The Forgotten Children (27 page)

Another aspect of the children’s value system at Fairbridge was respect for brawn over brain. Bookish kids who showed an interest in schooling were spurned and the Orange High School kids were resented. The big and physically strong ruled over the small and the weak. Fairbridge was a pretty tough place where little emotion was shown. As Lennie Magee remembers:

Although few former Fairbridge children talk about it, there was a system of bullying, particularly among the boys. The little boys were called runts and expected to take orders from the older boys. Barney Piercy remembers being beaten by an older boy shortly after his arrival.

Eric ‘Chook’ Fowler always felt a bit of an outsider at Fairbridge. He was one of ten children and was only four years old when his mother died. His father was an officer in the Royal Ulster Fusiliers based in Ireland and when he remarried he sent Eric, aged twelve, out to Fairbridge. Eric says his father thought he was going to a ‘young gentlemen’s school’. For the whole time he was there Eric was frightened to step out of line.

Malcolm Field, or ‘Flossy’, who had migrated twice from Britain in one year because of his feckless mother, did not come from a typical Fairbridge background either, and he did not become a typical Fairbridge kid when he reached the farm school. Malcolm explains that he got a ‘lucky break’ at Fairbridge.

After the service there was a reception in the dining hall and a number of the children were picked to show guests from around the district the village and the farm. Flossy was to look after Mr and Mrs Glasson from the neighbouring property, ‘Gamboola’. A few months later the childless Mrs Glasson invited Malcolm to stay at Gamboola for Christmas. ‘So I went for Christmas,’ he says, ‘and they have a beautiful old homestead and I lived there as a member of the family.’

Malcolm was regularly invited to spend weekends and school holidays at Gamboola. He was also one of the few who attended Orange High and remembers the Glassons helping him get a second-hand Orange High School jacket. When he finished school he went to live and work with the Glassons and boasts that he was probably the only Fairbridge boy never to have worked on a village muster or as a trainee.

Malcolm accepts that his good fortune put him at odds with the other Fairbridge children.

Fairbridge children were generally regarded as social undesirables by the local townspeople. Years later I was told by one of the Molong girls who was in my class at school that when the old Fairbridge bus full of kids arrived at the Molong swimming pool on a hot Sunday afternoon in summer, many of the parents would gather up their children and immediately leave.

After leaving Fairbridge, when he was working on the railways, Laurie Reid remembers going out with a nice local girl. When her parents discovered he had come from Fairbridge they put a stop to it.

Despite Fairbridge being coeducational, the lives of the boys and the girls were highly regulated and separate, and there were rarely any sex scandals. Occasionally kids had boyfriends or girlfriends, but it rarely became too serious. As Gwen Miller remembers:

For many years Fairbridge had an arrangement whereby Legacy girls came to stay at the farm school for a couple of weeks during the mid-year school holidays. Legacy was a big charity that assisted the families of servicemen who had died as a result of war and the Legacy girls were daughters of deceased servicemen. Their arrival created great excitement among the Fairbridge boys. I remember quivering with the thrill of having a Legacy girl as a girlfriend for a couple of weeks. We got to hold hands in the darkened back of the Fairbridge truck and I can still feel her breath now as she leant over and kissed me on the cheek.

Lennie Magee remembers as teenagers at Fairbridge in the late 1950s how clumsy and unsure we were with the girls.

The girls were every bit as naïve about sex as the boys – possibly even more so. Daphne Brown, who arrived at Fairbridge as a seven-year-old in 1948, recalls:

Joyce Drury remembers being frightened of kissing a boy:

While the children may have tried to create their own world, most had no other life experience to fall back on other than their years at Fairbridge. When they finally left the place they went out into the world alone with no family and no network of support.

Most Fairbridge kids as seventeen-year-olds out in the world found themselves physically and emotionally isolated, often living entirely by themselves, working by themselves and coming home to empty barracks. They had to live with something frighteningly new: loneliness.

Having a mum made my brothers and me different from other Fairbridge kids, because we knew we belonged somewhere and Fairbridge was not our only family. I will always remember one of the toughest trainees coming over to me when I was hanging out washing one afternoon behind Canonbar Cottage. When he was sure no one was near, he asked, ‘What’s it like to have a mum?’ I had no idea how to answer the question and he left disappointed when I said words to the effect that I thought it was okay. Even though the fact we would be together as a family again made us different, I didn’t feel the kids treated us any differently – we were all in it together, trying to cope with life at the farm school as best we could.

Even after the introduction of the One Parent Scheme in the late 1950s, Fairbridge discouraged parents from having too much contact with their children. Following a visit to Australia, a member of the UK Fairbridge Society, W. L. Sandover, reported to the London Fairbridge Society that ‘A lot of trouble arises when parents follow the children to Australia.’
¹

Single parents such as my mum were told that once they arrived in Australia they would be encouraged to make regular visits to see their children. A brochure explaining the One Parent Scheme made the claim that the parent:

But my mum complained that from the time she arrived in Australia late in 1959 she was provided with no assistance and no guidance in finding a home or a job. At one point Mum applied for a job as a cook on the neighbouring farm Gamboola, owned by the Glasson family. Mum was at Fairbridge visiting us and was to be picked up after eight o’clock that evening by Mrs Glasson, who proposed to drive her over to Gamboola, show her around, interview her for the job and then drop her off at Molong railway station in time to catch the overnight Forbes mail train to Sydney.

Nearly fifty years later the following file note, signed by Woods, was discovered in a miscellaneous collection of papers in the Fairbridge Foundation offices in Sydney.
³

The difficulty for Fairbridge was that when parents visited the farm school they were often disturbed by what they saw. I still recall when my mother first came to Fairbridge. She was horrified.

She stayed up the back of the village in one of the two guesthouses for visitors – simple accommodation with two single beds in each guestroom and a communal bathroom and toilet at the end of the verandah. It had a common room with an electric jug so my brothers and I were allowed at certain times during her visit to go up and have a cup of tea with her.

On her first morning she was shaken by the scene in Nuffield Hall. She was obliged to sit up on the stage with the staff and visitors to be served breakfast. Looking down, she would have seen us being marched in with nearly 200 other children, largely barefoot, dressed in rough clothing and with terrible haircuts, then seen us all sitting along wooden benches, eating bread and porridge on a lino-topped table from steel bowls and plates.

She was distressed after breakfast and we tried to console her as she mumbled words to the effect of ‘What have I done?’ and ‘It’s like something out of
Oliver Twist
.’

Some parents were so concerned when they came and saw Fairbridge that they wanted to immediately take their children away. A surviving undated report from the after care officer, W. Phillips, to Principal Woods outlines the concerns expressed by two sets of parents who were visiting their children for the first time at the farm school. After a two-day visit one of the fathers said the children ‘were treated far more badly than he himself had been treated as a prisoner of war’.
⁴

Phillips asked the parents to bring down their luggage to the principal’s house on the day they were leaving so he could give them a lift to Molong railway station. At an early lunch on the staff table in Nuffield Hall one of the parents, Mr Royale, said very loudly, ‘I wouldn’t leave my kids here for anything if I had somewhere else to leave them.’ When Phillips suggested to Royale that it might be better to take the children with him when he left, Royale responded by saying that he had already checked with the migrant hostel manager in Sydney, who said they could not take the children.

Royale told Phillips that he had talked to many of the boys during his two-day stay and that even though they had been ‘afraid to open their mouths’, they all told him they hated the place. Phillips wrote:

Phillips’s main worry was that another parent present with Royale, Mr Parker, said that the Methodist minister in Orange had described Fairbridge as a ‘dreadful’ place.

In 1961 I turned fifteen, and in the normal course of events I would have been expected to become a trainee working on the farm for the next two years. But by now Mum was in Australia. After completing my Intermediate Certificate I was going to leave the farm school to go and live with her.

When I told Woods at the end of the school year that my mum had arranged for me to join her, he said that I was expected to be a trainee like everyone else. The following Saturday, when I intended to catch the train to Sydney, he overruled my plan and announced at the village breakfast that I was to captain the under-fifteen cricket team that was to play that morning at Fairbridge against a team from Molong. I was filled with dread at the thought of not being allowed to leave and spending the next two years at Fairbridge as a trainee.

During the cricket game I hit a ball to the boundary through mid wicket and heard Woods, who was umpiring the game from his upturned oil can, shout, ‘Ho, ho, Hill leaves Fairbridge victorious,’ which signalled to me that he was not going to stand in my way after all.

At the end of the game I raced down to my cottage to pack my belongings into a small cardboard suitcase. It struck me how sad it was that after nearly three years at Fairbridge I had so little to take away with me. I had just enough time to say goodbye to my brothers, who intended to stay on at Orange High School but would both leave a few months later. In my desperation to catch the train I didn’t have enough time to say goodbye to any of my friends, Woods or even my cottage mother.

It was now too late to catch the daylight train to Sydney at Molong railway station as it would already have passed through, but Paddy O’Brien, the oldest boy in our group that had come out to Australia on the S.S.
Strathaird
, now had his driver’s licence and was driving a Fairbridge truck into Orange to pick up supplies. Paddy was happy to give me a lift, once I assured him I wasn’t absconding and he wouldn’t get into trouble with Woods. We were able to reach Orange with a few minutes to spare, as it had taken over an hour for the train to get there on the steep railway line from Molong through Amaroo and Borenore.

On the exhausting 300-kilometre train trip to Sydney I thought about my years at Fairbridge and contemplated what life now held in store. I felt strangely empty about leaving, which was similar to how Lenny Magee felt the day he left:

The train to Sydney was crowded. I was sitting next to a man who worked as a piano tuner and travelled around the countryside tuning pianos for several weeks on end, going home to his family for a few days every month. It sounded like an unappealing way to spend a life and I remember hoping that fortune would smile more kindly on me.

It was after nine o’clock when I reached Sydney and I was tired and hungry, having spent the last of my money on a bread roll from the train buffet some hours before. My mum was at Sydney’s Central railway station to meet me. It had been almost three years since she had waved us goodbye at the Fairbridge house at Knockholt in Kent. I recall her excitement, mixed with relief, that we were back together; but she would not be totally relaxed until my brothers left Fairbridge and joined us in a few months’ time.

We caught a suburban train through the city’s underground and over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to North Sydney. I sat, wide-eyed, in the window seat, marvelling at the harbour and seeing the bright lights of a big city for the first time. We walked down from North Sydney station to Mum’s tiny downstairs bed-sitter, which was in a terrace house at 96 Union Street that had been split into five little flats, all occupied by migrants from Europe. We all had to share the one bathroom and one toilet, which were upstairs. Mum’s bed-sitter had two small rooms. In one was a single bed, a bedside table, a tiny wardrobe, a small table pushed up against the wall under the window and three chairs. There wasn’t room for the fourth chair. The other room was even smaller: it had enough room for a stove, a sink and in the corner a camp stretcher for me. The flat had no phone, no refrigerator, no TV and only a transistor radio.

We weren’t particularly badly off since most migrants to Australia in those postwar years lived that way until they’d saved enough for a deposit on their own home, which in most cases took many years of hard work and a lot of overtime.

Mum had a boyfriend named Paul. He was an unmarried German builder and, like Mum, was in his mid-forties. They had met when Mum was working for a while at Sydney’s Concord military repatriation hospital as a nursing aid. On Saturdays a group of German workers who had come to Sydney from work on the Snowy Mountains project for a weekend’s recreation would phone the nurses quarters’ and ask out women of a similar age to the German Concordia Club in a nearby suburb for dinner and a dance.

After my arrival Paul didn’t stay on the scene long and Mum was devastated when he stopped calling around. The short period he was on the scene was the only time I remember seeing her with a man and so happy. She thought my arrival and the prospect of my two brothers arriving had frightened him off – but he had stayed around long enough to show me how to shave. By the age of fifteen I had grown a lot of facial fluff and had no idea what to do about it, as I’d never seen anyone have a shave before.

Mum was working in the Coles cafeteria in Pitt Street in the city. She wasn’t earning a great deal so it was expected that I would immediately find a job and start paying my own way. The day after I arrived was a beautiful summer Sunday that I spent walking with Mum around the foreshore parks near North Sydney. The next morning Mum left early for work and I got myself ready to start looking for a job. At Fairbridge I had been taught some basic rules about turning up for an interview, including having a clean, ironed shirt, neat, combed hair and polished shoes.

I caught the number 247 bus from outside North Sydney station up the Pacific Highway to Crows Nest, where Mum had told me I would find the government-run unemployment office. I filled out a form and it wasn’t long before I was called in for an interview. A nice man opened a drawer in his wooden filing cabinet marked ‘Male 15–16 year old’, which was full of cards recording available jobs. In those days Australia was experiencing ‘over full’ employment, meaning that the number of jobs outstripped the number of people looking for work. For the next few years jobs were so plentiful that I drifted from job to job and could boast that I was never unemployed for more than a day.

Of all the jobs at the unemployment office open to unskilled, inexperienced fifteen-year-olds I applied to work at Ismays’ hardware shop in Willoughby Road, Crows Nest – because it was the closest to Mum’s little flat. The Ismays were looking for a junior and were paying the award rate of £5, four shillings and sixpence a week (the basic full adult wage was around £12 a week).

Somehow, they knew about Fairbridge and were very tolerant and understanding, even though I was dumbstruck at the counter of the shop whenever a customer asked for even the most basic item and I had no idea what they were talking about. It was even worse when the shop was very busy and someone would yell out for me to answer the phone. I had never used a telephone before and didn’t know I had to say something when I picked up the handset. After a short time they limited my duties to going out with the truck driver to help with deliveries, or sorting out nuts and bolts at the back of the shop, which I found excruciatingly boring.