Black by Design

by Pauline Black

  I’m a great believer in serendipity, but this discovery was almost unbelievable. The chances of stumbling upon this particular programme in the middle of the night, when you had spent all day being a victim of the ‘Magnus Effect’, had to be a million to one.

  It was as if a giant, unseen boot had already applied itself to my rear end with a force that was propelling me towards my ultimate goal. Perhaps I should just bend with the Magnus Effect, instead of trying to impose my own linear trajectory. I needed more information about my birth, my mother and her family. The best place to find that was in St Catherine’s House in London, the national repository of records of births, marriages and deaths.

  I switched off the TV, returned to bed and slept like a baby.

  SIXTEEN

  HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM

  LIKE BELINDA?

  The following day I returned to London. I needed tangible legal evidence that Belinda and Eileen Magnus existed. The only way to get that was by looking at birth records. If I knew my mother’s date of birth, then I could look in the marriage records to see who she married. Maybe this would give me an insight into her world and possibly the greatest prize of all, a current address.

  It was an early train full of commuters. Next to me a well-upholstered woman was wedged into her seat. An open Tupperware box rested on the table in front of her, from which she continually extracted biscuits, which she nibbled like a hamster for the entire journey. A well-dressed businessman sat opposite me, poring over documents, occasionally adjusting his tight white collar with the fingers of his right hand. Next to him was a short, blond man, probably in his mid-thirties, who had the tiny arms and hands of a thalidomide sufferer. I was acutely aware that he kept surreptitiously peering at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. His bottle-bottomed glasses made his eyes look twice as big. To avoid his gaze I put on my sunglasses and pretended to be asleep.

  At Watford Junction, the large woman beside me poked me in the arm and said, ‘Excuse me,’ in the high, fluting voice that people use to tell a child to do something.

  She manoeuvred her bulk from the seat that she had shoehorned herself into, forcing me into the aisle. As I sat back down, the man opposite leaned forward and said loudly in a broad Yorkshire accent: ‘Are you that singer that used to be in a ska band in the ’80s? The Specials, right?’

  ‘Um, it was The Selecter,’ I replied, embarrassed by the fact that all the people in the immediate vicinity had turned to look at me.

  ‘You’re Pauline Black, aren’t you? You were right good,’ he announced in response. ‘Do you remember me?’

  Damn, he had uttered the four most deadly words known to an ex-pop star. I hardly remembered somebody I met yesterday, yet alone back in 1980. ‘Uh, where did I meet you?’ I said quickly, hoping for a clue.

  ‘Bradford. You were playing St George’s Hall. We chatted for ages. Remember?’

  I gave the usual response in such situations, which went something like: ‘I’m afraid I met an awful lot of people that year.’ I could almost feel the disapproval of the nearby passengers who were all earwigging the conversation by this time, obviously attracted by the unusual spectacle of an extremely discomfited, very minor celebrity.

  Like all fans, he had a story to tell about our encounter and proceeded to do so in such a loud voice that I reckoned they could have heard him in First Class. ‘You said you were hungry and asked me to go and get you some fish and chips.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said, ‘that was kind of you.’

  ‘Yeah, but when I came back with them, you moaned ’cos there wasn’t enough salt and vinegar on them.’

  The words hung in the air like a cartoon conversation bubble. Passengers’ eyes swivelled accusingly towards me, probably thinking: ‘What a callous bitch.’ Unable to give a good account of my behaviour, I laughed. I don’t know why, because it was a completely inappropriate response.

  ‘I’m really sorry about that,’ I said, trying to contain my giggles. Mercifully the long horizontal sign that says ‘Euston station 1 mile’ came into view through the carriage window. ‘Hope to see you at a gig soon,’ I said as a parting shot. I got up and fled down the aisle towards the front of the train.

  ‘I always liked Madness best out of you lot anyways,’ he said to my departing back. Some people just have to have the last word!

  I could see that it was a fine day outside the station concourse, so, not wanting any more embarrassing encounters, I decided to walk to my destination.

  My brisk pace rapidly took me through leafy Russell Square past Talawa Theatre, where I had starred in a play, From the Mississippi Delta, a few years before. I had discovered the Holborn area on exploratory walks to fill the time between matinee and evening performances on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

  The man’s words kept echoing in my head as I walked along: ‘You’re Pauline Black, aren’t you?’ he’d said.

  ‘Was I?’ I wondered out loud, much to the consternation of passers-by.

  Who was I? My first conscious identity had been as Pauline Vickers. Not happy with that, I’d changed my name by deed poll to Pauline Black, when I was twenty-six. Now I was about to reclaim my given birth name of Belinda Magnus. So who did that make me? Confused was the answer.

  I had often passed St Catherine’s House, but I had never ventured inside. It occupied a corner plot on the intersection of the Strand and Kingsway, an imposing, wedge-shaped building with a Portland stone and granite façade and large glass doors that swished gently as they were pushed open to the thickly carpeted inner sanctum. Once inside, it was like being hermetically sealed in a tomb.

  It was only 10.30 a.m., but already the place was a hive of activity. The occupants were mostly silent, or talking in hushed voices. The soft rustle of pages turning and the solid clonking of books being put back on shelves were the only sounds that disturbed the overwhelming quiet.

  These hushed enclaves are called ‘search rooms’. Here is the proof that humanity exists in Great Britain and beyond since records began; the proof that we are not figments of each other’s imaginations. All of life’s main events are recorded here in large slab-like tomes, burgundy-coloured for births, green for marriages and black for deaths.

  Each one represents a quarter of a year. They contain numbered codes that are useful when searching for lost relatives. Humanity reduced to letters of the alphabet and numbers. There is nothing to illustrate the accompanying information on each page: no happy photos of married couples or chubby-cheeked new arrivals on Earth. No photos of gravestones, mausoleums and follies, or worse, an unmarked pauper’s grave. There was nothing to say whether these people were loved, hated, did bad or good things. In this giant repository of human misery and happiness, equality reigned supreme.

  But in reality these millions of pages contained lots of dirty little secrets. I was one of them. In my opinion, adoption is legalised identity theft. How many children were trapped in this paper limbo-land, our real identities strangled at birth, reduced to a cross-referenced number, which enabled officialdom to bury our origins in an inaccessible grave, as if we didn’t exist. Many of us would never be found, but perhaps I could liberate Belinda Magnus from this closeted hell. She had been patiently waiting for forty-two years.

  Identity is the soul of a person. The adoption process is like having your soul written on a piece of paper and given to somebody else. Remember the Simpsons episode ‘Bart Sells His Soul’ in the seventh series? He writes ‘Bart Simpson’s Soul’ on a piece of paper and sells it to Milhouse for $5, who then sells it on to the comic book guy for some comics. Afterwards Bart has a nightmare where he and his friends are each rowing their boats across a misty river. The difference between Bart and everybody else is that each of his friends has another self – or soul – who helps row the boat. But Milhouse has his other self and the soul of Bart rowing for him so he does not have to do any work at all. Bart is doomed to the much harder task of rowing with both oars. That’s how it feels to be adopted. The busin
ess of life is much more hard work.

  I lifted the heavy book for the last quarter of 1953 from the shelf. I turned the neatly handwritten pages until I found the tenth month and the twenty-third day. Three-quarters of the way down the page, neatly recorded in blue script, was evidence of my stolen soul, two words, Belinda Magnus. She existed again. I was almost whole.

  The process of reclaiming my name seemed a natural rite of passage. I can’t explain the sudden joy I felt. Thus invigorated, I decided to look for my mother’s birth registration. I had been told that she was sixteen when she had me. I looked in all four quarterly books for the year 1937. I found her in the last quarter. With this positive identification and a birth date, I set about looking in every marriage registry from 1953 to 1996. I got to 1973 and gave up. Nothing. Perhaps she was dead? I stared at the black-bound death registers and decided that I didn’t dare begin.

  By now it was mid-afternoon. To satisfy my curiosity, I went back to marriages and looked through the registries until the present day. There was no record of a marriage for Eileen Magnus. Therefore at the age of fifty-eight, she was either a spinster, dead or in another country.

  It was almost five-thirty and the place was nearly empty. A security man was standing by the door intent on letting nobody else in and hoping those who were still present would soon leave. I reluctantly admitted defeat.

  On my return journey to Coventry I mulled over my discoveries and decided they didn’t really amount to much. Then I had an idea. The solution to my problem was so simple that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before: ‘Go to the last known address for Eileen Magnus.’ Of course! Even if she no longer lived there, perhaps the present occupants or a neighbour might be able to shed some light on her whereabouts.

  Then a glimmer of doubt crept into my plan. If I went to the address, there might be an embarrassing or even distressing incident if she still lived there. Or worse, there might be relatives who knew about me still living there. Perhaps they might not want me to know where she was? The idea was fraught with untold dangers.

  I’d read many pamphlets, articles and internet pages about searches for birth parents that had gone horribly wrong. The reader was constantly warned that the estranged son or daughter in question had not followed the guidelines for a successful reunion. There was always an official address at the end of such articles exhorting any adoptees to get professional help before embarking upon their journey.

  I knew these organisations had only the best intentions, but I decided that it was precisely the best intentions of such organisations that had got me into this predicament in the first place, so why should I trust them to get me out of it? Besides, I preferred a ‘hands-on’ approach. At least I could see what was happening on a daily basis. I didn’t fancy sitting around, possibly for years, before a letter dropped through my letter box saying that my mother would like to meet me. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain!

  I did have one trump card still up my sleeve – my adoptive brother Ken, himself adopted, lived in my mother’s home town, Dagenham, with his second wife and young son Daniel. I would ask him to make some enquiries. He was white, middle-aged and had the gift of the gab: excellent credentials for the job. As our adoptive mother often said: ‘He can charm the birds out of the trees when he puts his mind to it.’ I resolved to phone him as soon as I got home.

  My brother Ken was a kindred spirit. Even though he was twelve years older than me, the glue that united us was our adoptee status in the Vickers family. Unlike myself, nobody would have guessed that he had been adopted. He even looked similar to my other adoptive brothers. In his early thirties, he got wind of a rumour from our elderly aunt Lily that maybe our adoptive dad was actually his real dad. This bombshell caused a crater-like division in the family for a while, especially after he traced his real mother, Edna. It was quite natural that he wanted to find out if the rumour was true and since mothers know best, Edna was best placed to provide verification. All she would admit to was that she had had an affair with our adoptive dad, but she didn’t think that he was Ken’s father. Unresolved questions are worse than an unexpected answer. Our dad died soon after and took the secret, if indeed there was one, to his grave.

  I was the first person that Ken told when he embarked on his search. He explicitly swore me to secrecy, because he knew that it would upset Ivy and the rest of the family. During an argument with Ivy about how she couldn’t boss me about because she wasn’t my real mother, I viciously blurted out that Ken had found his real mum and I intended to do the same. If I had felled her with a cricket bat I couldn’t have inflicted a worse hurt. Ivy became hysterical and cried for a week. Our small family world fell apart. I was hit from all sides about how malicious, heartless and uncaring I had been to divulge Ken’s secret to her. The fallout put my own search back about twenty years.

  Ken and I didn’t speak for a few years. He was naturally very angry with me. In time we had got past this obstacle, but things were never quite the same between us. I think I was simply acting out of jealousy. I envied him finding his real mother. My lack made me cruel.

  When I phoned Ken later that evening, he would have been well within his rights to say: ‘Go do it yourself. I did.’ But he didn’t. He offered to help in any way that he could. We chatted for a while about possible strategies, but eventually decided that it was best just to wait and see what happened when he knocked on the door. He agreed to go the following evening.

  The night and the following day dragged on interminably. I told Terry what I had done. ‘What did you involve Ken for? I would have gone round there for you.’

  I felt guilty that I hadn’t even thought to ask him. I didn’t dare say that I thought Ken was better suited to the job, because he was friendly and chatty, whereas Terry could be very undiplomatic sometimes.

  ‘I should have thought,’ I said, as a placatory gesture. ‘I didn’t think you wanted to get involved.’

  ‘Well, I don’t really, but I promise to support you in whatever comes of this.’

  ‘Let’s just wait and see what happens,’ I said lightly.

  We settled down in front of the TV to watch a video of The Shawshank Redemption for the fourth time. Usually this movie was a guaranteed tearjerker, but I was so emotionally pent-up that I wasn’t even crying by the end credits. What was happening to me?

  I wasn’t good at waiting, so by the time the phone rang the following evening at 7.30, I was almost chewing the wallpaper.

  ‘Hello, little sister,’ Ken said, sounding very pleased with himself. Immediately he cut to the chase. ‘I think I’ve got a bit of a result for you.’

  My heart lurched like a playful puppy.

  ‘Eileen doesn’t live there, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Oh.’ My heart sank like a drowned puppy.

  ‘But the present owner of the house had a look at his deeds and it was sold to him by a couple with a Polish name. Have you got a pencil?’

  I grabbed a pen and paper.

  ‘Are you ready? I’ll spell the name, because I’m not sure how you say it correctly. B O B O L E C K I.’

  ‘Did the house owner know who they were?’ I asked tentatively, not sure what to make of this new piece of information.

  ‘He thinks the husband was Polish and the wife was Eileen’s older sister. Apparently he married one of three sisters. He can’t remember her name, but he’s pretty sure that it wasn’t Eileen. But he thinks their parents were named Magnus.’

  ‘Does he know where they went?’ I asked urgently.

  ‘Oh yes, I knew there was something else I had to tell you. He thinks they went to Surrey.’

  Surrey? Hadn’t expected that, certainly not after living in Dagenham.

  ‘All right, love. I’ll leave you to it then. My dinner’s on the table. Good luck,’ he said cheerily. He loved his food.

  I thanked him profusely and hung up.

  There was a lot to be said in pra
ise of family, no matter how you came by them. That old adage, ‘They stick by you through thick and thin,’ is absolutely true in the case of the Vickers family. Would I find the same willingness in this new one? I didn’t know the answer to that, but I hoped to very soon.

  I sat by the phone, staring at the nine capital letters on the page. Was this the key to the mystery or just a red herring? Whatever it was, I needed to know how to pronounce the name, before I could do any more with it. So I phoned my friend David Box in London. His mother, Hanna, was a Polish Jew. She was sure to know how to say the name.

  Fortunately he picked up after a couple of rings. I briefly explained my problem to him. He ran the name by his mum, who pronounced it exactly as it was written.

  ‘Do you know where they live?’ David asked.

  ‘Not really. Somewhere in Surrey is as far as I’ve got.’

  ‘Oh, that’s in the London area. Let me have a look in the phone directory and I’ll get back to you.’ He hung up.

  I sat with both hands on the receiver, willing the phone to ring. Surely, it wasn’t going to be as easy as looking in a phone book to find my mum? After a few minutes the phone rang again. It was David.

  ‘Hold on to your hat, Pauline,’ he said jokingly. ‘You’re in luck. There’s only one Bobolecki listed in the Surrey phone book. So there’s a good chance that it might be them. Do you want the number and their address?’

  Of course I want the bloody number and address, I wanted to scream!

  ‘Good luck. Let me know how you get on.’

  And there it was, probably the most important piece of information that I’d ever written down in my life – the telephone number of my prospective aunt in Surrey. I was almost home.

  The upwardly mobile leap from Dagenham, Essex to Worcester Park, Surrey, was encouraging. It was more heartwarming than finding your mother on a run-down caravan site in South Ockendon.