Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles by Margaret Humphreys Page A
Authors: Margaret Humphreys
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my birth certificate – I want you to find my mum.’
I looked at him, barely considering it credible and said, ‘How about we leave it till Boxing Day?’
9
I had another visitor that Christmas. Harold Haig had flown to England to see Marie and also to work with me in the search for his mother. Full of excitement and fear, he couldn’t sit still in Australia.
On a bitterly cold day early in January 1988, I took him on his first trip to St Catherine’s House. We caught the 6.00 a.m. train from Nottingham and with us were Yvonne and Paul Harrison, the Australian who’d arrived on my doorstep. On the train, I opened my briefcase and, over coffee from the buffet car, explained how St Catherine’s worked and what we had to do that day.
In Harold’s case, we had to find a record of the birth of his mother, Elizabeth Ellen Johnson, somewhere between 1904 and 1921. Marie was born in 1937 and I reasoned that their mother would have been no younger than sixteen and more probably eighteen at the time. Similarly, I thought she was unlikely to have been older than her mid-thirties. Seventeen years is a huge time period involving literally millions of births, but we had to start at the beginning and find a certificate.
As the morning wore on I noticed how despondent Harold became at the sheer scale of the task. In his eagerness, he had imagined that we could find his mother immediately; that he would open the first bound volume and ‘Elizabeth Ellen Johnson’ would be written there, as if waiting to be found.
At lunch-time we went for a walk and had a coffee and a sandwich. I doubted if Harold had the strength or experience to take much more. I was fearful he would throw in the towel and walk away, so I suggested that he spend a while helping Paul Harrison in his search.
Later that afternoon, when he found a relevant entry for Paul, I could see in Harold’s face that his happiness was overshadowed by his disappointment at having found nothing about his own mother.
At four-thirty St Catherine’s closed and we all trudged to St Pancras Station. Harold looked tired. I wasn’t sure if he would be able to cope. Almost all of his life he had been angry and getting nowhere, hitting one wall after another, but at least now a small part of him seemed to be holding tight to the belief that we would finally find his mother. He said, ‘I can’t run away this time. I understand, in some way, that this is my last chance; the last chance of finding out about myself. I know that if I did run away, I would never come back.’
I told Harold, ‘If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to do it all. We can’t just take a chunk and leave the rest. It may take days or weeks or much longer, but we have to go through all the twists and turns.’
The search for his mother’s birth certificate did indeed take weeks, until we had exhausted every avenue. It was the same story with his father. We could find no record of him being born. Nor was there a marriage certificate for them at any time, anywhere in England, Scotland or Ireland.
This bothered me. I lay awake at night wondering what we had missed. The search had cost a great deal of money in train fares and copies of promising certificates, but we had nothing to show for it. Harold’s birth certificate included the names of both mother and father. They should have been relatively easy to find. What had we missed?
There were several possibilities. Perhaps both were born overseas; or neither had used their real name on Harold’s birth certificate; or maybe they presented themselves as a married couple but were actually unmarried. It could have been any of these things, it didn’t matter. The reality was that it meant more pain and frustration for Harold. If St Catherine’s held the answer, we didn’t have the key.
Harold returned to Australia in February, totally exhausted and no closer to discovering his mother. I knew I had to look elsewhere so I started trawling the various
I looked at him, barely considering it credible and said, ‘How about we leave it till Boxing Day?’
9
I had another visitor that Christmas. Harold Haig had flown to England to see Marie and also to work with me in the search for his mother. Full of excitement and fear, he couldn’t sit still in Australia.
On a bitterly cold day early in January 1988, I took him on his first trip to St Catherine’s House. We caught the 6.00 a.m. train from Nottingham and with us were Yvonne and Paul Harrison, the Australian who’d arrived on my doorstep. On the train, I opened my briefcase and, over coffee from the buffet car, explained how St Catherine’s worked and what we had to do that day.
In Harold’s case, we had to find a record of the birth of his mother, Elizabeth Ellen Johnson, somewhere between 1904 and 1921. Marie was born in 1937 and I reasoned that their mother would have been no younger than sixteen and more probably eighteen at the time. Similarly, I thought she was unlikely to have been older than her mid-thirties. Seventeen years is a huge time period involving literally millions of births, but we had to start at the beginning and find a certificate.
As the morning wore on I noticed how despondent Harold became at the sheer scale of the task. In his eagerness, he had imagined that we could find his mother immediately; that he would open the first bound volume and ‘Elizabeth Ellen Johnson’ would be written there, as if waiting to be found.
At lunch-time we went for a walk and had a coffee and a sandwich. I doubted if Harold had the strength or experience to take much more. I was fearful he would throw in the towel and walk away, so I suggested that he spend a while helping Paul Harrison in his search.
Later that afternoon, when he found a relevant entry for Paul, I could see in Harold’s face that his happiness was overshadowed by his disappointment at having found nothing about his own mother.
At four-thirty St Catherine’s closed and we all trudged to St Pancras Station. Harold looked tired. I wasn’t sure if he would be able to cope. Almost all of his life he had been angry and getting nowhere, hitting one wall after another, but at least now a small part of him seemed to be holding tight to the belief that we would finally find his mother. He said, ‘I can’t run away this time. I understand, in some way, that this is my last chance; the last chance of finding out about myself. I know that if I did run away, I would never come back.’
I told Harold, ‘If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to do it all. We can’t just take a chunk and leave the rest. It may take days or weeks or much longer, but we have to go through all the twists and turns.’
The search for his mother’s birth certificate did indeed take weeks, until we had exhausted every avenue. It was the same story with his father. We could find no record of him being born. Nor was there a marriage certificate for them at any time, anywhere in England, Scotland or Ireland.
This bothered me. I lay awake at night wondering what we had missed. The search had cost a great deal of money in train fares and copies of promising certificates, but we had nothing to show for it. Harold’s birth certificate included the names of both mother and father. They should have been relatively easy to find. What had we missed?
There were several possibilities. Perhaps both were born overseas; or neither had used their real name on Harold’s birth certificate; or maybe they presented themselves as a married couple but were actually unmarried. It could have been any of these things, it didn’t matter. The reality was that it meant more pain and frustration for Harold. If St Catherine’s held the answer, we didn’t have the key.
Harold returned to Australia in February, totally exhausted and no closer to discovering his mother. I knew I had to look elsewhere so I started trawling the various
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