"Oranges and Sunshine" with Emily Watson and David Wenham (2010)

Emily Watson stars as Margaret Humphreys, a social worker in Nottingham, England who becomes involved in solving the disappearance of thousands of boys and girls who were illegally deported to Australia. This is a true story.

Most of the children were removed from their homes due to the inability of the parents to either provide adequately for them, or for any number of other reasons deemed appropriate by the social workers. There was no offer of counseling to help these people learn how to better care for their kids. There was no offer of financial assistance. There was just the arbitrary removal of the children from their parents. In many cases siblings were separated, never to see one another again.

Some of the children went to other abusive families in Australia, meaning that the child’s world did not change at all. There were just the lingering, faded memories of a past that would never fully go away. These children had been promised a life of “oranges and sunshine”. Instead they got abused, worked half to death and starved. The lucky ones went to state sponsored institutions where they were abused in a more regimental fashion.

As Margaret Humphreys digs deeper into this case, she comes to realize the full extent of this misguided and evil program. And then she sets out to make it right. Assembling all of the children that she can find who were deported, she begins to reunite them with the siblings they have almost forgotten, and restore their memories of the parents from whom they were so cruelly wrenched.

This is a very moving, and disturbing film. It highlights the problems of government sponsored social engineering; a process by which people who presumably “know better” get to launch whatever harebrained scheme they come up with. This is not a problem isolated to Great Britain.

Expertly directed and acted by all the players; and with an exceptional performance by Emily Watson; this film will affect you long after the credits have rolled off the screen.

"Cruel Harvest" by Fran Elizabeth Grubb (2012)

Prepare yourself to be shocked and disgusted by the treatment of Fran Grubb and her sisters at the hands of their father, Broadus, an itinerant farm worker, in this brave and gutsy memoir. I have never been able to understand the concept of the Stockholm syndrome, in which people can be made to withstand the most horrific treatment, yet form sort of a “bond” with their tormentors, or captors. But, apparently this is a real phenomenon and well documented.

The narrative takes place in the late 1950’s and 1960’s; the exact dates are not that important; except that it always shocks me to read of this kind of trauma actually occurs. Ms. Grubb’s father makes a sport of humiliating and beating his wife before graduating to the sexual molestation of his daughters, some as young as 12 years old. Their mother is powerless to protect them from her husband’s alcohol infused episodes of violence. Life is lived on the edge, with everyone in the family always on their toes, lest they do something to trigger their father's rage.

Writing this review is hard, as I cannot even imagine living like the author has. While my own father was verbally abusive, he doesn’t even register on the scale of Ms. Grubb’s father. He seems to thrive on the misery he causes. At one point he even kills his own newborn baby.

The author wonders constantly, as a little girl, what she has done to upset her father, and at times blames her mother for making her father angry. She actually wishes her mother were dead; or her father; either way might break the cycle. The guilt she endures for wishing the death of a parent is wrenching. The only reference I have to this, in my own life, involves my mother being very ill for many years and my thoughts that if she would just die then life would be normal for the rest of the family. This is a heavy burden for a child to carry around, and the guilt lasts a lifetime, even after you have come to terms with the reasoning behind the “forbidden” thoughts.

As the family bounces from one harvest to the next, things just seem to get worse and worse for the family. As each of the daughters comes of age; about 12; their father begins to molest them sexually, often beating them savagely afterwards. Again, their mother seems powerless to protect them, lest he turn his attentions towards her. And that’s the part that baffles me; how can a woman stand by silently and allow her own daughters to be treated in such a way?

To her credit, the mother and oldest daughter do plot to kill him, but after they are overheard by Ms. Grubb, she pleads with them not to kill her “daddy.” She would live to regret that.

When their mother turns them over to the Connie Maxwell Home in South Carolina, the children learn that there are such things as mattresses and clean clothing; not to mention 3 meals a day. They are used to sleeping on cardboard and old army blankets in any deserted farmhouse or sharecropper’s shack that they can find as they travel about, following the harvests. And food is always scarce due to their fathers drinking up all the money the family earns picking cotton and fruits. Ms. Grubb thrives, along with her sister, at the Connie Maxwell Home, but not for long.

When their father shows up with his sister in tow, the children are taken out of the orphanage and on a journey through hell as their father seeks revenge on his estranged wife by taking it out on his children. Along the way they encounter people who realize what is happening to the children, but in those days it was considered unfortunate, and so the abuse continued.

When Ms. Grubb’s father meets a woman named Millie, he charms her and her daughter into traveling with them. Millie is larger than Ms. Grubb’s mother, but no match for the brutal man she has attached herself to. Her daughter soon becomes the target of physical abuse, and Millie does nothing to protect her child. Once again, I cannot even fathom this line of reasoning. Eventually Millie prods the girls to run away, leaving only Fran to be abused. And soon after that, she helps Fran to flee from her father as well.

After a last standoff between her father’s employer and her dad, she is finally free of her horrors, although it would take years to overcome the abuse she suffered at his hands. With the help and guidance of her husband, Wayne; and through their faith; Ms. Grubb comes to terms with all that has happened in her life; and recovers her scattered siblings; finally gaining the family she always longed for.  This was a well written and very important book; but not an easy one to read; and I am glad that in the end the author is able to forgive her father; because I sure as hell can’t. That alone is testament to the power of the author’s words.

"Gonville" by Peter Birkenhead

What would it be like to be raised by a man who was alternately angry, passive, filled with joy and sometimes in deep despair? How would you feel if your father dressed in a pith helmet and spoke like Lt. Gonville, the character portrayed by Michael Caine in the historical drama "Zulu", a movie about the British in South Africa circa 1850?

Growing up in Brooklyn, and later, Long Island, in the 1960's and 70's,the author was faced with, and had to answer some of these questions. If not for everyone around him, then for his own sanity. Children don't always get to know the demons that haunt their parents. In this book, the author gives it his best shot. There are, indeed, comical moments in this honest and down to earth autobiography by Peter Birkenhead. But there is also a dark side to this tale.

Like many people do, Mr. Birkenhead dealt with these issues by not dealing with them. Throwing himself into a fantasy world was a great way to escape the turmoil at home. But escaping always bears a price to be paid at a later date. Eventually the author becomes an actor, playing many roles in which his character is angry at his father, just as he was with his own.

Haunted by a particularly vivid dream in which he is flying down a set of stairs begins a journey into the past. The dream turns out to be the night his father chased his wife and children from the apartment with a gun. The flight the author took down the stairs was in the arms of his mother.

A graphic look inside the mind of a child who was both amused, and confused, by the antics of his father, this book is honestly written. When we become adults the choices we make are largely our own. But a lot of what we chose to do with our lives stems directly from our experiences as children. Mr. Birkenhead has made this abundantly clear in this tightly written memoir.

Losing Everything by David Lozell Martin

This book has opened up more insights into my own past than even I could have imagined.

The author was raised in West Virginia by a mother who is mentally ill and a father who is abusive enough to have at least contributed to that illness.

This is the story of one mans battle with his own inner demons while acknowledging the demons that stalk us all.

A compelling read, Mr. Martin takes you on a journey of his own life up to and including the point where past meets present and he finds himself in, and reacting in the same way to, all the things that happened in his family as a child.

Together with his brother and sister he retraces the events and the shadows that hung over him while growing up. While reading it I became aware that I had not addressed some of my own childhood demons in my writing.

An accomplished author of fiction, Mr. Martin has written a very telling book, one that must have taken some courage to write. That he faces his demons and takes from them some very valuable insights make this book the gem that it is.