Alongside the River Medway

Some tremendous heavy showers this morning and this evening. As we were travelling home tonight there were torrential downpours accompanied by magnificent flashes of lightening. We had to pull over and wait for the worst to pass.

Today’s blip is of the Medway just after one of those showers. Autumn clings on.

We’d been to Canterbury to see “Ballads Of Child Migration at the Gulbenkian Theatre: https://www.folkradio.co.uk/2015/10/the-ballads-of-child-migration-songs-for-britains-child-migrants/.

A poignant set of songs, readings, images, recordings and film telling the moving story of thousands of children who were sent abroad to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries on the basis that they were orphans whose parents had either died or could not support their children.

Often these were lies and far from a new life many of these children were treated abominably and terribly abused probably in the full knowledge of the authorities in the UK and where the children lived.

Only now is their story being told. There are at least 2000 people still alive who were subject to migration but despite an apology by Gordon Brown and a recommendation of compensation in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse nothing has happened since the report was published in March this year.