Now a major film, the book that exposed the scandal of Britain's forgotten and abused child migrants. It reminds us that no matter how badly we feel about ourselves, and how difficult life is, it’s important to know, and keep remembering, that we can develop the inner strength to cope with the life that we actually have. When trying to find the "roots" of this person, she happened to find out about thousands of other people who had as children been sent to Australia, and a number of other countries throughout the world. After church we would look for pennies on the ground, and I remember a priest that would try to talk us into following him if we wanted to get a quarter each. I was surprised as I read, how in her telling of the story, I couldn't wait to move on to the next chapter and discover more of the story!

Margaret Humphreys reveals how she gradually unravelled this shocking secret, how she became drawn into the lives of some of these innocent and unwilling exiles, and how it became her mission to reunite them with their families. Despite a lack of resources, much official resistance and at times even death threats, Humphreys and her colleagues persisted in bringing to light the awful history of 'The Lost Children Of The Empire', as it became known. Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where you were so often abused, sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation, and the cold absence of love of tenderness of care. Yes, there were some children who actively made the choice to relocate and their parents were aware of the process and consenting. Throughout she never judges or apportions blame, instead she focuses on what really counts, reuniting families.Such a shameful act of how both the English and Australian governments organized it, how religious organisations managed to get away with hiding monsters who held positions of power and abused it in the worst possible way and only came to light when one of these children approached Margaret in the 1980’s and she started to investigate the allegation. She got a secondment from her social work position and created the Child Migrants Trust and it took over her whole life. Despite the staggering volume of correspondence she received she always devoted her complete time and care to each migrant, ensuring they were safe and heard, regardless of what time of day it may have been or how many hours she had gone without food or respite. child migrants who were taken from their families in the UK and sent to NZ, Canada, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the majority went to Australia. For the charities, the child migrant scheme was apparently a solution to the overflowing British orphanages and the fact that the colonies were in need of a cheap labour force.

Not least is finding out whether my son’s father was indeed a child migrant as I now have such a strong inkling that he was. This is one of those stories that's hard to love simply because it's a horrendous bit of history that's difficult to take, but I love it all the same as I bawled through most of it.As you read this memoir, though, you understand that there is no end to the pain and its repercussions. We will discover many more things our Governments have done which as citizens we trust them as being Right,, And yet many things in the past and even now are far from Right… The more we discover the more we learn.