Most people looking to adopt wanted a no-strings orphan of two or three years old, whereas in fact most children on offer were illegitimate and most of these were babies. In her book on adoption (A Child for Keeps), Jenny Keating explains the preference at this time for a toddler rather than a newborn as proof that the child came from sufficiently good stock to survive infancy, since its genetics, its inborn nature, would be the defining characteristic in its development. Subsequently, with more awareness of psychoanalytic theories’ emphasis on the dominance of nurture over nature, potential adopters were more attracted to the idea of a newborn infant as being a tabula rasa on whom they could imprint their own ideas and values.
Indeed, over the course of the twentieth century, the notion of intuitive mothering was increasingly challenged by the popularity of manuals from a growing number of experts in both child health and child psychology. From Truby King, with his belief in fresh air and rigidly regulated feeding and cuddling routines, to the altogether more relaxed and more permissive Dr Benjamin Spock, who encouraged mothers to trust their babies’ instincts, or on to the middle-way Penelope Leach or the draconian, childless Gina Ford, the zeitgeist of the nursery had changed. Mothering was not purely instinctive: it could be learned, it had a scientific, research-based dimension. The effect of this could hardly fail to narrow the gap between the ‘natural’ or birth mother and the adoptive mother, since both could be seen clutching the same latest fashionable mothering manual, both as perplexed by questions of babies sleeping on their back or front, of yes or no to dummies, the right age to potty-train, how to deal with the tantrums of the ‘terrible twos’.
A newborn baby being brought home from hospital was also a simulacrum of the natural arrival of an infant, its provenance obscured in the soft folds of the lacy white shawl in which it was likely to be enveloped. This was apparently particularly pleasing to middle-class adopters, for whom the unpleasant miasma of the ‘baby farm’ still obstinately tended to cling to the idea of adoption. In any case, the appearance of a toddler in the household of a childless couple announced in a starkly obvious way their failure, with no IVF or other aids to fertility available, to produce a child in the time-honoured way, whereas the arrival of a newborn baby was a more ambiguous event. If the arrival of a child signalled a ‘normal family’, why would adoptive parents wish to disrupt that conventionality if they could avoid it by proclaiming to the world that their family was ‘different’, their child a foundling of uncertain pedigree?
II Arrival
Given my age, I did not, of course, arrive at my new home wrapped in a shawl but, I was told – though I have been unable to find any photographic corroboration – dressed in a tweed coat with a velvet collar, tweed bonnet and tweed leggings (which were not like today’s leggings but more like trousers with elastic that went under the shoe). I was, I think, about two and a half years old, the paperwork required by the 1926 Adoption of Children Act completed, and only a short court hearing in front of a magistrate still to come, followed by the issue of a shortened birth certificate. This was half the size of a usual one and with no space for the name, occupation or parish of either parent, but was nevertheless a legal document of irrevocable status that gave an adopted child the same rights and legal status as a natural-born one when it came to inheritance. It was a ‘fresh start’, ‘a new page’ in my life. And stark evidence for evermore that I had been adopted.
I was illegitimate, as were more than 40,000 babies born during or just after the Second World War. I was adopted from the Church of England Incorporated Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays (subsequently the Dickensian evocation of Waifs and Strays was dropped in favour of the simple ‘Children’s Society’), where I’d been placed when I was probably about two months old after the original adoption arrangements made at birth had fallen through, since a severe case of bronchitis suggested that I might have a congenital chest condition and thus could not be granted the clean bill of health required for the adoption to go ahead. I believe it is the same with cows: they have to be certified fit before they can leave the cattle market for new byres.
A warning here. ‘All Cretans are liars,’ said the Cretan. ‘All adoptees are fantasists,’ said the adoptee. Certainly I am; a natural spinner of a skewed family romance. I not only exist in a personal historical void, I am a void, officially a filius nullius. I have no given past, no known sidebars. I am obliged to answer ‘I don’t know, I am adopted’, when asked if there is a history of diabetes, or high blood pressure, or insanity, in my family. Thus, it seems not unreasonable that given a blank sheet of paper, a true tabula rasa, one is unable to distinguish, or chooses not to distinguish, fact from fiction in the narrative of one’s life. I fill in the void, inscribing the abyss in ways that make my free-floating self seem more interesting, more desirable, by the construction of grander birth parents and more intriguing circumstances surrounding my birth. If I am rootless, why not sink my roots in the richest, most friable soil possible?
I sometimes say now that I am not entirely sure what the truth about me is, and that at least is true, but that is because over the decades, my memories and fantasies about my memories have calcified with what little I have been told, and that edifice is now the truth and I have no certain way of dismantling it. I may even occasionally find myself adding another layer or smear of obfuscation.
Under the terms of the 1926 Adoption Act, adoption had been intended to be an open process; the adopters’ names and addresses appeared on the consent form the parents (or more likely the mother) who gave a child up for adoption signed to enable this. But this transparency could prove to be an inhibition to would-be adopters who wanted the child they had adopted to be considered to be theirs, just as a birth child was. They were not prepared to trade the ambiguity of their family’s formation for legal regulation. They preferred their unregulated parental status to taking the possible consequences when not only the adopted child, but the world at large, could know the truth. This was considered particularly true of ‘villadom’, presumably the lower middle classes who guarded their privacy fiercely from neighbours ‘poking their noses into other people’s business’. But some working-class parents stated that they had chosen to move to another town to obscure the knowledge of their status as adoptive parents, whilst ‘some hunting people’ (presumably upper-class) admitted that ‘if we had to go into court, even a magistrate’s room to have this legalised, we would not do it. We would give up the child rather than that it should be known that it came through a society.’
This blotting-out of an adopted child’s origins was concretised by the 1949 Adoption Act, which raised a high wall of secrecy. It decreed that the birth mother would not in future be informed of the name of her child’s adoptive parents nor where they lived: in future, only a serial number would appear on the adoption papers, in place of the previously uncoded information. The sponsor of the bill in the Lords, Viscount Simon, insisted that ‘it was in the interest of the child that the birth mother should not haunt the home of the new family’. An iron curtain was to be dropped between the natural and adoptive parent so that it would be extremely difficult for a mother to trace the child she had relinquished.
However, despite this officially erected fence, it was increasingly accepted that it was unrealistic to imagine such an intimate secret could be kept in perpetuity. Furthermore, it would be traumatic for a young person to find out, perhaps at puberty, that the people he or she had regarded as its ‘natural parents’ were in fact not biological relations. The rock on which the young person’s identity had been grounded could crumble; they would be most likely to feel vulnerable, deceived and betrayed in the most fundamental manner. What else in their young lives was not true? Where did veracity lie, if not with the person they believed had borne them? To avoid this trauma of exposure, agencies strongly advised parents that their children should be told that they were adopted as soon as they were able to comprehend what that meant – somewhere between three and six
years was reckoned to be optimum.
I can’t remember when I was told that I was adopted, but I must have been quite young. However, once this information had been imparted, it was never referred to again and I was discouraged from asking more or alluding to the fact. Once, after being bought a doll in a toyshop, I remarked, ‘She’s adopted like me’, and was hustled out of the shop by my mother who said sharply: ‘We don’t talk about that.’
If I ever asked who my birth mother was, my adoptive mother would reply: ‘You don’t need to know that. You are ours now.’ This seems reasonable since in the immediate postwar world ‘birth mother’ was not a phrase in common currency, rather it would have been ‘real mother’, which must have been immensely hurtful to a woman who had done everything for the child short of pushing her out into the world. Who was the ‘real’ mother in this context? The bearer or the carer?
I understood, and I was prepared to believe – I think – that I was more special because I had been specifically chosen; rather than just slithering into my mother’s life with no chance of return or refund. I was told that I had been picked out because I had blue eyes and a nice smile – and in any case two-thirds of those wishing to adopt expressed a preference for a girl.
But what I did find very hurtful for many years were the veiled allusions, the snide remarks – ‘I’m afraid that you are fast growing up to be like your [birth] mother’ – with no more insight as to what that meant and why it was something I should not want to happen. And worst of all was my mother’s occasional taunt of ‘If only you knew who your father was …’, and no matter how much I begged to be told, my mother’s lips would purse into a stony silence leaving me none the wiser as to whether he might have been the Duke of Windsor, General Montgomery, or an American GI ‘over here’ to prepare for D Day (as I often fantasised).
My adoption was not terribly successful. My mother and I were a disappointment to each other. I was not the daughter she had hoped for, nor she the mother I would have chosen if such a reversal of choice had been on offer. She was, like so many mid-century women, I suspect, disappointed by life. She was of working-class origin but had a burning desire to be middle-class, with all the attributes and appurtenances that implied. Her father had been a railwayman, a signal keeper, I think, living in Walton, near Peterborough, who was dead before I came into the lives of Mr and Mrs Wells. Her mother, of whom she had been very fond, was also dead. My maternal grandmother had been nursed by her in our house in her dying months, though I cannot reliably remember her. I suspect that my mother was deeply saddened that she seemed unable to recreate with me the mother–daughter bond she’d had with her own mother.
My mother (Dorothy Fanny – known as Dolly – whose second name never ceased to make my children laugh) had wanted to be an infant school teacher, but that was an aspiration too far for a working-class girl in the aftermath of the First World War, educated only to the age of thirteen at an elementary school. I am not sure what she did for a living before she married; she was always very cagey about that, but I suspect that she was in service. Not in a grand Downton Abbey sort of a house with its life below stairs, its ‘pug’s parlour’, its ladies’ maids, its grooms and butler, but rather as a ‘cook general’, that loneliest of lives, the sole servant in a middle-class suburban villa, ‘doing’ for two bachelor businessmen, cleaning, shopping, cooking plain meals, washing and ironing. A housewife in all respects but those that one might think had meaning.
Things had brightened for her when she met my father, Charles, who was just a rung above her in her carefully calibrated social ladder. He had the ambition to be a doctor, but before he achieved medical school his father, a heavy drinker and, I suspect, a wife-beater, had died and that put paid to his ambition, since his wages were needed to help the family’s meagre income. My parents married in 1927, she in a drop-waisted, flapper-style cream silk dress and narrow satin T-bar shoes. A similar miniature shoe in silver, filled with wax orange blossom, and a silver cardboard horseshoe topped their wedding cake. My parents kept this souvenir, together with a collection of heraldic Goss china and a glass tube filled with layers of different-coloured sand (from Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight, where they had spent their honeymoon), in a glass-fronted display cabinet in the dining room throughout my childhood.
After their wedding, my parents set up home in privately rented accommodation (as most people did in the late 1920s) near Watford in Hertfordshire, moving a few miles to Hemel Hempstead when my father got a job in the local Borough Surveyor’s department. Eventually he would build – or customise the plans of a spec builder – the house in which they would live for some forty-five years. So in the mid-1930s my parents became proud home owners (or rather mortgage holders) of a pebble-dashed detached house with a rectangular garden back and front.
It was some time before they got round to starting the process of adoption. When I once asked my mother why she hadn’t had a child, she replied that the egg ‘kept coming away’, by which I presume she meant that she had had a series of miscarriages. Maybe hope ran out in the early days of the war. Maybe my father needed persuading – though I doubt that. Maybe the vicar had suggested it as a distraction from the nervous headaches my mother suffered from and a Christian gesture towards a cast-out child. They were quite old – in their late forties, which seemed much older then than it does now – to embark on first-time parenthood with a young child. And they were – unsurprisingly – stuck in their ways, rigid in their routines, unused to the noise and tumbling of childhood. ‘Steady, steady’, was the admonition most heard in our house, according to the recollection of childhood friends invited to tea.
I was frequently reminded that I was lucky to have been adopted, otherwise I would have ended up in an orphanage, or a children’s home. After all there were so many illegitimate babies on offer at the end of the Second World War – a regular ‘baby scoop’ the Americans called it. The uncertainty, danger, intensity and impermanence of wartime was conducive to unlikely liaisons and fleeting couplings, since men and women moved around more in wartime, posted away from their home surroundings to places where they knew no one and sought comfort or adventure. Some babies were born to single women, others to wives who’d had an affair while their husbands had been away fighting abroad or working elsewhere in war production. In some cases, the returning husband was prepared to forgive his wife’s ‘lapse’ on condition that the consequence was adopted. However, the novelist Barbara Cartland, who had advised WAAFs on welfare and personal problems during the war and turned to counselling returning war veterans after the war, advised men to try to accept this situation. ‘At first they swore that as soon as it was born the baby would have to be adopted, but then sometimes they would say, half shamefaced at their generosity, “the poor little devil can’t help itself, and after all it’s one of hers”.’
As I grew up I did indeed regard myself as fortunate to have been adopted. It sounds an unkind, and certainly an ungrateful thing to say, but I came to rejoice in my status as an adopted child. I was not ‘one of them’, I realised as I grew up. The traits that I found difficult or irritating about my mother were characteristic of her, not part of my make-up. I was a superior being, I conjectured, since I had no evidence; certainly the child of a very clever and beautiful mother, in the temporary custody of some rather banal earthlings. I did not expect to be reclaimed by this exotic yet warmly maternal creature, but this belief would eventually give me the confidence to strike out a new route to fulfilment and happiness, far from the high laurel hedges, Rexine furniture and conversations that invariably failed to move beyond remarks about the weather or comments on the food: ‘This lamb’s not as tender as last Sunday’s joint, Dolly.’ All I had to do was bide my time. Which is essentially what I did throughout my childhood and school years, waiting, confident that being grown up would change everything.
Despite a more relaxed attitude towards the ‘accidents’ of wartime, opinions hardened again during the postwar years of dreary
austerity. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, the ‘shame’ of illegitimacy still persisted, with the fear of a missed period blighting many young girls’ lives. Middle-class pregnant daughters were invariably sent by private arrangement to mother and baby homes, usually in the country but certainly far from their own neighbourhoods. There, they would give birth, and the baby would usually be taken for adoption, sometimes against the wishes of the mother, who would return to her family home and her old life after ‘a holiday with relatives’ or ‘a temporary job abroad’. She would slip back into her former life as if nothing had happened. But it had, of course. Regardless of how much she accepted that this was the only realistic course, the bereft mother had suffered a profound loss, and many women found themselves forever unable to forget the babies they had carried for nine months, given birth to, nursed for weeks, only to have the infant taken away.
For those without such resources, relatives or charitable institutions were called upon. ‘Being pregnant and unmarried in 1950 was something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy,’ wrote Sheila Tofield, who worked in the typing pool of the National Assistance Board in Rotherham. To her surprise and horror, she recalled in her 2013 memoir The Unmarried Mother, she found she was pregnant after sleeping with a former colleague who washed his hands of any responsibility. ‘If people did something that went against the social norm in those days, no one sympathised or tried to understand. It was simple: there were “nice girls” and there was the other sort, who brought shame on themselves and their families. And that was the sort of girl I had now become.’ Sheila Tofield’s brother effectively disowned her, while her mother was apoplectic at the ‘disgrace’ she had brought on her family. Her response was to half fill a tin bath with boiling water, command her daughter to climb in, and hand her a quarter-bottle of gin, instructing her to ‘drink this and then go to bed’.
Joining the Dots Page 3
