"I lost my childhood," say survivors of migrant scheme (News Feature)

By Anna Tomforde Feb 24, 2010, 16:24 GMT

London - Maree Mason remembers a childhood 'totally devoid of human love and passion' in Nazareth House, the church-run home in Western Australia where she was sent at the age of eight in 1947.

'The beatings, humiliations, the pain and terror of my childhood happened nearly sixty years ago. But it's all with me, every day,' Mason said in documentation released by Britain's Child Migrants Trust (CMT) Wednesday.

Now 70, she was one of the tens of thousands of British children sent from orphanages or 'poor and broken homes' to a 'better life' in Commonwealth countries - chiefly Australia and Canada - under Britain's Child Migrants Programme between the 1920s to the late 1960s.

Children were often told their parents were dead, while parents were given little or no information about the fate of their offspring.

Many experienced neglect and abuse in the foster homes, orphanages and religious institutions approved by the British government.

The scheme officially ended in the late 1960s, but according to recent reports, British officials were aware many years previously of the appalling conditions and treatment of the youngsters.

In particular, Mason remembers the fear of wetting her bed and recalls being 'locked in a small dark room with a man who had died' for punishment when she was 11.

'The nuns would box my ears. They would come up from behind and whack you across both sides of your head, sending a searing pain and giddiness through you. To this day I still have ringing in my ears and deafness on my right side,' she said.

Mason, while sure that the memories of the cruelty she experienced in the home run by Irish nuns will never leave her, was also a happy woman Wednesday.

'I feel that Gordon Brown understands what we have been through,' she said after hearing Britain's Prime Minister offering an official apology to former child migrants and their families in parliament.

Mason, who was sent to the home in Geraldton, Western Australia, from an orphanage in Cheltenham, southern Britain, said she volunteered for the journey because she thought she was 'going for a picnic.'

She was reunited with her family by Britain's Child Migrants Trust and now lives in England, but never met her mother who died before her return and who had never been told of her daughter's migration.

'The lies and deception of child migration took her from me and kept her from me, forever,' said Mason.

Fellow child migrant Marcelle O'Brien, 65, who was placed at a farm school near Perth, remembers a 'cruel and brutal life' of physical, mental and sexual abuse.

But also, she recalls, she had 'no shoes or coat' and found that the best way to warm her feet was to step into a fresh cow pat.

'I lost my whole childhood and with it my sense of hope and joy,' she said. But a 'little bit of the hurt began to melt away' when she was reunited with her mother in England six years ago.

Rex Wade, who now lives in Cornwall, south-west Britain, was one of the last migrant children to be sent away in the late 1960s.

Now aged 51, Wade is still struggling to shake off the memories of physical abuse and hardship in Tasmania which had ruined his life.

'There was no love, no kindness...my life was stolen,' he told the BBC.

But Margaret Humphreys, director of the Child Migrant Trust, said Brown's apology marked the 'most positive day in the history of child migration.'

'This is the day child migrants come home,' she said. Child migrants could now 'move forward after a lifetime of waiting.'

Asked why it had taken so long to obtain an apology, she said: 'There has been a lot of denial.'

But many of her clients had told her that it was 'never too late to do the right thing.'