is the nucleus of our society, and it was precisely the family support system that was torn away from many of the children and replaced with something quite inferior.
Isobel Harvey, a B.C. child welfare worker in the 1940s, visited the farm school in 1944 and presented a nine-page report on the conditions she found at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School at that time. The cottages were, in Harvey’s opinion, “planned on an outmoded plan which allows the cottage mother little opportunity to foster any feeling of home … most of the children appear in aprons designed by the school clothing head, one might imagine they were residents of an orphanage in the last century.”[1] Harvey’s report was written almost two years after they sent Marjorie out to work as a domestic servant. It appeared that life at the farm school had not improved since her departure. For many of the children, the farm school cottage life did not provide a real place of belonging. The various cottages Marjorie was housed in and the numerous cottage mothers she was placed under were a poor substitute for her own family.
I wondered what effect an apology would have on my mother. Marjorie and three of her siblings had been removed from their mother’s care in early 1937. She strongly believed that removing her from her family and sending her to Canada as a child had not been the best thing for her or for her family. I tried to envision how it would be for my mother to actually be present when Gordon Brown gave his formal apology. Would it hold meaning for her? Would it speak to her “heart,” the heart that was broken nearly seventy years ago? Would the spokesperson, the British prime minister, be able to speak for the heart of Britain? After all, Gordon Brown himself was in no way responsible for the years of child migration.
I was aware that I had persuaded my mother to make this journey and if she could not find any meaning in Brown’s apology, then this trip could cause more damage and not bring her any resolution. It was not Brown who sent her away. Would his words be sufficient? Could his words touch her heart?
In the days leading up to our departure to London, I was asked numerous times: “What does this apology really mean? After all, it will only be a group of words uttered by a government spokesperson — it is nothing really concrete. It doesn’t change anything. It is a waste of money, time, and words.”
I never failed to reply, “If you are not the recipient, then how can you understand or begin to judge its merits or its effects on those who are directly receiving the apology?”
As for my mother, I truly wanted to believe that it could become a final resting place for her childhood grief, a time to replace any leftover stigma with a sense of pride, and a time to really see herself as the strong survivor that she was forced to become at such a young age. But there were no guarantees. I could just remain hopeful.
Others were stunned when I told them why Marjorie and I were going to London. Often they replied with something like this: “I consider myself well read and knowledgeable but I have never heard of child migration.” I would explain that the story of child migration had not been properly documented, nor taught in history classes. Many child migrants felt such shame that they would not talk about the circumstances of their removal from England and their subsequent childhood experiences. Individual instances are tragic enough, but strung together over centuries, the stories becomes unpardonable.
February 21, 2010
Marjorie and I boarded the plane in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the early evening of Sunday, February 21, 2010. We would arrive in London mid-day on Monday, giving us time to recover from our jet lag before the Tuesday evening reception, hosted by the Child Migrants Trust. We should be well rested and ready for the big day on Wednesday. My eighty-three-year-old mother, Marjorie, was a trooper, but this would be a taxing journey for her, especially as there had been so little time to prepare.
I sat next to my mother, tingling with anticipation. I had warned her that I wanted to share the manuscript I had written about her journey as a child migrant with her during this journey: our journey. Uncertain as to where to start, I decided to wait until the plane was safely in the air before beginning.
A Cloak of Shame
As the plane flew into the evening sky, I mulled about what this apology might mean to me. I was tired of feeling ashamed. As a young child, shame had buried itself into my very core before I was aware that such a thing was possible. For years I had been ashamed of my mother. She was ashamed of herself. We were nobody. We didn’t belong. The shame was so heavy that, as a child, I felt it covering me, my head, my shoulders, even obscuring my vision. I felt it was probably passed on to me in the womb. Shame had grown to be such a part of me that I had a hard time telling where it ended and where I started. I had struggled with it most of my childhood and was certain I had “daughter of a child migrant” stamped across my forehead for all to see. I could not erase it. My mother’s shame was my shame. Her rejection was my rejection.
I felt certain that Marjorie was hiding something from me. I hoped that it was for my own good. Up until I was a young adult, some part of me believed — the child in me perhaps — that if I tracked down where my mother came from, I’d discover that she was not my real mother and that I was someone else’s daughter. My real mother would come for me one day and all would be made clear. I just needed to be patient. That was my childhood fantasy. Certain that there must been have been a mistake, I expected the truth to come out one day. My survival depended on it. How could I belong to this family? We had nothing in common. I needed roots and I found none. My mother was no role model for me. I blamed her for not teaching me how to hope, to trust, to reach for the stars. I felt cheated. No one came to rescue me. My mother failed me. I was afraid of my future.
Regrettably, my fear came out as anger, and the distance widened between my mother and me. Now I wanted her to know that my childhood anger stemmed from fear, fear of the empty past she presented to me, and not from a lack of love for her. My anger, rooted in fear, was blinding and isolating. They say the truth will set you free, but it is not an easy process.
I looked over at my mother’s calm hazel eyes. She hated flying. It terrified her, yet you wouldn’t know from looking at her. It had taken me forever to recognize her calmness as one of her strengths. It would not be true to say that nothing fazed her, but, when threatened or attacked, she usually stood her ground without needing to lash out. I think she knew that my love for her ran deep, even when I did not know it myself. Writing her story has brought us closer.
The Whitley Bay sands with St. Mary’s Lighthouse in the background. Memories of playing on the sands and walking over to the lighthouse never left Marjorie.
Photo by Patricia Skidmore.
Realizing the difficulty I had chipping away at my own locked-up childhood helped me to gain a better understanding of why it was so complicated to pull out my mother’s hidden past — her buried memories and her painful secrets of rejection. She had years of experience to harden her past behind her cloak, to lose them, to act as if they didn’t exist. But it was her past, her childhood, that I wanted to know about. I wanted her to take my hand, to walk with me down that road, to show me, even at the risk of distressing her or finding the wrong things. I wanted to go back with her to revisit what it was like for her to be removed from her family and deported to Canada. I wanted to find the childhood that she had blacked out. I needed her to do this for me, with me, and I hoped that at the same time, she would find some healing as well.
Marjorie was born in Whitley Bay and lived there for the first ten years of her life. Whitley Bay is a seaside town on Britain’s northeast coast, just east of Newcastle upon Tyne. I wanted to go there, as I needed to imagine my mother as a little girl. I wanted to see where she was born, where she lived, where she went to school, and where she played. The first time I saw Whitley Bay, I thought it was beautiful. It must have been a grand
