The Laurels

It was 1964. I was five years old. And no one kept a record of me.

I didn’t find out the name of the place I had been sent to until 2018, when an organisation called Find and Connect helped me trace what had happened to us. Someone unearthed a letter — not about me, but about my mother, and the placement of her remaining three children. The two boys would go to the Melrose Boys’ Home and the Adelaide Walker Babies’ Home. The remaining child — me would go to The Laurels, which was a Protestant home for girls.

Read more: The Laurels

I found references to the home online and recognised it immediately when I went searching. The big, wide verandah at the front. I might have been one of the girls in the photograph.

I cried from the moment I arrived at the Laurels. I couldn’t understand where my family had gone. The Matron eventually placed me in an older girl’s room to try to settle me. It didn’t work. I simply could not stop crying.

The Laurels had its rules. Meals were taken in a large dining room — elbows off the table, one hand in your lap, no talking. Soup was taken from the nearest edge of the bowl, quietly, with no slurping allowed! The baths held six children at a time, and the toilets had no doors, which bothered me so much.

I still eat the way the Matron taught me. Especially soup. The body does not forget what the mind tries to leave behind.

When I arrived, I was told to donate my toys and clothes to the home. What a good girl I was as I watched other children play with my Christmas presents. I watched them wear my clothes. I was simply beside myself — a small girl in a strange place, with no language for what was happening to her and no one to explain it.

One day, my mother came.

She was the most beautiful mother I had ever seen. Her hair was swept up in a bun, fashionable in the sixties, and she always wore beautiful shoes.

To me, she was elegance itself.

She took me out for the day, and on the way, we collected my little brother Mark from the babies’ home. He was so small. The sun was shining. We had lunch. For one ordinary, extraordinary day, we were just a family. I can`t recall where Shane was – perhaps he had been fostered out for the weekend.

On the way back, my mother asked who wanted to go home first. I said “Mark”, so I could keep her a little longer to myself. But when the bus stopped outside the babies’ home, Mark began to cry. A nurse came out to collect him, and the image of my little brother standing on those front steps, clutching his teddy bear, crying — that image has never left me. It never will.

My mother knelt in front of me as I started to cry too. She made me a promise that next Sunday, she will come for me and take me out forever. We would get Mark and Shane, too, and we would all live together.

I told the Matron I couldn’t go to church that Sunday. I was leaving with my mother.

Sunday came, and I was dressed in my best coat and shoes. My little brown case was packed, and I was told I could wait in the chapel.

I sat in the front pew and watched the cleaners work around me.

She never came.

There are no words for what a little girl feels when that happens, so I will not try to find them. Some things are better left in the silence where they live.

I didn’t see her again for years.

Eventually, the Matron contacted my grandmother. Take her back, she said, or she will be made a ward of the state. Eventually, my grandparents came and picked me up, and I wish I could say it was a happy occasion, but I was going back to a house where I was tolerated rather than wanted, and where the girls` home was held over me like a threat whenever I stepped out of line.

I was five years old and had already attended three different schools, five times. I came back silent from the home, cautious, and withdrawn, and I started noticing things, like where the danger was, observing people without connection, and feeling without speaking.

It wasn`t long before I started wetting the bed. To tell small lies. To eat in secret. And I learned — early and well — how to find the threat in the room.

It would not be the last time that skill would save me.

With Care

– Rae 🌿

For those interested in the history of The Laurels and the work of Find and Connect, a government site that assists people trying to trace their own stories, you can read more here. https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/entity/the-laurels/