Hertfordshire, the county in which I was brought up, had been designated a ‘neutral’ area during the war, one that neither sent nor received evacuees under the official government scheme, though of course many private arrangements were made ‘to get the children away’ from designated danger zones. Some stray bombs had fallen not far from my home, evidenced by craters in the roads or fields, some of which were absorbed into the landscape as ponds. By the time I was born, virtually no one carried a gas mask anymore and the Anderson shelters were gradually colonised by weeds and brambles.
I had few toys and those I had were invariably hand-me-downs from my parents and often incomplete: lead farm animals with matchsticks for legs, Dinky cars with a wheel missing. A home-made stockinet rabbit I called Tipsy was a particular companion that I pushed around in a wooden box on wheels for a pram. But I was not aware of the absence of the playthings that might have filled a middle-class child’s toy cupboard in the 1930s.
There are a few reminders of war, however, that I do recall from those early postwar years. One was the evidence of destruction on trips to London, when my mother and I went shopping or visited the Wallace Collection at Hertford House, which was my mother’s favourite cultural venue. She loved the domestic interiors by Dutch and Flemish artists such as Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch and found it convenient that it was just round the corner from Selfridges, and a couple of bus stops away from Daniel Neal’s in Kensington for Start-rite shoes, liberty bodices, fawn knee socks and navy knickers for me.
Nothing was whole anymore, or so it seemed. Many buildings were nothing but facades; others had tarpaulins stretched and lashed down to serve as roofs; windows were boarded up, or just left as holes in the brickwork. There were sudden gaps in terraces of houses or parades of shops. Stretches of Oxford Street were like a Wild West boardwalk, and looking in the windows of John Lewis’s department store which had been all but razed to the ground on 18 September 1940 was like peering into an aquarium: a narrow rectangle of glass behind which whatever paucity of merchandise was available could be glimpsed. In February 1946, Vogue was thrilled to report that ‘Dickins & Jones [in Regent Street] are soon to have their plate-glass windows restored,’ although what would be displayed in them was anyone’s guess.
Rationing affected me consciously not at all. I had no pre-war abundance with which to compare the shortages, so the leather-hard liver (offal was not rationed), the tasteless mince eked out in a sea of imperfectly mashed lumpy potatoes, the slightly muddy, undersized carrots from the garden, were what I expected to be served – and was. I was unquestioning of the eggs stored in isinglass (made from fish bladder) in the larder; oblivious to the fuss made when the import of dried eggs from the US was temporarily banned; non-complicit in the illegal acquisition of butter and cream from a local farmer. It was not until sweets came ‘off the coupon’ in 1949, only to go straight back on again since the demand was so heavy it could not be satisfied, that rationing impacted on me. I had spotted something I liked and pointed to it, only to discover that chewing gum was not the nougat I had imagined it to be.
The other subtler memory is of class, which I could neither conceptualise nor name as such at the time. I recall very well the gossip that I would later recognise as disquiet that class, and thus power relations, had been turned upside down during the war – and the implacable determination to set them to rights again. In my mother’s view – and she was not alone in this – shopkeepers had become very ‘uppity’, reserving special goods on points, keeping the occasional few oranges under the counter for favoured customers. Such retailers seemed to regard the long queues that formed outside shops as their personal supplicants. The grocer who weighed out sugar in blue paper bags, scooped biscuits from glass-topped tins, sent his delivery boy round weekly on his bicycle with my mother’s order of rashers of streaky bacon and a box of Post Toasties cereal, must have realised that as ration books disappeared, his control was ebbing. The customer was again king (or rather queen) and had a choice of shops to patronise. The half-crown or capitalist ten-shilling note became the only currency of exchange required, instead of the government-issued ration book to be stamped.
Herbie Gates was one of the church wardens at St Mary’s Church, Hemel Hempstead, where my mother went to matins every Sunday and was a member of the Mothers’ Union. Before the war he had sometimes helped with the heavy work in our garden, but during the war he had volunteered for Civil Defence duties, becoming an ARP warden, a responsibility he had taken very seriously, even officiously. ‘Little ’itler’ was murmured as he admonished ‘Put out that light!’ to householders demonstrating inadequately observed blackout. Now that he had handed back his brassard and tin hat, he too must be cut down to size, according to my mother and her neighbours, and put to setting potatoes, scything nettles and taking the church collection plate again, rather than having his wartime authority recognised as was surely his due.
It is not surprising that I have no memory of the war or its immediate aftermath, but what is surprising is that while I could read the signifiers of shortages and destruction, I had almost no factual knowledge until I was almost an adult about this cataclysmic event that would slice the twentieth century in two. No one I knew wanted to talk about the war that had gone on too long and too painfully and had put lives on hold for half a generation. There was no narrative of the war, though it was proffered as an explanation for many things, including the appearance one Sunday lunchtime of a neighbour who had been in a Japanese POW camp for three years, crawling on his stomach through the open French windows of his family home some months after his release, a knife clenched between his teeth as he threatened his wife and children.
Boys played cowboys and Indians, not Tommies and Nazis; we looked at maps of the British Empire in primary school, not the world at war. The Second World War was not on the syllabus at secondary school either, and nor was it offered as a topic when, much later, I went to read history at university.
There were soon plenty of books about the military aspects of war: battles, generals’ memoirs, discussions of causes, strategies and hardware. Cinema-goers too thrilled in time to such heroic films as The Wooden Horse and The Dam Busters. But the civilian experience remained largely unspoken. During the war, films such as Waterloo Road, Millions Like Us, Went the Day Well? and Mrs Miniver had filled cinemas with their subtle – and sometimes not so subtle – messages of propaganda and encouragement for the home front. Give your all for the war effort; pull together for victory; keep faithful and devote your energies to keeping your home happy and secure for when your fighting man returns. Immediately after the war, the dreariness of wartime sacrifice was not what cinema-goers wanted to be reminded of; the films they flocked to see were comedies, musicals, historical dramas and thrillers.
Richard Titmuss’s volume of the official history of the civilian war, Problems of Social Policy, came out in 1950 but it was not until the late 1960s that books for the general reader began to be published. Angus Calder’s The People’s War, the first – and to date the best – book on the civilian war in Britain, much influenced by Titmuss, was published in 1969, followed in 1971 by Norman Longmate’s history of everyday life in wartime Britain, How We Lived Then. The first of the twenty-six episodes of the epic series The World at War directed by Jeremy Isaacs was shown on ITV in October 1973. ‘Home Fires Burning: Britain’, the single episode on the civilian side of the war, written by Angus Calder, was transmitted on 13 February 1974.
There were many hard-working and courageous women who joined the forces in the war and gradually the great value of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANYs) and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAFs) was recognised, as was the story of the heroic women recruits to the SOE (Special Operations Executive). However, the contribution of women on the home front was slower to be acknowledged. This was in no way solely a women’s domain: think firefighters, Civil Defence and Observer C
orps, medical staff and many more organisations which in most cases consisted of more men than women. Nonetheless, women did ‘keep the home fires burning’, in their own houses if their meagre coal rations stretched to it, but also on the land, in banks and offices, in munitions and aircraft factories, on buses, in postal services, as porters at railway stations, and in welfare and medical services.
Statues of Second World War generals and leaders strut on plinths throughout the country. Even the animals – horses, dogs, pigeons, mules – who served in various ways in wars had a monument erected at the edge of Hyde Park in 2004. But it was not until nearly a year later that a sombre bronze monument depicting the wartime uniforms women had worn, both military and civilian, hanging, discarded, from hooks, was unveiled in Whitehall close to the Cenotaph. Certainly I had no idea in those early postwar years of the professionalism and heroism that must have been displayed by the women around me. It was many years later, through my work as a historian, that I came to understand the texture of the time.
Chapter Two
Second-Hand Baby
The sun was shining in through the net curtains, making laser-pointed parallel shafts of dust in the late summer light as I sat on the gloss-painted windowsill in the dining room, looking through a large Marshall & Snelgrove dress box full of photographs. I had been given a photograph album and a small packet of photo corners for my eighth birthday in June 1951, and on this September afternoon, the last day of the school holidays, I was sorting through the photos to choose which I wanted to stick into the album, to create a storyboard of my life so far.
There were pictures of me aged about two, perhaps, sitting on the grass wearing a sun bonnet; one of me with a terrified-looking friend, crouching naked in a tin bath on the lawn as an unseen hand aimed a water jet from a hosepipe at us. There were also a number of photographs taken on the promenade in Paignton, Devon. One showed me sitting on a moth-eaten stuffed horse on the seafront; another with my cousin Sheila, who usually came on holiday with us so that I had someone to play with, eating candy floss on the same promenade. We always spent a fortnight there in August, staying in a boarding house owned by a Mrs Pollard, overflowing with souvenirs from various other seaside resorts she had visited. Once a week she would urge us to hurry back from the beach as there was chicken for dinner that night (in those days chicken was a rare delicacy).
Then in the box I found a sheet of Polyfotos, each the size of a passport photograph, printed like a cine film so that each sequential frame showed a slight variation from the one before and the one after. A lurking smile might be replaced by a full-on grin; a blurred, waving hand give way to a face half turned from the camera. This was a record designed to animate the subject in a way that the frozen image of a single shot never could.
But at the bottom of the box I encountered a photograph I could not recall having seen before – of a baby I did not recognise lying on a shawl. The rest of the sepia or black-and-white photos in this repository of my parents’ recorded life had some sort of identification pencilled on the back – ‘Chas. and Dolly’s wedding, 18 June 1927’, ‘Picnic with Hilda and Bill, Swanage, August 1951’, ‘Giddy [with a hard ‘G’, my infant attempt at the name I went by then, Gillian] feeding ponies on Dartmoor, August 1950’. However, the photograph of the baby had no identification. The back was covered with what was known as butterfly tape, a wide band of gummy white paper which, when licked, would stick to paper or card. Curious to know who the baby was, I carefully started to peel the paper off. ‘This is my baby for adoption. Her name is Olivia. Weight at birth 6lb 4ozs.’ I knew then who the baby was. Me.
For dramatic effect, I wish I could say that this was the first time I had known that I was adopted, but that would not be true. And so many half-truths, evasions and downright fantasies accrue round the identity of an adopted child that it seems important to nail the few incontestable facts.
I Adoption
Until the 1920s, the adoption of babies and children had been a casual, informal affair with no legal process involved. It was not until 1943 that it became compulsory to register adoptions. Children were regarded much as chattels: the responsibility but also the property of those who had created them. The babies of unmarried mothers might well be absorbed into the family, the mother stripped of her maternal status and passed off as an older sister or an aunt. Or a baby might be handed on like one of a litter of puppies or kittens in excess of requirements, to a more distant relation, friend or neighbour who didn’t have children of her own and wanted a baby, or to a motherly soul who already had such a large brood that one more wouldn’t make much difference.
The writer Ian McEwan’s mother handed her baby over at Reading station to a couple who had answered a newspaper advert. Later she bore two more children, one of them Ian. And in 1938 the mother of the future children’s author Allan Ahlberg, carrying a string bag containing bootees, a baby’s bottle and a shawl, had travelled from Paddington to an orphanage in Battersea where she ‘signed a couple of documents’, the infant Allan was handed over to her and she returned to Paddington where her husband was waiting, clutching ‘her secret/ On her lap/ From all the other passengers/ All the way back’, and the new family caught another train home to Oldbury in the Black Country.
Many of these informal arrangements probably worked out reasonably satisfactorily for the child and its new family, but there were sensational reports in the newspapers from time to time about ‘baby farming’, when a usually middle-aged woman who had advertised in a local newspaper offering to provide a home for a baby for a cash payment, was subsequently found to have starved, neglected, beaten or even killed babies in her care. The most notorious case was that of Mrs Amelia Dyer of Reading who was hanged in 1896 after being convicted largely on the evidence of her daughter of strangling a baby and dumping its body in the Thames. The police estimated that Mrs Dyer had done away with at least twenty and possibly as many as 200 babies that had been entrusted to her care by their mothers.
Throughout my childhood, a wax model of the fearsome-looking Mrs Dyer standing in the dock of the Old Bailey could be seen in the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussauds on the Marylebone Road in London. It terrified yet compelled me, and lying in bed at night I would conjure up that monstrous black-clad figure with prominent teeth and a cold, sightless gaze. This would alternate in my imagination with G. F. Watts’s melancholy painting Hope (1886), a large reproduction of which hung in our hallway at home. This gloomy allegorical depiction of a blind woman sitting on a globe, her eyes bandaged as she strains to hear the faint music of the broken lyre she is holding, haunted me for years, and I am at one with G. K. Chesterton who wrote that a more appropriate title would have been ‘Despair’. To me these were the two most frightening images possible, and their nightly evocation, I imagined, would be a talisman; the equivalent of a lucky rabbit’s paw, which would somehow keep the dark forces of night at bay.
The desperate plight of an unmarried mother and her intense desire for secrecy would mean she was in no position to enquire too closely into the circumstances of the person to whom she was handing over her infant, and there were no legal requirements on either side, just an implicit understanding that the mother would not seek to reclaim the baby she had effectively sold, nor the ‘adopter’ seek to return it. The drawbacks to this casual exchange were addressed to a small extent in the first Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, which required that anyone receiving two or more infants under the age of one (eventually raised to seven by the Children’s Act of 1908) for ‘hire or reward’ was obliged to register her address with her local authority, or in the case of London, with the Metropolitan Board of Works. But these safeguards were neither effective nor enforced.
Concern sharpened after the First World War when there was a positive glut of babies in need of care, either orphans, the progeny of widows whose husbands had been killed fighting, or babies born out of wedlock. Around 42,000 of them – ‘children of the mist’ – were in this last categor
y at the war’s end. This figure was not reached again until the year of my birth, towards the end of the Second World War, when the rate of illegitimate births leapt from 36,000 in 1942 to 43,000 the following year.
However, moves to regulate adoption practices in the interwar years came not from the government but from voluntary organisations, following the example of Clara Andrews whose work in Exeter with child refugees from Belgium during the First World War had convinced her that there was a need for some sort of a broker between unwanted children and would-be parents. The National Children’s Adoption Association (NCAA) was intended to do just that: those wishing to adopt a child were given full details of the child’s background and medical history, while a certificate of health and references were required both from the child’s parents and from the putative adopter, and similar procedures were also the practice for Dr Barnardo’s and other charities which arranged for the permanent placement of ‘unwanted’ children with families, or very occasionally with single women.
Nevertheless, throughout the interwar period adoption was regarded as a last resort, even in the case of the unmarried mother. It was argued that all should be done to help her keep her child rather than have it adopted. The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, set up in 1918, insisted that this was generally the best solution and that more support should be given to the mother to enable her to keep her child. This view was influenced by a belief in the strong biological bond between a birth mother and her child, and by a concern that potential adopters could be impulsive and sentimental in their desire for a child and might not have fully thought through the responsibilities and stresses of parenthood. If a young woman could just hand over her baby for adoption and thus relieve herself of any responsibility for it, it was deemed likely that she would not learn her lesson and moral turpitude would go unchecked. Moreover, many eugenicists considered that personality traits were genetic and likely to be inherited: they would ‘out’ like physical characteristics such as blue eyes or blond hair. So an infant born out of wedlock was seen as preordained to have a not entirely reliable moral compass: as clear as an unsightly birth mark, an irremovable moral stain tainted the innocent bastard.
Joining the Dots Page 2
