The shameful secret of Britain's lost children: All her life my mother had a sense of sadness about her

UNTIL SHE was contacted by the Child Migrants Trust in 1989, Pauline Ireland, 49, from Cambridge, did not know she had two older sisters. Her mother had died two years earlier without mentioning the other daughters she had placed in care when they were toddlers.

'Finding out about my sisters in Australia explained a lot. All her life my mother had a sense of sadness about her. I put that down to a hard life, but I did feel something was going unsaid. There was a barrier there. Children sense that and I did not push it. Now I know that I must have been a constant reminder to her of my sisters.'

Why Mrs Ireland's mother gave up two of her daughters seems likely to remain a mystery. The three sisters, who have met and now write, assume the separation resulted from difficulties during the Second World War.

Pauline Ireland was just a baby when the her sisters, aged two and four, were handed over to a Catholic home in Feltham, Middlesex, in 1944. 'There was no welfare then. If you were bombed out, there was no one there to help,' she says. 'But my mother took the secret of what actually happened to her grave. She did marry again, and I have a half-sister. But my stepfather is dead now and I don't know if she ever told him.'

Her sisters spent four years in Feltham. Officials did not tell them they were related until they sailed for the Catholic-run Goodwood orphanage in Adelaide.

Their experiences at Goodwood were far from positive. 'The nuns were not intentionally cruel, but it was a rigid regime. They were not cuddled or treated as individuals. They received little education. When they were 15 they were sent to the outback to be domestic servants.'

Mrs Ireland says her mother would have benefited from being reunited with her daughters, and their children, before she died. 'I can't tell you how I felt when I discovered I had sisters. It is all a blurr now, but I remember just thinking how sad my mother always was. That was the hardest thing.'

Mrs Ireland believes she was robbed of her family and that the British government is doing too little to right past wrongs.

'I am pleased to have been reunited with my sisters, but we have no common background and no shared experiences. I am just one of thousands waiting, and the trust is working against the clock,' she says.

(Photograph omitted)