El. knyga: Marjorie Her War Years: A British Home Child in Canada

Her family broken apart and her identity taken away, she had to forget her past in order to face her future. But forgetting isn’t forever.

Taken from their mother’s care and deported from England to the colonies, ten-year-old Marjorie Arnison and her nine-year-old brother, Kenny, were sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island in September 1937. Their eight-year-old sister, Audrey, followed the next August.

Marjorie's new home was on an isolated farm — a cottage she shared with at least ten other girls and a “cottage mother” at the head, who had complete control over her “children.”

Survival required sticking to bare essentials. Marjorie had to accept a loss, which was difficult to forgive. Turning inward, she would find strength to pull her through, but she had to lock away her memories in order to endure her new life.

Marjorie was well into her senior years before those memories resurfaced.

Sent away from her family and England to an isolated farm where she was at the mercy of a tyrannical “cottage mother,” Marjorie Arnison had to learn to forget her identity in order to survive in her unfamiliar and hostile new home. It was only much later in her life that the memories of where she came from began to resurface.