Free Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles by Margaret Humphreys Page B

experiences of counselling, Harold was predisposed not to trust me or have any positive expectations.
    I just felt that here was a man who was so lost and lonely, so bereft of feeling, that I had to do something for him.
    ‘Can you take me to the children’s home where you grew up?’ I asked.
    ‘What for? What good will it do?’
    I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t just in Australia because of Marie. If I was to search for their mother, both of them had to take the journey with me.
    Harold was eleven years old when he arrived at St John’s Boys’ Home, in Canterbury, a comfortable middle-class suburb of Melbourne. He remembered being told by a welfare officer at Sussex County Council that he was going to live in a land where the sun was always shining and where he would ride to school on horseback. He left England in 1949 from a children’s home in East Sussex. They let him keep his name, and packed him off to Australia with only an entry card to prove his existence. It was still the only record that he had of his youth.
    The next day Harold took Marie, Annabel and myself to the Boys’ Home. We walked along the corridors, into the church and the dormitories, with Harold telling me stories of his youth.
    He explained how the large old building was used. The front of the ground floor housed the offices. At the back there was a large kitchen and dining-room on one side, and on the other, a large pantry which the boys would raid whenever possible.
    ‘Joined on to this was the sewing room and laundry, and a large quadrangle. The upstairs was used for the younger children – bedrooms, bathrooms and so on. The older boys – eleven years and over – had quarters next to the dining-room area. It was a large dormitory with a quadrangle in the middle. From floor to ceiling was half solid walls, and the rest covered by blinds. Great in the summer, a bit bloody cold in the winter.
    ‘It wasn’t meant to house migrant children, you know, but I was placed there with state wards from Melbourne.’
    ‘Was life strict?’ I asked.
    ‘There were certain rules to be obeyed and if you broke these you were punished,’ Harold said.
    ‘What sort of punishment?’
    ‘Strapped on the hands, maybe caned on the backside or given extra work to do. But the housemasters and the Revd Neale Molloy, who was in charge, were always fair. They never handed out punishment unless you had done something wrong; we were never treated brutally, or abused in any way.’
    ‘What was a normal day like?’ I asked.
    ‘Regimented, like all institutions. Get up around six-thirty, wash, dress, make your bed, and do whatever inside job you were assigned to – like sweep the dormitory, get the breakfast ready, set tables, make lunches. We would then have a ten-minute service in the chapel, have breakfast, and go to school.
    ‘Sunday mornings we would have Holy Communion after jobs and before breakfast. Two of the boys would be altar boys, so they’d prepare the bread, rolling out thick white slices and cutting them into squares, and prepare the wine. The stuff they used was cheap sherry, and after the service was over, and Mollie Molloy – as we called him – had departed, we would give it a go. Quite liberally sometimes. Perhaps that is where I got my love of red wine.’ Harold laughed, but, like his words, this too was tinged with sadness.
    ‘Were you lonely?’ I asked.
    ‘Let me put it this way: I had many friends, but I always felt alone. Not lonely. Alone. Particularly on visiting days.
    ‘When I was sent away from England they told me my parents were dead; that I had no family; that I was an orphan. I felt cold and empty. I never talked about these feelings – who could I talk to? Talking about your feelings wasn’t encouraged at St John’s. Perhaps they felt we didn’t have any, perhaps they did not see it as important – and how could I explain my feelings anyway? I didn’t understand them.
    ‘Love and affection are what you