One Sunday afternoon, a group called the Christian Brothers visited the orphanage. They described a better life: work outside in the fields, families ready to take us, a wonderful school in an exciting place called Australia. It sounded a lot better than this place, but I was skeptical. It sounded too good to me. But not to many of the others. Hands went up around the room. And as they did, the kids were called forward. One of those hands was Alistair Hughes. Orville reached for him to put it down, but it was too late; they were already ushering him into the crowd to leave. Orville joined them without a word. He nodded to me as he left.
I learned later that all was not as the Christian Brothers had promised. The program was actually the continuation of similar initiatives in the seventeenth century, when children were shipped to the Virginia colony as migrant labor. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly 150,000 children were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Rhodesia. They worked in harsh conditions, but the work was only part of their suffering. From the 1940s until 1967, about 10,000 children were shipped to Western Australia to work in the fields and live in orphanages. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant and only discovered in later years. In 2009, Australia’s prime minister formally apologized to those children who had suffered under the program, for what he called “the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost.”
I, too, was watching my childhood slip away. I had started to grow pessimistic that I would ever find a home when a woman named Sarah Moore began volunteering at the orphanage. She was kind and very smart. She reminded me of my mother. She taught me French, which I picked up quickly, to her delight. Her husband was more stoic, but I thought he liked me too.
One Sunday, the woman in charge of our ward told me to make ready to leave. I was scared to death as I stuffed my meager belongings in the sack they’d given me.
I was overjoyed when Sarah and her husband Robert came into the room and told me I was coming to live with them. Against my will, I cried, but that was okay with them. They simply hugged me and loaded my things into their shiny car and drove away.
I took their last name, but kept my original family surname as my middle name. In school the next year, I couldn’t have been more proud when I signed my first paper: William Kensington Moore.
Peyton stood and moved to the corkboard, scanning it again. Her eyes locked on a worn picture pinned near the floor. She pulled it from the board and studied it. Three children stood there: on the left was a girl, perhaps three years old; in the middle stood a girl of perhaps seven; and on the right was a boy of eleven, with only one arm.
“I know who wrote this,” she said.
Desmond moved to her side and gazed at the picture. “You do?”
She pointed at the youngest girl in the picture. “That’s me. Madison’s in the middle; Andrew on the right. William Kensington Moore is my father.”
Chapter 79
Desmond tried to process Peyton’s words.
“I thought you said your father was dead?”
“I thought he was,” she replied. “Maybe he is. We don’t know when this letter was written.”
She returned to the couch, sat down beside Desmond, and pulled the thick quilt back over her. Outside the stone cottage, the sunrise broke through the fog. She wondered how long Avery would be asleep, how long they had before they’d need to make a decision. And what they’d find in the rest of the pages.
What I remember about the first years after the war was that Britain was broke. We’d won the Second World War, but it had come at a fantastic cost—most of all in lives, but also in pounds and pence. America suddenly and unexpectedly ended the Lend-Lease program that had likely saved us. The Treasury was near bankruptcy. So began the Age of Austerity; it seemed we’d survived the Nazis only to starve to death. And we weren’t the only ones. The entire world was freezing, starving, and still reeling from the greatest conflict in human history. In Britain, rationing and conscription continued. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the worst in recorded history. Coal and railway systems failed, factories closed, and people were very, very cold.
Things turned a little each year. The Americans loaned us 3.75 billion dollars at a low interest rate in July of 1946. The Marshall Plan launched in 1948, further bolstering our financial situation.
Everyone felt that the next war was right around the corner. I did too. It was hard not to. But the world was doing everything it could to stop it—and to get ready. The United Nations was formed in 1945, NATO in ’49. Britain began giving its colonies independence: Jordan in ’46, India and Pakistan in ’47, Israel, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka in ’48. Even more nations gained independence from the UK during the fifties and sixties: Sudan, Ghana, Malaysia, Nigeria, Kuwait, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Jamaica, Uganda, and Kenya.
The country was back on its feet by 1950, but all eyes were now on the Soviet Union and the expanding Cold War. The UK joined the US in the Korean War that year, fighting the Chinese and the Soviet Union in what we all believed was a dress rehearsal for the next global war. It ended in a stalemate, and the country was split in two.
The US and Russia began mass-producing nuclear weapons, amassing thousands—enough to alter the Earth permanently, making it uninhabitable. Other nations developed their own nuclear weapons: the UK, France, Israel, India, China, and Pakistan.