More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  My parents and I cleared our belongings from the house at Lefevre Road, leaving behind only memories. In transit I lost my treasured Olivetti typewriter but I had plenty to keep me occupied. I painted the walls of my room olive green and yellow and luxuriated in my first double bed, which I covered with a bri-nylon quilt to match the decor. Seeing so much enthusiasm for interior design, my parents rashly allowed me to decorate and furnish the whole flat. From a store in Roman Road I chose a black plastic three-piece suite, a Formica sideboard with co-ordinating table and chairs, a low coffee table with a well in the middle for magazines and a large red vase, in which I arranged sheaves of wheat. My pièce de résistance was a huge reproduction painting of a white horse beneath a waterfall. I insisted the white-painted walls remained as they were to show this off to its best advantage.

  My parents viewed my efforts open-mouthed. They were lovers of patterned carpet and textured wallpaper so it was all a bit of a shock. To my chagrin, kitsch items began to sneak in, notably a small statue of a Native American chief wearing a litmus-paper outfit that forecast the weather and bore the legend: ‘Apron blue—sky is too. Apron pink—weather stink!’

  As soon as we moved in, my mother stopped going to the Bridge House and I realised just how much of a safety valve the pub had been for her. She had lived on her nerves at Lefevre Road but now, with room to breathe and a sense of security, I knew she felt we could be a proper family in a proper home. Everything was perfect—or would have been perfect if only my period would come.

  Meanwhile, June and I had found jobs together in ‘press publicity’ at a Farringdon agency, which to us sounded impossibly glamorous. What the work actually entailed was somewhat more mundane. We would be given lists of names—celebrities, politicians, sports personalities, and the great and the good—and sat all day in a large office sifting through piles of newspapers, identifying any articles about or references to our subjects, cutting them out and sticking them on to pieces of paper. For ten minutes or so in every hour, a radio would switch on automatically to signal the arrival of ‘Smoky Joe Time’, when we were allowed to break off for a cigarette. Presumably it wasn’t safe to permit smoking all the time with so much paper about. We’d thought we were on the way to seeking our fortunes, but what we were doing barely even qualified as an office job—it was really only one step up from working in a factory. Still, experiencing an early reality check on our high-flown ambitions was probably good for us.

  I soon had far bigger concerns than my job. By the spring of 1970, I knew for certain I was pregnant. Yet while my condition remained unconfirmed I somehow managed to carry on pretending nothing was wrong. Even the morning sickness I’d suffered in the winter hadn’t prompted me to act. In time it had passed and as soon as I felt better, I convinced myself everything was fine.

  I may have prided myself on being a mature adult but in truth I was barely out of my childhood—it was only a matter of months since I’d been chucking stink bombs around a classroom—and I responded to the situation like a child. I simply ignored it and hoped it would go away, even though on an intellectual level I knew that was never going to happen. Unlike the swollen women I saw lumbering through the market, I didn’t even look pregnant, which made it all the easier to exist in state of denial. The only perceptible change in my body was the appearance of a little pot belly.

  I had given up my job at the cuttings agency when the morning sickness had taken hold, causing me to turn up late or call in sick too often. For the next four or five months of my pregnancy I remained unemployed, though I can’t remember how I got my parents to acquiesce to that without too many complaints. I must have told them I’d been laid off and was having trouble finding another job. They didn’t seem too concerned as they could see I was keeping myself busy. I was still doing my Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen number on our maisonette and handling the housework as well, so my mum was only too pleased to be coming back to a tidy home in the evenings for the first time in her married life.

  Nobody knew my secret except for Martin and June. How could I possibly break something like this to my mother when it had taken me two days to tell her I’d started my periods? Now that I had a room to myself I had more privacy, so I was managing to hide any weight gain beneath kaftans and other baggy clothes. My parents evidently didn’t suspect a thing. But one day I felt a sudden lurch inside me. The baby was moving.

  By sheer coincidence, I knew two other girls who were also pregnant. Carol and Hazel were the girlfriends of a couple of Martin’s mates and part of our social circle. But their reaction couldn’t have been more different from mine. They were over the moon. I listened, mute, as they chattered excitedly about their pregnancies, debated the merits of various names and compared notes. Hazel was about to get married; Carol was already engaged and the only modification she and her fiancé needed to make to their plans for the future was to bring their wedding forward by a few months for form’s sake. They reminded me of my friends at primary school and their mothers, who accepted that having children was what everybody did: when babies came along, you greeted them with joy, loved them and just took them in your stride. But Hazel was two or three years older than me and both girls had homes and partners with steady jobs. Martin, on the other hand, was working as a casual labourer and I was just seventeen and unemployed. We had nothing except each other. We had every desire to stay together but any possibility of marriage and setting up on our own was some way in the future.

  Being with Hazel and Carol at that time was like having a mirror constantly held up to me but still I refused to look into it and face facts. After five missed periods I was too far gone for a termination and Martin and I now saw only one solution: adoption. To us the pregnancy seemed not so much about a living, breathing baby as a mistake we had made, a mistake that had to be put right before we could continue with our lives. Just as I had done as a small child, I was problemsolving in a clinical, superficially adult way and not allowing my feelings to intervene. I still wasn’t emotionally mature enough to do otherwise.

  Perhaps if I’d talked to my parents, if we’d sat down and discussed everything, it might have been different. But the question I was asking wasn’t ‘Can we possibly do this?’, it was ‘How can I possibly tell my parents?’, and I couldn’t get beyond that. I couldn’t bear to imagine the look of disappointment on my father’s face or the sight of my mother’s tears. There would be no more bragging from my dad about his kid, that was for sure. So much for expectations.

  My only option, I reasoned, was to present them with a fait accompli: ‘I’m pregnant—but it’s OK, don’t worry. Everything’s sorted, the baby will be adopted and we can go back to normal. Nobody need ever know.’ I even allowed myself to consider that I might be able to get through the whole thing without them ever finding out.

  Eventually Hazel was told of our plans. She couldn’t understand how Martin and I could ever consider adoption. She persuaded me to make an appointment to see the doctor.

  Dr Teverson was still my family’s GP, as he had been for almost all my life, making visits to our flat throughout my childhood, braving a terrible winter one year to find me seriously ill on the sofa with bronchitis. That evening his glasses had misted up in the heat from our old paraffin heater and as he peered over the top of their cloudy lenses, he had gravely warned my parents to invest in a mains heater or lose me to pleurisy. My mother and father had always been grateful for his advice and deferential to his position, especially since their previous doctor, a woman, had been notoriously harsh and unsympathetic. When my mother was nine months’ pregnant, she had gone to her practice with grotesquely swollen ankles, asking if she could possibly have a certificate for the last week of her pregnancy since her job was swinging hundredweight bags of coins on to trucks at the Royal Mint. This martinet had lectured her about pregnancy not being an illness, forcing her to work right up to the birth.

  Now, eight years after our kind family doctor had diagnosed my puberty, I was sitting in the s
ame surgery having a teenage pregnancy confirmed. It was no surprise, but it came as a shock none the less to have it spelled out to me that I was already six months’ pregnant. Dr Teverson told me that I would have to begin attending the hospital immediately and, after taking my blood pressure, he sat down to write up his notes. My eyes were drawn to the shelf above his desk. On it sat a tall jar, filled with a variety of boiled sweets—acid drops, humbugs, cough candies. Over the years he had taken down the jar to offer me a sweet every time I had cried or seemed anxious. I heard myself suddenly blurting out that the baby I was expecting would have to be adopted.

  Dr Teverson stopped writing and looked at me across his glasses. I met his gaze.

  ‘I can’t keep the baby. It’s impossible.’

  For a moment he was silent. I looked away, tortured by a mixture of embarrassment and guilt.

  Having briefly reflected on what I’d said, he explained that I would need to discuss that further with a medical social worker at the maternity hospital. He returned to his writing and when he had finished he handed me a referral letter. The sweet jar remained on the shelf.

  Dazed, I walked out of the surgery and on to the street. It was real at last. I was going to have a baby. The denial stage was over and I was entering the next phase of my pregnancy: blind panic.

  That night, at home, I watched my parents involved in their usual routines: my father eating supper on his lap, railing against the television news; my mother quietly occupied in the kitchen, catching up with her housework. My heart was thumping but inside my body another, tiny heart was softly beating. I could ignore it no longer. After an hour or so, I headed upstairs to my room, telling my parents I needed an early night.

  A few days later, I received notification of a hospital appointment. I had been booked in at the Mothers’ Hospital in Clapton Road, Hackney, which, I would discover, was run by the Salvation Army—a successor to a series of maternity homes they had set up at the end of the nineteenth century for unmarried mothers as an alternative to the workhouse. Services at the Mothers’ Hospital, opened in 1913, had always been available to all mothers, although in accordance with the Salvation Army’s aims it had a particular remit to care for those who were single or poor. And having kept its Salvation Army identity after being integrated into the National Health Service, it also retained that bias.

  Hazel insisted on coming along with me to my first appointment. She was determined to change my mind about the adoption and, like a newlywed threatened by a singleton, she refused to entertain any of my misgivings about teenage motherhood. She was unwavering in her confidence that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

  The medical social worker, middle-aged and reserved, seemed sympathetic. At any rate she treated me with compassion as I told her my story. I explained that I was still living at home but had succeeded, thus far, in keeping the pregnancy from my parents. Hazel offered up the view that I wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer. I countered by voicing the possibility I’d been nurturing that I might be able to give birth and have my baby adopted without anyone ever knowing at all. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I realised how ridiculous this idea sounded but the social worker listened without comment. I wasn’t worried that she would give away my secret. I knew I was protected by the rules of patient confidentiality and so did she. She told me she would set things in motion for the adoption.

  At the time I wasn’t aware that a lot of the staff at the hospital were Salvation Army officers, but as we said goodbye to the social worker, I could have sworn I saw a bonnet hanging on the back of her door.

  Outside on the pavement, Hazel stared at me, appalled. ‘It won’t be as easy as you think,’ she warned. ‘You have to consider the baby. Even if you’re with him for just a short while in hospital, he’ll fret for you. He’ll miss your smell.’ This was the last thing I wanted to hear. I went to the rest of my hospital appointments alone.

  A few weeks later, Martin and I learned that the medical social worker had set up a meeting for us with a justice of the peace to discuss the adoption. We took the tube to North London and made our way to a sprawling house in a leafy part of Hampstead. A woman opened the door with a genial smile. She was in her early fifties, short and dark-haired, and radiated a bustling self-confidence. Showing us into a book-lined room looking out over a beautiful garden, she sat us down, gave us tea and began to ask us questions, inquiring into our backgrounds, religions and academic histories, making notes as we responded. Finally, she put down her pen and told us that she was in close contact with a couple who, she believed, would make perfect parents for our baby.

  Sitting beside Martin as the JP talked, I felt incredibly young and insignificant. Taking in the elegant desk stacked with papers, I was transported back to my headmistress’s office. During the dressing-down she had given me I’d been angry and indignant, considering myself far too old to be insulted in this patronising manner. Now, conscious that I was in the wrong, I felt guilty, penitent and intimidated by my ‘betters’. I had done exactly what she had predicted I would do, and it was a bitter pill to swallow.

  The JP was warning us that once the adoption was legally completed there could be no further contact with our baby. In some cases, adoptive parents might see fit to send on news to a child’s birth parents but only through an intermediary. In this case, since the prospective adoptive mother had been in the public eye, and her own father well known in his professional field, it was deemed to be both unfair and unwise for us ever to know who they might be. Did we understand?

  I nodded, but I wasn’t fully able to absorb the ramifications of what she was trying to tell us: that we would never see our child again, as infant or adult, since at that time adopted children did not have a legal right to access their original birth certificates or other records. She went on to explain that this couple lived in a large house with a lovely garden. I looked again out of the latticed window. Perhaps they had a house like this. It was becoming clear they were successful and financially secure, far better equipped to give my unborn baby a good life than Martin and I were at present, and probably ever would be.

  I knew all my parents wanted for me was a better life than theirs. It didn’t occur to me until much later that I was transferring the same undefined ambitions to my baby. He would be better off with this couple purely because they were my ‘betters’. I was as convinced of that as I was that our baby was a boy.

  The JP was smiling kindly. Although there could be no more contact, she said, she would try to persuade the adoptive parents to send me a single photograph, just to show that our baby was doing well. Until then I should take care of myself until the child was born.

  I went to the hospital each month for check-ups. As my due date approached, I gained the impression the doctors thought something wasn’t quite right. I was still very small—my bump hardly showed at all—and they were beginning to wonder whether I had got my dates wrong. I was adamant that they were correct. In the end, it was decided that I should attend the hospital every week for treatment in an experimental machine designed to help increase the blood supply to the womb.

  During these sessions I sat encased in a piece of futuristic equipment that put pressure on my abdomen using some kind of suction. I resented having to undergo this treatment, not just because it was uncomfortable, but because it seemed to be working: one afternoon my father remarked that I was putting on weight. But if he harboured any suspicions that I might be pregnant, he was in denial, too. Neither he nor my mother ever tackled me on the subject.

  I was still visiting Martin most evenings, and he was still walking me home as usual, kissing me goodnight by the rubbish chute on the landing. But we had started to argue. I was stressed, my moods were erratic and I had crying jags. I began to question the unquestionable: could we possibly keep the baby? Could we move in with Bridie, or my parents? Unable to think clearly any longer, one night I decided that Martin and I should break up.

  We didn’t see each othe
r for a week or so. Then he wrote me a long letter clearly setting out his feelings and reviewing the plans we had made. He wrote that he still loved me but that he was convinced having our baby adopted was the right decision. We’d always acknowledged that the conception had been a mistake, and nothing had happened since then to change anything. Now we just had to do what we could to make it right, and keeping the baby just because he was ‘our baby’ was selfish. We had to consider what was best for him. We were too young, we had no money and we had nowhere to live. We both knew that a baby deserved much more than what we had to offer and here was a rich couple waiting in the wings to give him everything he would ever need.

  His measured words put everything into perspective. I realised I had been toying with alternatives rather than seriously considering them.

  How did I think I was going to bring up a baby in my room? My parents had looked forward for years to having a home of their own, never dreaming they might need it to accommodate an unmarried daughter and her baby. I tried to imagine the scene, all of us trapped together in one council flat. I would be reliant on my mum and dad, emotionally and financially, perhaps forever.

  Somewhere beyond the East End there was something called the ‘permissive society’, but it hadn’t filtered through to Gullane House. Here, on this estate, people still adhered to a strict social code. They might not have had money but they still had morals and clean doorsteps. Shotgun marriages were not yet a thing of the past. I thought of my mother, beaten for talking to boys on street corners. She had known she must never bring shame on her family and neither could I.

  And what would happen to Martin and me if I insisted on keeping the baby? I didn’t want to lose him, but that was quite likely to be the outcome. I knew in my heart that everything he had said in his letter was true. And so, adrift in a sea of hormones and powerful emotions, I clung on to Martin, held fast to the conviction that we were doing the right thing and wiped all other ideas from my mind.