Читать книгу A British Home Child in Canada 2-Book Bundle - Patricia Skidmore - Страница 7

This is a story of my mother, Marjorie, who was one of the thousands upon thousands of children who were removed from their families, their communities, and their country to be placed in one of the British colonies to provide “white stock” and cheap labour for that colony.

As a child, it angered me when I asked my mother about her past and she would not tell me. The anger stemmed from fear, as I imagined the many horrid secrets that she was keeping from me about her past. I felt such a strong sense of not belonging that I told the other children in my school that I came from Mars. We had no past. There was nothing to root me to my birthplace. I did not understand why my mother was so vague about her family and why they all lived in England while we lived in Canada.

It took me many years to discover why my mother would not tell me about her childhood family — it was not because she was keeping a dark secret, but because she had lost her roots.

By 1937, Marjorie’s family had been living in Whitley Bay, in northern England, since the early 1920s. Unemployment there was high, and Marjorie’s father had left his family and the area to look for work. He did find employment around London but had not returned home for the past four years. From time to time he sent some money to his wife and their nine children, but it was rarely enough to sustain them.

In February 1937, with the permission of Marjorie’s father, Marjorie, two sisters, and a brother were removed from their mother’s care by one of Britain’s many emigration societies, the Fairbridge Society. (Kingsley Fairbridge started the Society for the Furtherance of Child Migration to the Colonies in 1909. It was soon shortened to the Child Emigration Society. In 1935 it was renamed the Fairbridge Farm Schools Incorporation, and by the early 1950s it was renamed again to the Fairbridge Society Incorporation. For the purposes of this book, the “Fairbridge Society” will be the main title used.) The society placed the four children in the Middlemore Emigration Home, over two hundred miles southwest of Whitley Bay, in Selly Oak, Birmingham. There they waited their turn to be tested to see if they were mentally and physically fit enough to be accepted for emigration to Canada.

Six months later, ten-year-old Marjorie and her eight-year-old brother were sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Marjorie recalled that when leaving Liverpool on the Duchess of Atholl she physically pulled an “imaginary cloak” of protection around her as the shoreline slipped away. For this ten-year-old, forgetting her past, her family, and England was the only survival tool she had to enable her to face her frightening and uncertain future. She and her brother were separated and continued to be so until they were well into adulthood. Two of her sisters were at the Middlemore Emigration Home and her beloved mother was in Whitley Bay with her other siblings. She had no one.

Their younger sister was sent out eleven months later, but the older sister, Joyce, was left behind at the home in Birmingham. She was deemed to be too old for the Fairbridge farm school scheme. She was only twelve, but her records incorrectly showed that she was thirteen.[1] Her loss was as great as her siblings’. They were simply gone one day, and she was not even allowed to say goodbye to them when they left for Canada. Joyce stayed at the home until she was sixteen, then was sent back to her family.

I started my research with a small handful of my mother’s early memories, mostly from her childhood at Whitley Bay: she recalled swinging on an old rusty gate, yelling to her mother for a half penny. It was her tenth birthday. She eventually ran off across the alley to school without so much as a farthing. She also recalled playing on the sands at Whitley Bay, the Spanish City Fun Fair at the north end of the town and walking over to St. Mary’s Lighthouse at low tide. I had a photograph of my mother (see top front cover and page 172), although it would take finding several other pieces of her journey before we recognized this as a photograph from the day she arrived at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School. She had vague memories of Canada House in London and of leaving Liverpool. The rest was locked away.

I was determined to unlock her hidden past. I contacted the Whitley Bay School District. They still had records from the 1930s, and I was not only able to discover which schools she attended, but also the dates she attended and the addresses she lived at while at each school. I tracked down the only home where they lived, across the alley from a school: a brownstone house on John Street. I stood and imagined her swinging on a rusty gate and running off to school. I walked the Whitley Bay sand and imagined her playing there as a child. I visited the lighthouse and the old fairgrounds. I walked the same streets that she did as a child.

When I felt that I had found what I could of her first ten years in Whitley Bay, I brought my mother back to the little seaside town of her birth in 2007 to share with her all that I had found. Her big sister Joyce came with us. Seventy years had passed since the sisters had seen Whitley Bay. They both said that they did not remember much, but I walked quietly behind them, with a notepad, as memory after memory poured out.

Together, we walked from the last flat they lived in with their family, on Whitley Road, to the train station — the very station the children left from in February 1937. We stood by the new gate at the John Street brownstone and imagined the squeaky, rusty old gate and ten-year-old Marjorie running across the lane to Cullercoats Primary School. It was torn down years ago, but standing there I felt I could see Marjorie running across the alley to the school. Marjorie and Joyce stood by the Rockcliffe School, the last school they attended in Whitley Bay, and memories of skipping school and running to play on the beach came back to them. We visited the other houses where the family had lived and the other schools the children attended.

A fuller picture of her childhood slowly emerged. Together we pieced her last few months at home with her mother, and then her journey from the Whitley Bay train station to Newcastle upon Tyne, down to Birmingham, and eventually to London, and finally up to Liverpool. The crossing of the Atlantic aboard the Duchess of Atholl, landing in Montreal and the train ride to Vancouver, the ferry to Nanaimo, and finally the last bus ride to Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island. These events all had dates attached to them now. We had a framework to work from, and with it details of her childhood and her journey to Canada emerged.

The pieces of the puzzle were coming together to portray a picture, each piece helping to unlock her painful past. But there was still one pain that needed addressing: the feeling of betrayal towards her mother that Marjorie had carried for seventy years. By the time Marjorie turned ten, she had not seen her father for almost four years, thus, removed from her mother’s care, it was natural for her to blame only her mother for sending her away and not keeping her safe.

My grandmother managed to get to Canada for a brief visit with her “Canadian” children in 1969. It would be the only time after being sent away that Marjorie would see her. It was not a successful visit. Marjorie wanted answers and her mother could not give any. My grandmother returned to England, the bond with her daughter still as broken as ever.

During our visit to England we were able to visit my grandparent’s grave. They are buried at the Greenwich Cemetery on Shooters Hill, Eltham, London. As Marjorie stood by the grave, she was able to tell her mother that she forgave her and that she finally realizes, after all these years, that it was not her mother who sent her away. Marjorie had been told so frequently by her English family members that it was to her mother’s “eternal distress that she lost her children to Canada.” To know that they both shared this “distress” at being parted helped Marjorie’s healing and allowed her to forgive.

In February 2010, Marjorie received a call to be present at the formal apology that the then-British-prime-minister, Gordon Brown, was scheduled to give to all child emigrants sent from Britain to the colonies from 1619 to the 1970s. The 350-year history of child migration was finally being recognized for what it was for so many of the children — a shameful part of British history. Marjorie waited for seventy-three years to hear it. In her heart, she knew from the start that it was wrong to separate her from her family and send her to the colonies.

When the prime minister took Marjorie’s hand during his very personal and individual apology to each of home children present, he looked directly at Marjorie and said to her, “I am truly sorry.” I sensed that she fully believed that he was sorry for what happened to her and even appeared to be a little shocked at the whole phenomena of child migration. With that recognition and understanding, she was finally able to shed the last of her shame.

This is Marjorie’s story. It is a story of a little girl who learned at a very young age that it would do no good to cry, no matter how frightened she was. The only person who could stop those tears was 6,000 miles away. When Marjorie was removed from her mother’s care, they not only took her away from her family, her community, and her country, they took away the love of the most important person in her world — her mother. It is a story of loss and a story of discovery. It is a story of healing and of forgiveness.

This is also my story. As a little girl I struggled to accept my mother — this woman without a past. As a teenager I simply left. After my first son was born, I wondered how I could be a good mother if I couldn’t be a good daughter. It took many years to find a way to walk together with my mother. I needed answers and it was not until I fully understood that she wasn’t keeping anything from me, that we could truly communicate. She had lost her past. Together we went and found it.