The Forgotten Children (9 page)
Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
Sunday
7 am. Rising Bell
7.45 am. Bedmaking
8 am. Breakfast.
9 am. Bell. Get Ready for Church.
9.30 am. C. of E. M[olong] C[hurch]. Service.
11 am. Sunday School for all children aged 9 years and Under.
12 noon. Dinner for all.
Sunday afternoons consisted of more sport, usually for the trainees, who normally worked all day on Saturday.
2 pm. Cricket for Trainees and Older School Boys.
3.30. Bus to Molong with those children who have to be Baptised at the St. John’s Church of England (Such child being Baptised may invite a friend or brother or sister to attend the Baptism as well.)
Sunday night back in our cottages was usually an empty time when we would sit around after the evening meal and talk, or perhaps write a letter home – for those of us who had someone to write to. For me, a slow Sunday night was a time to reflect on how it was that I had gone from living happily as part of a family in a village in the south of England to being with almost 200 other children in a tough farm school in the Australian bush.
S
ETTLING IN
Almost every child who went to Fairbridge Farm School still vividly recalls the day they arrived. I remember having to adjust to a regime that was much tougher than anything I had expected. There was no induction on arrival, and no one to show us the ropes, so we all quickly learnt to tag along with the others whenever the village bell tolled.
The adjustment was even harder for many other children. I missed my mum but I was nearly thirteen years old and I knew she was following us out to Australia. Most of the other kids were not so lucky. They were much younger than me when they arrived and were unlikely to see their parents again.
Linda Gidman was only five when she arrived at Fairbridge. Her older sister and brother were already there, but she was still unhappy:
I kept asking for my mother and I was saying, ‘My mother will come through the door any time,’ and ‘Mum wouldn’t leave me here,’ you know. ‘I’m waiting for Mummy to take me home,’ and all that sort of thing … And they were saying, ‘Well she’s not coming: make the most of it.’
Laurie Reid arrived as a seven-year-old in 1950 with an older brother and two older sisters. He remembers crying for his mother:
After just a couple of days I started to cry, ‘I want my mother, I want my mother.’ … And she [the cottage mother] said, ‘I’ll give you something to bloody well cry about.’ And they did, they strapped me and I found every time I cried I got the strap. So hey, I’d better cut this out and grow up fast, you know.
Within a fortnight of arriving at Fairbridge, Billy King wrote to Dorothy Watkins, the social worker who had arranged for him to be sent from a children’s home in Cornwall, pleading to be allowed to come home:
I do not like it hear [sic] it is nothing like you said … I wish I could come back to England than stay in this place until I am 17 and I still won’t have enough money to come back … They at least could have told me the truth about the place instead they told lies … We do not ride horses to school.
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Watkins responded by writing to Woods asking him to calm down Billy:
I can remember Woodsie taking me down to his office and … him threatening me with a hiding if I didn’t stop my blubbering and get back to my cottage … As time went on … I sort of knew that I couldn’t do nothing about going home. I had to sort of put up with it.
Being forced to adapt to life without parents was difficult enough, but many of the children were also split up from their brothers and sisters as soon as they arrived. My two brothers and I were lucky: we were put in the same cottage. We later learnt it was because there happened to be three beds available in the dormitory when we arrived, since three boys had left the cottage in recent months, having reached seventeen years of age. Being together gave us greater security. On our first morning in the cottage, one of the older boys started picking on my twin brother, Richard. Dudley quickly moved in and made it clear he would fight the bigger boy if necessary. From then on the message was clear: if you picked on one of the Hill boys, you might have to take on the others as well.
Not all the children were so fortunate. Siblings who had never been apart were sent to live in separate cottages, as Fairbridge simply allocated children to the available beds, making no attempt to keep families together. Boys lived in separate cottages from girls, which meant sisters and brothers were separated within an hour of arriving at Fairbridge. This could be especially traumatic for the smallest children, who were already yearning for their parents.
Wendy Harris and her little brother, Paul, came out in the same party of children as us. On the ship coming over Paul was allowed to sleep in the same cabin as Wendy, so she could look after him. But immediately after arriving at Fairbridge they were separated: Wendy was sent to live in the girls’ Molong Cottage and Paul to the boys’ Blue Cottage. Wendy remembers that Paul kept coming over to her cottage crying for his older sister, until the Molong cottage mother banned Wendy from seeing him and told Paul he couldn’t come over to his sister’s cottage any more.
2
When Stewart Lee arrived with his three older brothers, the four boys were split up and put into three cottages. Nine-year-old Sid went into Red Cottage, eight-year-old Ian into Blue and ten-year-old Graham went with Stewart into Mort Cottage. He says: ‘Well, the worst memory is … when I was split from my brothers … I was only four. Always, even in England, where my brothers went, I went.’
Six-year-old Peter Bennett and his nine-year-old sister, Marie, were in the last party of Fairbridge children to leave England before World War II, and arrived at Molong in 1940. They were plucked from Middlemore Homes just outside Birmingham. Marie was to have been sent ahead of Peter to the Fairbridge school in Pinjarra in Western Australia, but she was delayed with tonsillitis and then the threat of war. By then it was thought Peter was old enough to go with Marie, so together they were sent to Molong. Peter often wonders:
If Marie had gone to Canada, or Pinjarra, and I ended up in Fairbridge Molong, would we have ever met again? Possibly never.
Because of the war, Peter’s party came via Canada:
We left up in Newcastle on the east coast in the
Duchess of Richmond
. We couldn’t come down the Suez because the war was on; we had to go up around the Atlantic and across to Quebec, up the Lawrence River to Montreal, five days by train across Canada and we got to the Canadian Fairbridge Farm School [on Vancouver Island] and stayed there for a month.
Margaret Watt was a ten-year-old travelling in the same party as Peter in 1940 and remembers the excitement of the wartime convoy leaving England: ‘We went right up north to escape all the submarines and we went past ten icebergs and two merchant ships were sunk and some other damaged but we weren’t touched.’
Peter described the trip across the Pacific:
Then we boarded the
Orangi
and came down to Australia through Tahiti and Honolulu. At Honolulu we couldn’t get off the boat because they had twenty-eight names on one passport. So they had to get in touch with Washington and by the time the reply came, it was time for the boat to leave. So we never got off the boat.… We were able to land in Fiji and they took us around the island and we saw coconuts and bananas and pineapples. The kids didn’t even know what they were; we’d never seen anything like it. And we left Suva and came down to Auckland, where they took us to see a movie, and from Auckland we came across to Australia …
As soon as Peter and Marie arrived at Fairbridge they were split up and saw little of one another in the village after that: ‘Very seldom did I see my sister, or she see me, or very seldom did we talk to each other … because we just weren’t allowed to mix with the girls. That was it.’
Peter recalls his difficulty settling in at Fairbridge:
I was a very timid, scared, frightened little person … I had a lot of time and trouble settling down in Fairbridge … I used to wet the bed and you were made to hang out your clothes and sheets every morning and, I mean … a six-year-old child that’s come out of an orphanage. I mean, when I look back on it, it’s just unbelievable that you could be treated like that.
I really didn’t have a happy childhood and it was only … the friends that we had and the mates and everything within the cottages, the camaraderie that we’d got between each other, that sort of helped you through.
Malcolm Field arrived at Fairbridge as a nine-year-old in 1952 with his fourteen-year-old brother, Laurie. Their six-year-old sister, Jane, was already at Fairbridge, having arrived more than a year earlier. When they were finally reunited they were to see very little of each other:
My sister says to me that the only time she saw me was on Sunday at the church, which was in the dining hall in those days before the chapel was built, and she’d say to her friends, ‘That’s my brother, Malcolm, he’s the server.’ That’s the only time. We hardly ever spoke.
The Fairbridge village was very beautiful and well maintained, largely by the children. The village was built on typical Australian harsh and sparse bushland. By the time we arrived in the late 1950s, the shrubs and trees that had been planted when Fairbridge first opened in the late 1930s had matured, and each cottage garden was well cared for by the children, under the supervision of their cottage mother.
Like many others, I was surprised to find it so cold when I arrived. In all the photographs and brochures we were given by Australia House and by Fairbridge in London the sun was always shining. We simply weren’t prepared for the winters to be so cold. Joyce Drury, who arrived in Australia in 1939 aged ten, recalls:
I came in June to Molong – and I have never felt the cold as I did that first night … And getting up in the morning! And there was frost, and even though I came from England, it’s a wetter kind of climate up in Lancashire in the north-west and I’d seen snow but I hadn’t seen frost on the ground, and that surprised me.
Suffering such temperatures was made worse by having to go about the village barefoot most of the time and not being allowed to put your hands in your pockets. David Eva, who arrived at Fairbridge as a ten-year-old, remembers his first morning:
Of course I had no shoes on, and all these other bloody kids had no shoes on, and there were two heaters in this massive great hall and these two little heaters … and I mean, they wouldn’t heat up that hall if you had a furnace there, the size of it.
Peter Bennett recalls how, aged only six, he was forced to run around in bare feet in winter, and wasn’t allowed to put his hands in his pockets, so both his hands and feet bled:
You couldn’t have any shoes. And Molong was the coldest place in the world. And I used to get these chilblains on my fingers and they would bleed and my feet would bleed … And hands in pockets! Woods said to me, ‘Hands out of your pockets, Bennett.’ So he said, ‘Come down to the machine.’ So I had to take my pants off, and he sewed the pockets on the leather-working machine he had down at the end of the hall. So, I’m smart, I undid them. And I got caught again. So he sewed them up again and got an assistant to cut the pockets out and said to me, ‘Now open them up.’
Laurie Reid describes how our feet eventually toughened up:
And the only time we used to wear shoes was if you went to church or to secondary school. Now when I left the place it took years and years for me to get all that hard skin off the bottom of my feet. I could walk on bindies or anything and wouldn’t even feel them.
On our first day at Fairbridge we were issued with clothing to replace our London wardrobe. We were given two sets of clothing: one for work and for wearing in the village, and another for school. We also wore our school clothes to church on Sunday, with a grey jacket that was worn on special occasions. The work clothes were khaki, blue or grey shorts and shirt, with a pullover in winter. The school clothes were khaki or blue shorts and shirt, with a Molong school grey pullover for winter and a pair of shoes and grey socks. It was ‘sissy’ to wear socks pulled up so they were worn rolled down around the ankle, however cold it might be, and boys did not wear underwear until they were twelve years old.
Lennie Magee arrived at Fairbridge in 1954 aged seven and was nicknamed ‘Moon’ because of his round face. He remembers his fine English wardrobe vanishing and being issued with rough Fairbridge clothing:
When we first arrived at Fairbridge, each of the boys was wearing a brand new pair of shorts and a blue shirt, a gold and brown tie, a blazer, long grey socks and black leather shoes. They were taken from us the moment we arrived and we were never to see them again … With few exceptions all of the clothes we were issued at Fairbridge were hand-me-downs. Someone else had worn them to a frazzle before us. My first trousers were short, grey and hairy, with buttons, worn with a threadbare T-shirt and bare feet, except on Sunday mornings when we wore shoes. Generously, we were given an extra blanket in winter and a pullover to wear, but it wasn’t until I was twelve years old that I was given my first pair of underpants. Thankfully they were new.
My brother, Dudley, then fourteen, remembers being ordered to the sports field for rugby league practice on our first afternoon at Fairbridge. At that stage he had no clothing other than a pair of khaki shorts and what he’d arrived in, including the black shoes and socks that he had been wearing all day. When he complained that he had no sporting gear, Principal Woods said, ‘Don’t worry, play in what you’re wearing.’
