Voices of the Left Behind. Melynda Jarratt

      A homecoming party for a soldier back from Europe, at the Club Venetian, Montreal, December, 1945. When the Canadians came home, girlfriends left behind were easily forgotten.

      Although the terms “illegitimate” and “bastard” no longer apply today, they were once powerful social statements on the position of unwed mothers and what their fatherless children could expect in British society. Marginalized and disenfranchised by virtue of their marital and birth status, both mothers and war children were treated with derision and received little, if any, sympathy or support from either side, British or Canadian. (See Chapter 8 for further discussion of this issue.)

      Unlike the war brides who married their Canadian boyfriends and came to Canada to live at the end of the war, these women were abandoned by their soldier boyfriends, now officially Canadian veterans, who disappeared off the face of the earth once they returned to Canada at the end of the war. Desperate pleas to the Canadian military authorities, Veterans Affairs and External Affairs as to the whereabouts of missing fathers were fruitless — and continue to be to this day under the pretext of Canada’s Privacy Act.

      Left alone to raise their children in a highly judgmental, moralistic society, often without financial support or skills, many women decided to give up their children for adoption or were forced to hand them over to relatives. And at a time when there were few social supports or economic opportunities for women, those who decided to go it on their own suffered enormous social consequences that still reverberate in the lives of the war children today.

      John Costello, in his famous study of changing social values during World War II titled Love, Sex and War, describes these British women and the wartime circumstances that found them unwed and pregnant with the children of foreign soldiers:

      Of the 5.3 million British infants delivered between 1939 and 1945, over a third were illegitimate — and this wartime phenomenon was not confined to any one section of society. The babies that were born out of wedlock belonged to every age group of mother, concluded one social researcher.

Some were adolescent girls who had drifted away from homes which offered neither guidance nor warmth and security. Still others were women with husbands on war service, who had been unable to bear the loneliness of separation. There were decent and serious, superficial and flighty, irresponsible and incorrigible girls among them. There were some who had formed serious attachments and hoped to marry. There were others who had a single lapse, often under the influence of drink. There were, too, the “good-time girls” who thrived on the presence of well-paid servicemen from overseas, and semi-prostitutes with little moral restraint. But for the war many of these girls, whatever their type, would never have had illegitimate children.⁵

      One of the most famous war children is legendary blues guitarist Eric Clapton, who discovered in March 1998, that his father, Edward Fryer, was a soldier from Montreal. Raised by his grandparents as their son, Clapton found out when he was nine that his sister Patricia was actually his mother. His story of a lifelong search for a Canadian father he never knew is one that echoes loudly for the British war children of World War II.

       NOTES

1 Trinder is widely credited for the famous saying “They’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here!”, intended as a gibe against American servicemen in Europe.

2 Immigration Branch, Annual Report of the Department of Mines and Resources 1947–48 (Ottawa: Edmund Cloutier, King’s Printer, 1948), p. 240. As cited in Melynda Jarratt, The War Brides of New Brunswick, master’s report (Fredericton: University of New Brunswick, 1995), p. 5.

3 This is a an estimate of Canadian war children born in Britain. Recent correspondence (December 2003) with the Public Records Office, the National Archives and the Office of National Statistics in the U.K. confirm that evidence of Canadian paternity found in the birth certificates for illegitimate children born during the war years has never been compiled and is therefore unavailable at this time. It has also been suggested that the number of children whose fathers were Canadian servicemen may never be known; married women whose British husbands were away during the war would have given their Canadian children their husband’s name, as opposed to the biological father’s name. We know this to be the case for several children whose stories appear in this book. The lack of readily available statistical evidence points to a need for further research in the British archives to determine through objective analysis the numbers of war children whose fathers were Canadian servicemen.

4 We used the word “illegitimate” only to separate children born out of wedlock from those whose parents were legally married. It by no means carries the social stigma it did as recently as ten years ago.

      5 John Costello, Love Sex and War: Changing Values 1939-45 (London: Collins, 1985), pp. 276–77.

Exceeded All My Hopes

      by John*

      I was born at the end of 1946 in London, England, to an English mother and a Canadian soldier who had returned to Canada with his regiment in the middle of 1946. The months leading up to and immediately after my birth were very difficult for my mother. She was sent to a Roman Catholic home for unmarried mothers. After I was born, a charitable organization arranged for her to work as home help with a Roman Catholic couple in Sussex.

      In 1947, my grandfather returned from naval service and set up home near Portsmouth in Hampshire, so I went to live with my grandparents. My mother, meanwhile, had managed to get office work in Sussex, and came to see us on the weekends. My grandfather’s home was a small holding in the countryside, and I have fond memories of this early period in my life. I also established a strong bond with my grandfather.

      My mother met and married my stepfather in 1948. He was serving with the Royal Air Force, and I continued to live with my grandparents until he was posted to Nairobi in East Africa in 1949. I went abroad with my mother, and then was formally adopted by my stepfather when we returned to England in 1953.

      I had a happy childhood, and my mother ensured that I acquired a good education. At age twenty-six I married and settled in Lincolnshire, where we have lived ever since. We have had two children of our own, who gave my mother much joy up to her death in 1992. My stepfather followed her shortly after in 1994.

      All in all I have been fortunate and had a good life with no regrets, but I have always wondered about my Canadian father. With both my parents gone, in 1995 I decided to find out more about my biological father’s background. I had little information to go on: a name, the fact that he had been a Canadian soldier, and that he had been awarded a medal for bravery.

      I began my research in the London archives and also made contact with Olga Rains at Project Roots. Olga was immensely supportive, and encouraged me with advice although, at that time, I had no real facts on which to base a search. Eventually I was able to link the name and the medal, and to acquire a copy of the military citation. Being a wartime citation, it did not, of course, contain any personal information, but it did provide me with a regiment and service number.

      This was the breakthrough that Olga needed, and with her extensive contacts in Canada she was able to trace my father in a very short time. At the end of 1999 she telephoned my father on my behalf, and so initiated a relationship for which I am eternally in her debt.

      For two years we corresponded and spoke