I asked Ruby how much her mum remembered of the voyage, and she said it was difficult to know how much she remembered and how much she thought she remembered, but some of the stories did turn out to be true. For example, Mrs Moore liked to tell the story of there being a boy on board the Ormonde screaming in pain, who had to be operated on right there on the ship, cut open by a woman who happened to have a sharp knife handy. The grandkids had shown some scepticism about that over the years, but it’s actually true, there was a fifteen-year-old boy, Raymond Willocks, aboard the Ormonde and he was stricken with appendicitis. Dr Margaret Henderson – she was a PLC old girl from Peppermint Grove in Perth, and a graduate of medicine at the University of Melbourne – did the surgery.

The ship was four weeks at sea before landing at Fremantle, with stops at places like Colombo and Port Said on the way. I dug a press clipping from the West Australian out of the ‘Forgotten Generation’ files: it records the arrival of the Ormonde at Fremantle, on Saturday, 8 November 1947. The copy reads:

She had 1052 passengers, almost all of whom are intending settlers in Australia . . . including many children from orphanages in Scotland and England . . .

That obviously tallies with Ruby’s story. It goes on:

They have been assisted by two Sisters, and four nurses . . . altogether, there are 291 children under the age of twelve years aboard the ship, and they were popular with the crew . . . that is shown by the actions of the seamen in paying for a prize, consisting of a packet of sweets, a bar of chocolate and postcard of the ship for each one of them.

According to the West Australian, two buses were waiting by the dock to ferry the Fairbridge kids to a reception at St Patrick’s Hall, where they had to listen to what was probably a boring message from the Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, booming out of the sound system, telling them they’d been given a new life in a new country and they should make the most of it. A troupe of Old Fairbridgeans played musical instruments, and then it was off to a picnic lunch at Perth Zoo.

‘Mum definitely remembers the zoo,’ Ruby told me, and I was immediately struck by her use of the present tense, as if her mother was just around the corner. ‘Mum hadn’t seen wild animals before, so it stuck in her mind. She also remembers the trip out to the Fairbridge Farm School in a yellow bus. It was hot, and there was no air-conditioning so they all had their elbows out, and they all got sunburnt, and they thought that was hilarious, having white skin and bright red elbows.’

I’ve had a look at some of the old pictures of the Fairbridge Farm School on the web: there used to be an old dirt drive, winding up and over a cattle grate that stopped dead in front of the main building. Ruby says her mum remembered the bus pulling up, ‘and there was an old man with a flat cap standing there with a two-handled trolley, like a wooden wheelbarrow. He put all the orphans’ suitcases on that trolley and he told Mum to kick her shoes off and put them in the milk pail, and none of the children wore shoes again, except to church.’