1960

By the time I was ten years old
the memory of my mother
had been almost obliterated.
Apart from the indisputable fact
that both my brother and myself
walked upon this world
and therefore must once have been born
it was if the woman who had given us life
had never existed.

My father ran his own Ministry of Propaganda:
any reference to our mother was expunged
from our past and present lives.
No photographs or documents existed
which might serve to remind us
that once we had enjoyed
the comfort of a mother's love.
And implicitly we knew
that we must not mention her
in any way.

At the end of 1959, my brother and I
embarked from the port of Tilbury in Kent
to sail for Australia aboard the SS Strathaird
of the Peninsular and Oriental Line.

Within the space of less than two years
our feeling of family had been whittled away
until finally we had become child migrants:
ostensibly orphans under the temporary
care and protection of the Fairbridge Society.

Just before Christmas the small group
of children with whom we were travelling
arrived in Melbourne and were then
transported overland to the Fairbridge Farm School
near Molong in New South Wales.

We only spent six months there
but for two young boys aged ten and eight
it might as well have been six years.

Decades later when the tragedy of child migration
had been rightly exposed for the abuse that it was
I was informed by a social worker assigned to
the task of counselling former child migrants
that my my brother's and my own case
did not qualify for assistance because unlike
others less fortunate we had only spent
a short period of time in the hell that was Fairbridge.

I wanted to tell her that after the first month of
systematic neglect, exploitation and endemic bullying
it no longer mattered how long it persisted
for by then the damage was already done
after which it became merely a matter of endurance
and the counting off of the months and years remaining
before the long-term inmates could legally claim the right to leave.

And I also wanted to tell her that although
I wasn't quite certain what damage the experience
had wrought on me, I knew that within two years
of our departure from that wretched place
my brother began exhibiting the first symptoms
of the mental illness that would see him
spend the rest of his life in institutions suffering
the ravages of ECT and chronic medication.

I am sure they would all say they were only doing
their job: the well-remunerated professionals,
the middle-class men and women who counselled my father
that he was doing right by us in giving us a better life
than we could ever hope to have if we were to stay in England:
they who would make decisions on our behalf that would affect us
for the rest of our lives.

And my father who likewise convinced himself
he was doing the best for us but who also
somewhere unacknowledged inside himself
saw our migration as a way of punishing my mother
for her transgressions and her crime
forever.

By the time I was ten years old
the memory of my mother
had been almost obliterated.

But I still remembered the day in 1957
when they took my brother and I
to say goodbye.