More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  I look back at the nurse. Her arms are still outstretched. In my own, Sarah Louise is still passive, oblivious of how her life is about to change irrevocably. Her tiny feet are swamped by the white bootees. Why hadn’t I bought smaller ones? They are slipping off as I pass her carefully to the nurse. It is done.

  Then my mother and I are walking quickly along a corridor, sunlight streaming through open windows on either side. Someone is coming towards me: another mum is also leaving the hospital today but it takes me a second to recognise her in her summer dress.

  As we meet she registers the suitcase my mother is carrying. ‘Are you off now?’ she asks me. Her smile is as bright as the bold colours of her dress. But suddenly a shadow flickers across her face. She knows there is something wrong, something is missing.

  ‘Where is your baby?’

  I have no idea what to say. The woman waits, confused by my silence. Both she and my mother are looking at me expectantly and I know I have to give an answer but then, suddenly, a nurse is hurrying past us with a bundle of clothes: a white shawl and a white ruched dress. The woman’s eyes are still on me but I am staring after the nurse, watching her round a corner, wondering where she has taken my baby’s clothes. I hear myself reply: ‘I left her behind.’

  The young woman’s face instantly clouds. As a mother, she cannot make sense of what I have told her. I feel hot tears streaming down my face, the first I have shed since giving birth. My own mother looks at me helplessly in the same way I looked at her as a child, anguished and impotent in the face of her grief, the pain of being separated from her beloved brother.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she says as she takes my hand. We walk on together as the young mum gapes after us, speechless.

  Outside, on the hot street, a man stepped smartly out of a parked car and opened the passenger doors for us. It was the husband of the couple who lived on the floor below us, the friends in whom my mother had confided. He knew my secret. But he didn’t speak of it. Instead he nosed us through the traffic home to Gullane House, commenting on the hot weather. The sun was still shining and life was going on in spite of what I’d just done.

  Back at the estate, our neighbour carried my suitcase all the way up to our maisonette. There the ritual of tea-making could not dispel the awkwardness we all felt. Perhaps I was turning into my mother, but I didn’t want this man, or even her, to make any mention of what had just happened. More than that, I didn’t want anybody’s pity. I excused myself and took my case upstairs to my room. I was tormented by the image of a nurse taking away the clothes I had bought for my daughter, and it cut me to the quick. What had happened to them? Had they been thrown away? Given to someone in greater need? I tried to rationalise. My little girl had another life now, and new clothes would be a part of that. Lots of beautiful new clothes.

  My hand glided over a perfectly flat stomach. Somehow it had snapped miraculously back into place as though Sarah Louise had never been there. But I knew, and I would always know, that she had been. For nine months she had grown inside me and now she was missing.

  I still had something to prove it. I opened my case and took out my toilet bag. Inside I found what I was looking for: a tiny plastic wrist tag with two words written on it—‘Baby Wassmer’.

  I put it to my lips as the tears flowed. It was all I had left of her.

  Chapter Seven

  Afterbirth

  For weeks after the birth I continued to hope that a photograph would arrive in the post. It never did. I cursed myself for not having taken one in the hospital but deep down I knew that an image captured at that time would only have preserved the moment of abandonment forever. A picture now, though—even a few weeks after our separation—a little piece of evidence that Sarah Louise was thriving in a new environment, might offer some justification, however small, for what I had done.

  What I did get was a visit from a Home Office official. My mother was unnerved by this arrival on our doorstep, but the woman explained that she was simply gathering information for possible changes to the Adoption Act. It would all be completely confidential. My mother put the kettle on while I took this lady to my room. Sitting on the edge of my bed, she asked lots of questions, taking notes throughout our conversation. I assured her that I was fully aware of my rights. I knew I had six weeks from the birth before I had to sign the papers.

  Years later I would learn that at the time the Adoption Act, which had been passed into law in 1958, was the subject of widespread criticism. A committee set up to examine its provisions was to report in 1972 recommending significant reform. This report became the basis for the Adoption Act of 1976, which repealed the 1958 legislation in its entirety. So I like to think my experience played some minuscule part in helping to improve the process for future mums.

  In 1970, however, the adoption of my baby was being handled according to the old law. The Home Office lady had also brought with her a form she asked me to sign, provided I was happy to do so, for passport office paperwork that would allow the adoptive parents to take my baby on a short holiday abroad. In order to do this they needed my consent.

  This request added another detail to my sketchy picture of this family’s lifestyle. How wealthy they must be to be able to go off abroad. So far the only person in our family who had left these shores, except to fight in wars, was Aunt Carrie, who had been on a plane that did the ‘loop de loop’ while flying from Southend to Calais. And here was my baby travelling to a foreign country when she was only a few weeks old. It reinforced my conviction that Sarah Louise would have so many more opportunities with her new parents.

  The days plodded by. The weather was still hot but the nights were getting longer. My parents never mentioned the concealed pregnancy or my baby’s birth. The impending adoption, too, continued to be ignored. This avoidance of the issue was alienating me from them. I knew they must be wondering whether I was going to change my mind, but they never once asked me. Instead, they did their best to cheer me up, both taking a week’s holiday from work even though we weren’t going away anywhere. They simply stayed at home with me. I inferred from this that they believed I was doing the right thing and felt that now it was just a matter of getting me through it.

  One day we went dog racing—all of us, even my mother. At the Wick my father made a fuss of me, buying me extra Russian salad. We were a family. I was their little girl again. But when I went to the ladies’ and caught sight of myself in the mirror I noticed that my breasts were still leaking milk, staining the tie-dye dress I was wearing. I wasn’t a little girl, I was a mother. A mother without a child.

  I was also still Martin’s girlfriend. Most evenings I walked to his flat, just as I’d always done. For the remainder of the summer I could be as carefree as the other young people singing along with Mungo Jerry. But I knew I was pretending, and everyone else knew it, too.

  Carol and her husband had moved into the flat under Bridie’s. Carol had recently given birth to her baby—a boy, like Hazel’s—and I could hear him crying night and day. I was trying to behave as if nothing had happened. I was not prepared to accept pity from anyone, and especially not from other mothers. My head knew I had made the right decision but my body was still telling me otherwise, and I could not bring myself to hold this other baby. I felt numb when I looked out of the window one day to see Bridie in the garden, rocking back and forth as she cradled Carol’s son tightly in her arms.

  The documents were ready for signing. I was standing at a fork in the road with two clear paths before me. I could still choose motherhood. Martin believed it was too late, and I knew he was right. Strangers had now been taking care of my baby for far longer than I had. She had been with them for forty-two days; I’d shared only ten with her. I could not even imagine what Sarah Louise would look like by this time—not without a photograph. I still kept her wrist tag in my bedroom drawer but now, when I held it to my lips, I could no longer smell her sweet, baby scent. It had faded, as the words ‘Baby Wassmer’ were starting to do. Sh
e was someone else’s child.

  Nothing in my circumstances, or Martin’s, had changed since we had first made our decision. Besides, everything was in motion, and although I knew that I could have pressed the button to stop the machinery, I felt it would be irresponsible of me to do so at this late stage. The burden of our secret had been lifted from our shoulders and was being dealt with by important people—lawyers and courts and a host of other officials. If I dared change my mind now I would have been wrecking things for the new parents, who had stepped in to remedy my mistake. They were important people too, according to the JP. I had to stand fast.

  I was no longer the feisty rebel of the Central Foundation School for Girls with her scorn for authority. I had been traumatised by an overwhelming sense of guilt stoked, as it turned out, by post-natal depression, and I wasn’t the same girl any more. The experience had subdued me, robbed me of my teenagerhood. I’d seen the pain we had caused my mum and dad and Bridie. I felt I had ruined my parents’ lives just when things had been looking up for them. Giving up Sarah Louise was, as it had always been, what I had to do to make things right.

  I signed the documents.

  In the autumn I got a job. I was now a junior librarian in the main branch library next door to the Whitechapel art gallery. I worked from nine to five most days and until 8pm one evening a week. Within a few months I had become an expert in the Dewey classification system and spent much of my time with my nose buried in the books that surrounded me.

  I got on well with the rest of the staff and soon came to know the regular borrowers, who were mainly students from Walbrook College on the Whitechapel Road, elderly men in search of large-print westerns by Zane Grey and permatanned Jewish ladies hankering after historical romance. Everyone else borrowed Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, first published the previous year, which was still the library’s most popular book by the end of 1970.

  Away from the tranquillity of the library, however, I was a mess. My relationship with Martin was often fraught. When we met up in the evenings I tried to keep my emotions in check but I was liable to fly off the handle or sink into despair. We had both thought, naïvely, that once the baby had been adopted we could go back to normal. We were trying to carry on as if nothing had happened, but something had happened, something huge and life-changing. Although we had faced it together we hadn’t been marked by it in the same way. I was the one who’d been through it; he was the one who had been waiting for me to come out the other side. I had been fundamentally changed by it; Martin hadn’t. I bore the battle scars—stretch marks—to prove it.

  On my way to Martin’s house I often saw other girls heading towards the station at Mile End and a night out ‘up West’. They looked about the same age as me but I knew that, inside and out, I was much older.

  We had decided that I should go on the Pill and I had promised to go to the Brooke Advisory Centre, which provided free confidential advice on contraception to young people, but I kept putting it off. We didn’t sleep together in six months. The truth was I didn’t want to sleep with Martin, or anyone else. My mind and my body were resisting it because I knew to my cost what sex led to. How could I be a hundred per cent sure the Pill would be safe and it wouldn’t happen again?

  At home, we were on the phone at last. My mother bought a special telephone seat (Formica again) with a little padded cushion and a cupboard underneath for the directories. In an attempt to lighten my mood, she took photographs of me perched on it, the fashionable white receiver pressed to my ear, smiling emptily and talking to nobody, like a model in a cheesy advertisement. She was stealthily modifying my choice of decor and would eventually have the white sittingroom walls papered in a patterned design that totally ruined the effect of the white horse under the waterfall.

  Meanwhile, I redecorated my own room, painting the walls matte black. If there were any doubt that I was suffering from post-natal depression, this ought to have been a clue. I completed the revamp with an Athena poster bearing the words of ‘Desiderata’ (‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste…’), the ubiquitous New Age mantra of the times. King Crimson had used it to promote their album Lizard in 1970 and a recording of it by a US TV and radio host, Les Crane, backed by a gospel choir, was in the charts for four months in 1971. The line that most resonated with me was: ‘And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.’

  My mother came home from work, looking forward to putting her feet up with a cigarette, took one look at my grim black room and exploded. ‘You’ve done this on purpose, haven’t you? Our lovely new flat and look what you’ve done!’ She eventually got the council to repaper the walls.

  I went to see Dr Teverson, who prescribed Librium. I took it for a while and then tried to do without it, but immediately I began to feel hollow, as if a hole had opened up inside me that would never be filled in. My baby’s absence gnawed at me—an absence stronger than any presence. One night, consumed by loss, I wrote a poem as I struggled to make sense of it.

  ‘Cuckoo’

  Since you have gone,

  Another shape now fills

  The empty space between

  The sheets.

  It leaves no perfect mark

  Upon the pillow.

  At night, its silence

  Breaks into my dreams,

  With selfish screams it keeps me

  From my sleep.

  Tonight, it tries to suckle

  On my soul,

  This sullen, selfish stranger

  To my womb.

  And weakened by each silent breath it steals

  I watch its shadow grow to fill my room.

  Dr Teverson put me back on the Librium and signed me off work for a week while it began to take effect again. On my first day back, a kindly old deputy manager drew me to one side. He had seen the word ‘depression’ on my doctor’s certificate. ‘What’s a lovely young girl like you got to be depressed about?’ I wished I could tell him but I couldn’t.

  In the spring of 1971 we were joined by a new member of staff. Like Martin, David was a couple of years older than I was, tall, slim and wore his hair long. He was passionate about art, and one afternoon I went with him next door to the Whitechapel gallery. As we wandered around the canvases his appreciation of and enthusiasm for the paintings opened my eyes to a world I had not explored much beyond the pages of The Book of Knowledge. Soon we were going to other exhibitions, taking in bold images by Gilbert and George, and David Hockney; to the Tate gallery and the Courtauld Institute. One afternoon, looking at some Post-Impressionist paintings by Bonnard, I began to understand how life—maybe even my own life—could be viewed from new perspectives.

  It wasn’t long before I was checking the library timesheets to see when David and I would be scheduled to work together. I started to look forward to his company. I started to look forward, period.

  Martin and I were drifting apart. Now, when I went round to his flat in the evenings, he would doze on the sofa, tired out after working on a building site every day. I would be left sitting beside him watching television. We had, it seemed, nothing left to say to each other. We had been through too much, too soon. We both knew that we could never have coped with our baby, but it was clear that we couldn’t cope with the loss of our baby, either. We had persevered for over a year since Sarah Louise’s birth, handling the grief in our own ways, and we had moved on—but apart, not together. It was as if we’d become different people.

  When we broke up, in July 1971, it was not with a bang but a whimper. One night I just decided not to visit him. I called him on the phone and he didn’t argue. He told me he was busy, too. We let each other be and when we met again a few weeks later, things felt better between us. We had given each other permission to pursue our respective new lives.

  By the end of August I was officially going out with David. Initially I’d wanted to keep him separate from my life at home, just as I’d done with Martin, but David was a different character altoget
her, outgoing and upbeat, and he wasn’t having any of that. He just turned up at Gullane House and introduced himself to my mum and dad.

  My parents were pleased about this new relationship. For them it drew a line under the past. And they loved David. He talked politics with my father and charmed my mother. He even appreciated her kitsch knick-knacks, laughing with her over ‘Apron pink—weather stink!’. David was good for me, too. He was a positive person, always looking forward rather than back. I had told him about Sarah Louise and the adoption and he had taken it all in his stride. He offered me a way out of the maze of dark days towards a possibility of brighter times I couldn’t have envisaged a few months earlier and his infectious passion for art was helping me to broaden my mind again. I loved him perhaps even more than I’d loved Martin. I was no longer taking anti-depressants.

  David moved into a flat in Wimbledon, sharing with a friend, and I spent a lot of time with him there. Compared with the East End it was like being in the countryside and we enjoyed long walks across Wimbledon Common. At home, he stretched canvases and painted me. I was flattered to be his muse.

  With my life slowly getting back on an even keel, I realised that to even begin to justify the agony of having Sarah Louise adopted, I needed to work towards a better future for myself as well as for her. The first step was to make up for my abandoned education. Encouraged by David, I put in my notice at the library and enrolled at Walbrook College just down the road to begin studying that autumn for the A-Levels I’d missed.

  The course was only a year long but I hoped, by the end of it, to have gained passes in English and history. I expected to do better in English, my strongest subject—but that was before I knew that one of my history tutors would be John Merrington, a charismatic Western Marxist historian who went on to write for the New Left Review and to publish several highly respected books. No teacher could have been more of an inspiration, even if his coverage could be a little lopsided. I recall spending months on the French Revolution and then rattling through several less interesting and uncontroversial periods at great speed.