time to make our beds, to signal breakfast and lunch, when to assemble, when to go to church, and when it was time for evening showers and the night-time curfew.

It wasn’t actually a bell – it was a piece of steel railway line about a metre long that was suspended by a steel chain from a wooden crossbeam. One of the boys, usually a trainee working in the village kitchens, was assigned to ring the ‘bell’ by striking it with an iron bar. Most of us boys liked to ring it because it meant you could make a sound that would be heard for miles around. Fairbridge did own a proper big bronze bell, but it would have been broken if beaten regularly with an iron bar. For years it sat next to the piece of railway line before eventually being put into the Fairbridge chapel, which was built in 1961.

Village muster was physically hard maintenance work around the village and farm. It could involve planting trees, cleaning drains, clearing roads, repairing fences or periodically cleaning out the septic sewerage systems around the village. We also spent a lot of time weeding, and painting the rocks bordering the village roads and paths with white paint. At harvest time we would all be taken up to work on the farm.

On Tuesday afternoons we worked under the guidance of our cottage mothers on the cottage gardens, which were judged once a year by the Fairbridge board of directors. The Cottage Garden Competition was fiercely fought out, particularly among some of the longest-serving cottage mothers: children in their cottages dreaded spring, when they would be ordered out at every available moment to clear, plant, mow, prune and weed the gardens.

In an otherwise totally regimented week we all looked forward to our ‘free’ afternoon on Wednesday. If you were on the discipline list for some offence, though, your privileges were withdrawn and you had to work. During the couple of hours’ free time after school the kids enjoyed playing or simply hanging around. There wasn’t a great deal to do, but most of us enjoyed the little time when we weren’t being ordered around.

Thursday afternoon was sport, which, depending on the time of year, meant cricket, soccer, rugby league, hockey, swimming or the annual inter-cottage Fairbridge athletics carnival. Most of us loved sport as much as we enjoyed our free time but for those children who were not good at sport it could be a nightmare, as the boss would run after the boys he thought were being slack and whip them on the back of the legs to force them to try harder.

Before the evening meal we all had a shower in the cottage bathroom, usually with hot water because the boy who was assigned to clean the bathroom in the cottage each morning was also responsible for relighting the ‘donkey’ heater before going off to school.

The quality of the evening meal varied from cottage to cottage. The cottage mother was responsible for ‘tea’, as we called it, which might be some of the lunch leftovers brought back to the cottage and reheated. Some of the cottage mothers would take the trouble to cook an interesting meal for the children, while the lazier ones served up little more than bread and milk. In other cases, the cottage mother ordered one or more of the secondary-school kids to do the cooking for the whole cottage.

After tea, the Orange High School kids normally did the washing up because we had missed a lot of the cottage and village work during the day. It was an awful job because all the hot water was used up with the evening showers. Cleaning mutton fat off steel pots and plates in tepid or cold water was hard work and seemed to take for ever.

After dinner we just hung around until it was time to go to bed, because there wasn’t much else to do. Unless there was some ordered activity, we were not permitted to leave the cottage after the evening meal. In our cottage there was no radio or TV and no books, except for the odd comic or Zane Grey western.

On winter’s evenings we were allowed to light the one fire in our cottage, and up to fifteen children would crowd around it before going off to bed in the freezing cold dormitory at the other end of the building. The farm rules dictated the dormitory windows always stayed open – in summer and winter – and there was no heating. A number of Fairbridge children recall they were only permitted by their cottage mothers to light a fire on rare occasions. Talking after lights out was always forbidden.

The weekend was as regimented as the rest of the week, but it usually involved sport and free time, which most of us loved. A regular feature was the Weekend Notice, which was roughly typed on pink or yellow paper by the boss on his old manual Olivetti typewriter and pinned up on one of the entrance doors of Nuffield Hall every Friday afternoon. A surviving example of a Weekend Notice begins with orders for Friday afternoon village muster, and on this particular Friday, arrangements had been made for some of the children to go to the cinema in Molong.
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This was a special occasion, as normally a trip to the cinema was limited to the trainees over fifteen years of age.

After breakfast on Saturday some of us were put to work on jobs such as picking up meat and vegetable rations for the evening meals or collecting wheelbarrow loads of coke for the cottages’ hot water systems. Everyone else worked on the big Saturday-morning village muster.

During the summer months there might be other events woven into the weekend schedule, including pony club for the few children who had access to the handful of horses at Fairbridge:

After a busy morning the village had lunch, at the end of which pocket money was handed out. The base pocket money when I was at Fairbridge was threepence for the little kids, sixpence for the secondary-school-age kids, a shilling for the fifteen-year-old trainees and two shillings for the sixteen-year-olds. The tuckshop would be open for half an hour and we’d be able to buy a few sweets with our pocket money.

Saturday afternoon involved organised sport for everyone, except trainees who were working in the dairy, the farm or the village kitchens. In summer we usually played cricket or went swimming in the big dam at the back of Fairbridge Farm, but during droughts or when the water level was low we were taken into the little town swimming pool in Molong.

In winter we were relayed in an old bus or in the farm truck or station wagon into Orange or Molong to play rugby league or hockey against ‘town kids’. The transportation of multiple sporting teams of boys and girls by Principal Woods, his wife Ruth and perhaps one or two other staff members was a logistical marvel. On more than one occasion, Woods, who was a very large man, squeezed an entire team of thirteen of us rugby league players, covered in mud, into the one station wagon for the trip back to the farm.

Most Saturday nights were like any other night of the week. We were confined to our cottages, although every couple of months an old movie would be shown on the antiquated Fairbridge film projector in Nuffield Hall. Sometimes Fairbridge would hire out the large and impressive Nuffield Hall on a Saturday night for banquets and balls and we would be the waiters for the evening, or we might host a dinner and a social for the Junior Farmers Club, or some other local community activity.

Sunday was the one day we did not work before breakfast; the whole village, except the working trainees, slept in until 7 a.m. Attendance at church was compulsory and on most Sunday mornings the Anglican vicar came out to Fairbridge to conduct a service in the Fairbridge dining hall. But on the first Sunday of each month we crowded on to the old Fairbridge bus and went to the service in Molong. My brothers and I had been to church regularly at school in England, and I found the services at Fairbridge every bit as tedious and boring as the ones I remembered in Langney.