It was too late to phone. Besides, I had to think of a plausible story before I went barging into a potential aunt and uncle’s lives. How could I get them to deliver the answer to my 64,000-dollar question without giving away my real identity? I knew that I would have to resort to a temporary subterfuge to find out what I needed.
By the time I had finished phoning all the Magnuses in the East London phone book I had perfected a plausible white lie. Generally, lies are seldom foolproof, but the one I had constructed had held up under heavy scrutiny. I just hoped that it wouldn’t receive too much analysis in the morning. For all I knew, any mention of the name Eileen Magnus might raise alarm bells.
I tried to imagine what my aunt would be like. It was likely that she was older than my mother, but I couldn’t be sure. Did my aunt know about me? It was possible that she didn’t, although unlikely. A big sister tended to notice if their little sister gave birth to a black baby in 1953. Therefore if somebody enquired about the whereabouts of Eileen, would she be alerted to the possibility that this baby had come looking for its mother? I hoped that so much time had passed that she had forgotten that I ever existed.
What if she was racist? People of her generation were often uncomfortable about black people. When I was the radiographer on night duty at Walsgrave Hospital in the mid-’70s, very occasionally I would have to X-ray an elderly patient who refused to be touched by a black person. I would patiently explain to them that I was the only person on duty in the middle of the night and that they would have to let me do it or wait until the morning. Some of them eventually saw sense, but some preferred to suffer their agonies until a white person turned up to do the job in the morning. I found these experiences totally humiliating.
Was my aunt like that? If she was Jewish, then I hoped that she would be like David’s mother Hanna, who was one of the most enlightened women I knew.
The following morning I was unusually nervous. Breakfast was a meagre affair, just coffee and buttered toast. I kept pacing up and down the kitchen, practising what I was going to say on the phone, unable to sit still. Terry was unusually quiet when he came downstairs. I had shared the previous night’s news with him. It had taken him by surprise. I could tell that he had thought that my enterprise would take weeks, not days. He murmured some vague words of encouragement, but we hadn’t discussed the implications it had for us. He let the dog out into the garden before switching on the kettle to make his customary cup of tea. A pall of silence hung over the kitchen. We occupied the same space, but seemed to be living in two separate worlds. It was almost as if my mother had become a taboo subject between us. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when this had happened, but I knew that the train of events that was bringing me closer to my mother seemed to be pushing me further apart from my husband. I wasn’t exactly sure why. Perhaps he was afraid that if I found this new family then I would have less need for him?
Something similar had happened when I joined The Selecter. The band was like a surrogate family, albeit a dysfunctional one. For two years it was all-possessing and all-encompassing. Outsiders, even spouses, were largely unwelcome in our tight little world. I did my best not to exclude Terry from decisions I made concerning my future, but sometimes I could see the hurt in his face when I ignored his advice and joined in the band consensus over an important issue. Our relationship suffered so much that we argued most of the time. It was only after the demise of the band that things settled down enough for us to make a fresh start. We were both younger then and more adaptable. I wasn’t sure that we could take that kind of strain again.
‘I’m taking the dog for a long walk,’ he suddenly announced.
As soon as the front door shut, I went upstairs to the office and prepared to make the phone call that I hoped would change my life. I placed a notepad and pencil beside the phone so that I could note down all the twists and turns of the conversation. I was so nervous that I mis-dialled twice. It rang five times before it was picked up. The inside of my mouth was so dry that I could barely part my lips. I fought an overwhelming urge to hang up.
‘Hello,’ a crisp female voice said.
‘Hello,’ I answered. ‘I wonder if you could help me?’ was my opening gambit.
‘That depends on what you’re selling,’ came the instant retort. She didn’t sound friendly.
I suddenly realised that it was a big assumption on my part that this was actually my aunt. It could just as well have been her daughter, daughter-in-law or, indeed, my actual mother. I decided to tread carefully. ‘I’m not selling.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ she rejoined.
It wasn’t going at all to plan. I decided to quit the small talk and get to the point as quickly as possible. ‘My mother recently died and left a package in her will for an Eileen Magnus, but unfortunately no forwarding address. I’m trying to track down this person. Do you know her?’
If they bit down hard on this piece of information, which most people did when they heard the words ‘package’ and ‘will’ in the same sentence, they usually asked for this fictitious mother’s name. Which she did.
‘Ivy,’ I said truthfully. ‘I think my mother worked with Eileen when she was very young. I’m not sure where.’
‘Did your mother work in London?’
‘Yes,’ I replied with as much confidence as I could muster. I just hoped that it wasn’t a trick question. Then I moved in for the kill. ‘I think it’s mostly photos and old postcards in the parcel, but I’m not sure, there might be some jewellery.’
At the mention of something substantial, she dropped her guard and said, ‘Oh, Eileen would love that. She loves anything to do with dear old Blighty. She doesn’t live here any more, you know. She’s been in Australia for years. Would you like her address?’
No wonder I couldn’t find any evidence of her existence. She wasn’t here. She was halfway around the world. Before I knew what was happening I was copying down the address of my mother in Australia and not only that, her telephone number too. After that there was very little to say. I thought it was better to cut short the call, just in case she asked any probing questions, like how had I made the connection between her and Eileen, given that they had different surnames.
I bade her goodbye and promised to let her know how I got on. After replacing the receiver, I did wonder whether she would phone my mum in Australia and discuss the strange conversation that we just had. Perhaps they would put two and two together and come up with me. I didn’t think that I had said anything to arouse her suspicion, but it was impossible to know what conclusions she would make after mulling over such a strange conversation.
Australia. I hadn’t expected that. Talk about a curve ball! I wondered how she had got there? I guessed that she had probably gone out there on the ‘assisted passages’ scheme, usually referred to as ‘the ten-pound pom’. She had certainly put some distance between us.
My adoptive parents had once considered emigrating when it was all the rage in the ’60s. They knew a family, the Hemmingses, who decided to join the long queue of ten-pound Poms. Mr Hemmings had been my dad’s drinking buddy, a work-shy loudmouth, who drank too much and made too many children. Mrs Hemmings had befriended Ivy on the pub steps as they waited for their drunken husbands to be thrown out late one Saturday night. She was a rumpled bed of a woman, with a sagging belly from too many pregnancies and pink-rimmed National Health spectacles held together with pink plasters. Her untidy, unkempt house was a stone’s throw from the pub and opposite Romford bus garage. Ivy often visited her with me in tow. The house seemed to be overflowing with small boys in grey-worsted short trousers, and girls in dirty pink pinafores, all sporting the same pale pink National Health specs as their Mum. I think I once counted seven children in total.
Mr Hemmings had tried to convince my dad to get out of the rat race too and go with them. I think my dad was very interested in the idea, but there was one little problem – me. Back in those days, black people were not welcome in Australia. You c
ould go there as long as you were white. I think Dad got as far as filling in some preliminary forms because I remember a lengthy discussion about emigration that he had with my two elder brothers around the kitchen table. Curious to know what was so hush-hush, I eavesdropped from the adjoining living room. One of my brothers said: ‘They won’t take Pauline, you know.’ Nothing came of it. We stayed in Romford.
The intervening years had firmed up my poor opinion of the Australian government and the shabby way it had treated the indigenous population of Aborigines in the past. Everybody in Britain loved the irascible Rolf Harris, but I used to cringe as a child when I heard him sing ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’, particularly the line about an Aboriginal man who is dismissively referred to with a derogatory name.
How come a bespectacled white comedian introduced us to the didgeridoo? It was supposed to be a sacred instrument for the Aborigines, not a cheap comic turn on TV variety shows. Australian history was concerned only with the white man and how he had conquered the inhospitable terrain and made it habitable. The fact that it was already habitable to the Aborigines had been conveniently forgotten, just like the stolen Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their parents from 1869 to 1969 and made to skivvy for poor white families in the outback.
‘Of all the countries in the world she could have gone to, she had to go to Australia,’ I said out loud. I was elated and disappointed all at the same time.
Soon afterwards Terry returned with the dog. ‘Why the long face?’ he asked.
I showed him the piece of paper with my mother’s name, address and telephone number on it. ‘Because she’s in Australia,’ I said.
He immediately hugged me. ‘So what,’ he said. ‘That’s brilliant, Pauline. I knew you’d do it.’
In that moment I realized why I loved this man and no other. He dashed to the bookshelf in the living room and grabbed a World Atlas. Like excited teenagers, we traced the New South Wales coastline with our fingers, eventually stopping at Tarrawanna, a tiny dot on the map, beside the much bigger dot of Wollongong, which we estimated was about sixty miles from Sydney. She lived almost by the Pacific Ocean.
We agreed that I shouldn’t phone my mother. So I went into town and bought the most expensive stationery that I could find and spent the afternoon composing a letter. Cherry-picking one’s own forty-two-year-old life for interesting facts to tell your mother is a nigh-on impossible task. I wrote fifteen drafts before I was happy with it. I enclosed some photos; a couple of baby shots, one of me with an Afro hairdo when I was twenty and a newspaper clipping from The Selecter’s heyday. I took it to the post office to catch the last post of the day. I was dismayed to find out that it would take seven days to reach its destination. The final cruelty!
I woke a week later to an insistently ringing phone. I looked at the alarm clock. It was 5 a.m., who the hell was ringing at this hour? Blearily I groped around on the bedside table for the phone. ‘Hello,’ I mumbled, rubbing sleep out of my eyes.
‘Hello, is that you, Belinda?’
‘Yes,’ my soul blurted, before I could stop the word. I was suddenly super-alert.
‘It’s Mummy, darling.’
I couldn’t help thinking that my mother sounded alarmingly like Dame Edna Everage!
My mum, 1996
SEVENTEEN
CRASH LANDING
To lose one parent…may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Lady Bracknell, Act 1, The Importance of
Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
With the acquisition of my real mum, I had entered the hallowed ranks of the merely misfortunate, according to Oscar Wilde. The countless clichés, previously guaranteed to cause my emotional meltdown, such as listening to the old mournful spiritual ‘Motherless Child’ sung by Mahalia Jackson, watching Kizzy being torn from her mother’s arms in Roots or the comedic appearance of the ‘handbag’ near the end of The Importance of Being Earnest, were now rendered as harmless, dead and defunct as a Norwegian Blue parrot. It was mid-July, the height of summer and the living was easy.
But having spent much of my life fantasizing about what my real mum looked like, the reality of seeing her photo enclosed in her first letter was shocking in its simplicity. I searched the photo for a vestige of similarity between us, but sadly there was nothing of immediate significance. I saw a bespectacled, grey-haired, blue-eyed woman with smooth skin, an engaging smile, a neat knitted cardie and sensible dress and shoes. What had I expected, an ageing sexpot, Sophia Loren? Maybe. Sensible had never come to mind whenever I thought about my mum.
I was reminded of a Mike Leigh film, Secrets and Lies, that I had seen on its release in 1996. It too described the reuniting of an adopted black daughter with her white birth mother. Many people I met around this time alluded to this film whenever I told them my story. Indeed, perhaps I was influenced by the movie to go in search of my parents, but not directly so, because when I first saw the film I thought it was rather fanciful, even if it did have excellent performances from all the actors involved. It was difficult to buy the idea that a white woman in Britain in the late ’60s, however young and downtrodden, could actually forget giving birth to a black child. It made for a nice comedic feelgood moment for white audiences, but didn’t ring true for me. But the bigger idea of making the mother’s well-heeled brother a photographer, intent on displaying the real world as a pleasant illusion, while the adopted daughter is an optometrist, intent on helping people to see more clearly, was inspired. It effectively showed how normal everyday folk reacted when their worlds were turned upside down.
But what was happening to me was no movie. There was no handy blueprint for how everybody was supposed to behave. I had come crashing into their antipodean lives and a maelstrom of emotion had been unleashed, most of it not mine. This crash landing had the effect of fragmenting the entire construct of two separate families. Mum’s older sister, Aunt Jeanette, who lived only a few miles away from her, told me in our first telephone conversation that my mum had fought to keep me after I was born, but eventually had to give me up for adoption, causing her to have a nervous breakdown. These few new facts were like being given jewelled pieces of a mosaic that I had to hastily assemble into a coherent picture. My mum was served with the same task as I tumbled and jumbled my thoughts and feelings into a flurry of letters to match her abundant communiqués. There was so much to say, but how to say it?
The three sisters Aunt Jeanette, Mum, Aunt Margaret, c. 1942
Sometimes I wanted to pick up the phone and scream at her: ‘Why did you abandon me and then move to the other end of the Earth?’ and other times I wanted to soothe any anguish she might still feel and write about how lucky I was that she had found me two loving adoptive parents. I felt pulled every which way, one half of me trying to quell the hurt, needy child inside and the other half trying to act like a considerate and understanding adult. Every sentence had to be weighed carefully in case it might be read the wrong way or cause offence. Unfortunately, diplomacy had never been my strongest trait.
I don’t know if my mum felt the same as I did. Her early letters mostly stressed how pleased she was that she had ‘done the right thing’ and made sure that I was given to a loving family. I certainly couldn’t pretend otherwise, but there were many layers to my childhood that I instinctively knew were better not discussed with her. Perhaps I would be able to do that when I met her. In my mum’s very first letter she vowed to write every week and she has never gone back on her word. I vowed to do the same and largely I’ve met that goal. In this day and age, snail mail seems so antiquated, but emailing my mum would feel like a betrayal. She types her letters, somehow lending an emotional distance to the words. Her subject matter always remains stolidly in the present, very rarely discussing the past. In an effort to please her, I do the same. It’s as if we need to be very clear and precise about what we reveal to each other. Perhaps we worry that the sprawl of personal handwriting might subliminally allow
unpleasant past memories and feelings of recrimination to creep between the words.
I was brutally made to realize that mums rarely come singly, they fetch up with all kinds of other people. After all, forty-two years had gone by, ample time to replenish a family nest with countless relations, or ‘relos’ as they were affectionately referred to in Australia. I had a brother and sister, one niece, seven cousins and twelve second cousins, plus numerous in-laws. These enthusiastic relos wrote or phoned, eager to be included in this new family drama. At the oddest hours of the night, the ringing of the telephone would elicit yet another new family member with a tenuous grasp of time zones, who was eager to fill me in on themselves and welcome me into the family. The initial conversations would then be followed up by a letter full of photos of healthy, grinning faces resplendent in the New South Wales sunshine. They overwhelmed me with often conflicting stories and gossip. Their good intentions were legion. Their newsy letters, full of eager curiosity and the minutiae of family life, crossed the equator on an almost daily basis. People who I had never known existed the previous week suddenly bared their souls just on the strength of a half-blood relationship. It was an extraordinary and exciting time.
My mum had had some explaining to do when I turned up. As I carefully pieced together a montage of conversational snippets, I realized that her generation knew about me, but the generation that she and her two sisters had produced did not. This obviously came as a shock to my newly acquired thirty-five-year-old brother Cornelius, shortened to Little Con for family purposes, and my thirty-three-year-old sister Sally-Ann. Con sent me a seven-page letter outlining his life to date on paper torn out of a spiral notebook. The ragged edges of the lined paper, bearing his neat handwriting, mirrored the tearing apart of the fiction he had been told about his mum’s youth from his newly revised reality. His first words were: ‘Words cannot express my happiness at the news that I have an older sister.’
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