I felt prickly at Rony for bringing those callous thoughts to my attention. I knew full well that my dad was one of the rare adoptees whose biological mother had absolutely no regard for him, until he got himself a degree and she got herself drunk. Perhaps it was bizarre that I believed Frankie’s mother was a good person, a compassionate mother doing the best for her child, when I knew only too well that can sometimes not be the case.
The YWCA was just down the road from Queen’s University, our next destination. I assumed Janet and her lover would have graced its halls as students. Maybe they met at a student dance – perhaps at a cèilidh organized to introduce all the foreign students to one another. I imagined Janet and her charming medical student trying to follow the steps and becoming unwittingly entwined in each other’s arms. They must have both been lonely, cold. One night they snuggled up together and one thing led to another. Oh, yes. The Victorian corridors of Queen’s University were much more in keeping with my romantic notions of Frankie’s conception!
At Queen’s University, Rony and I spoke to a receptionist. The look on her face told me she’d just received the strangest inquiry of her career. However, she was sympathetic and made a series of phone calls trying to find us someone who could help. After some talks with some very obliging staff, I somehow managed to arrange a late afternoon meeting with a Dr. Eric Morier-Genoud in a coffee shop across the street from the university.
Eric was a lecturer in African and Imperial History and he was writing a paper on the African students who came to Belfast to study after many of the African colonies gained independence. He listened to my story with great interest and was generous with his time; he even told me he would try his best to trace Frankie’s parents. I left Belfast that weekend grateful to have seen where Frankie was conceived and humbled that this professor had taken an interest in my story. There was none of the romantic sparkle I had pictured and hoped for, but there was now a spark of hope that Eric would be able to find for me some information about Frankie’s parents.
CHAPTER TWO
Twins
Scotland, 1967
Born a month apart in 1966, Frankie and I were raised as twins. Our parents pushed us down Byres Road in the West End of Glasgow in a twin pram: one black child and one white child inside. Dad had always had a strong desire to adopt. He wanted to a give a vulnerable child a home and the love that was missing from his own childhood. Mum, on the other hand had some serious reservations about adoption. In fact, Dad had to talk her into it. However, I think two little Pakistani children probably helped my dad’s case. Mum once told me that before I was born, they almost adopted two Pakistani siblings. Their mother had been brought over from Pakistan for an arranged marriage to the local grocery shopkeeper. He already had a white girlfriend but had to marry someone from his own faith. They married in Glasgow and had two children. However, very sadly, this young mother’s sari caught fire on the small barred heater in her flat. She was unable to remove herself from the sari and burned to death. My parents were told that the two small children watched in horror as their mum died in front of them. Mum and Dad had gotten to know the family fairly well as the shop was close by and were devastated when they heard what had happened. The grocery shopkeeper had to work all hours day and night and so my parents offered to look after the two young siblings. Their father rarely came by to check on them. He seemed to have more interest in his white mistress. As the months went by, my mum and dad grew very fond of these children and considered adopting them. However, in the end the grandfather came over from Pakistan and took the children back home with him. Amongst my inherited paperwork I found a letter from the grandfather thanking my parents for all they had done for his grandchildren. My parents had kept it all those years and I still have it. Mum told me she often wondered what happened to them. I think perhaps the love she found in her heart for these two beautiful children made her feel she could adopt.
I’m not sure exactly when my parents started the adoption process but I know they hadn’t set out to adopt a black child. What they had wanted to do was to adopt a “hard to place” child, one who was perhaps older than a newborn, had a disability, or had been removed from an abusive situation. My older brother Stephen was eight at the time. Initially, my parents had thought a child of perhaps three or four might be a good idea so the adopted child would be in-between our ages. It was attractive to the adoption agency because that age group was rarely considered; most couples looking to adopt at that time wanted a newborn. However, when a little black boy arrived at Tanker Ha’ Children’s Home in Kilmarnock, Scotland, he proved to be very hard to place. This little boy was now thirteen months old and seemed destined to be left behind.
My parents were asked if they would consider a black child. Now, this was 1967—the height of the American Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was never out of the news. In some parts of Britain, racial tension had reached the boiling point with some landlords refusing to rent to the “nig-nogs” and some hairdressers even refusing to cut their hair.
The strange thing is, I don’t believe either of my parents had any hesitation about the color of a child’s skin. I think, with Frankie, it truly was love at first sight. Mum later confessed, laughing with me, that her biggest concern was how to comb his hair.
Our beautiful mum
However, the adoption agency had bigger concerns. With only weeks between Frankie and I in age, they felt there could be territorial issues. So, Frankie came into our home as a foster child. Thankfully there were no territorial issues at all. From what Mum and Dad said, Frankie followed me around everywhere and I guided him like a toddler-mother. Any fears were quashed and he was legally adopted into our family less than a year later.
Pushing a black and a white child in a twin pram in Glasgow in the ’60s was unusual, to say the least. According to Mum, we caused a bit of a stir wherever we went. Everyone wanted to stop Mum in the street and goo goo gah gah over her new little black baby. They wanted to touch his coarse, curly hair and feel his skin. Sadly for Mum, some of this touching and prodding and adoration of her new black son was too much. One day, when she was near death, she confessed to me that she had wanted to scream at these well-meaning people surrounding her, “What about my new baby? What about Michaela? Haven’t I produced my own gorgeous, cute, little baby girl?”
It seemed to her that everyone was only interested in the poor little black boy and not at all in her own daughter. Frankie would get handed free sweeties in the sweetie shop and bits of sweet dumpling in the local butcher’s, and they seemed to forget about me. I’m not telling you this because I am looking for sympathy. I don’t remember too much about it, but Mum obviously did, and it was still painful for her to admit. I think she felt guilty for feeling upset about it. When she told me, I cried with her, but the tears were for her pain. I told her I wasn’t bothered and I really wasn’t; it wasn’t until later that night, after I downed a bottle of wine on my own, that it hit me.
I always felt I had to try hard to make people like me and that there was some basic flaw in me. Frankie could walk into a room and people would flock to him. People would talk about how his smile lit up a room and what a wonderful laugh he had. Both were true! Frankie didn’t have to do anything for most people to like him. It was apparent with friends, with teachers, and also with some relatives. Mum admitted to me, “I used to get so angry, did people think we starved him and put him in a dark cellar or something? They were always feeling sorry for him and offering him things as if he didn’t get anything at home. Everyone always wanted to touch him and cuddle him like he was a soft toy. You would be sitting right beside him and people would just go directly to him. Why couldn’t they look at you? Want to pick you up? I sometimes felt they treated him like he was a pet and not a child.”
Add to this the fact that everyone felt Frankie was special; he had been chosen by my parents and was a gift from God to our family. This sugary sentiment i
s understandable. After all, this little child needed all the love and attention my parents, and everyone around, could give him. He’d been abandoned. Everyone felt awful about that and somehow wanted to make it better for him. He was black in a sea of white strangers. And the wee soul couldn’t even hide the fact that he was adopted because in the ’60s that’s what people did. Adoption was cloaked in secrecy.
I never saw any of this till Mum started to talk about her feelings that day. It wasn’t something she usually did. She generally kept most of her pain to herself, but when she was dying, we talked a lot, and it was obvious that when it came to Frankie, she wanted to get some things off her chest.
I did cry that night. I cried hard—a primal wail. One of those on-the-floor-kinds of wails. It wasn’t for Mum…or Frankie. It was for me.
I couldn’t remember those earlier years in the pram, just like Frankie did not remember the day he was separated from his mum. Psychologists talk about the first three years of life being the most important for emotional development, and the fact that a child has no tangible memory, does not lessen the impact of those early experiences. Indeed, they can have a profound devastating effect on the future of the child.
The severing of the connection to one’s mother from birth must trigger a grieving process for both mother and child. The sheer despair that must be felt by both is almost unfathomable. At some level, the memory of that severance must haunt the child as much as it must the mother. The unconscious fears of further losses and rejections have to somehow manifest themselves. I can only imagine the terror an infant must feel at being unceremoniously taken from the mother whose very womb they depended on for life just minutes before.
While Frankie had a smile that could charm all of Scotland, I was always aware of his pain below the surface. I was haunted by Frankie’s terrifying screams as an infant. You see, just as we were getting ready to leave the house in the pram Frankie would scream blue murder. His anxiety was immense and there was no pacifying him. Mum told me that when she opened the door she had to close it again for fear of the neighbors thinking she was murdering him. She told me it took ages to get us out the door, and when we did finally make it over the threshold, Frankie was always in a state of panic.
Although I can’t remember this in detail, I know in a strange way I have absorbed it; I have an image of us side by side in the pram, me sensing his anxiety and wanting to help him. Calm him. Tell him not to be scared. But I was only thirteen months old too. God, I am upset writing this. It must be a memory. Imagine me, a baby, hearing those terrifying, anxious screams. If they scared Mum, they must have scared me too.
It’s sad to think Frankie probably thought he was going to be abandoned again. When Frankie first came to stay with us, it was only for a few nights here and there to see how he would adjust to his new home and how I would adjust to having him there. Looking back, I am not sure those well-meaning social workers got it right. Anytime he left our house he probably thought he was going to be sent back to the children’s home. It was evident he did not want to go back there; his screams were his way of fighting for his survival. And Mum was his key to survival.
Mum said she didn’t realize how difficult it would be to have an adopted child, especially a black one. I don’t think the social workers ever considered the fact that the mother might be the one resentful of the attention a black child could take from her own child. Add to this the complexity of adoption itself and I think it set off a chain of emotional responses and ambivalent behavior.
Perhaps she, like many, naively thought adopting a child wouldn’t be unlike having her own biological child. But how could it when the very child you are bringing into your home is in a state of grief for their biological mother? The substitute mother most certainly has her work cut out for her. And if she doesn’t understand some of the emotional complexities going on, she can, as I think Mum often did, find herself an innocent victim of them.
Even from a toddler, it seemed Frankie was unconsciously programmed to push all her buttons. Yet she was the very person he wanted more than anyone else in the world to love him. She was his lifeline. He adored her. But, as time went on, his need of her seemed to drive him to do the very things that would upset her the most. I think she was ‘tested’ over and over again by Frankie to see if she would reject him. Deep down I believe he perceived his own mother rejected him because he was a bad baby and defective in some way. If only Frankie could have believed he was special and that my mum loved him, things might have been different. However, the deep fear of unworthiness that few saw made even a hint of rejection catastrophic, yet he couldn’t help but perpetuate his own fears. I think this behavior gave rise to Mum feeling guilty for not being good enough as his mother. She once said to me, “Why would he do things to upset me if I was a good enough mum?” Deep down Mum felt she had failed as his mother. Of course, she hadn’t. It was his very love of her that caused his anxiety and tension. He was making it almost impossible for her to love him as she would have wanted. I think the battle was exhausting for them both at times.
I am so glad Mum opened up to me when she did and told me how she had felt, even if she thought it made her sound cold. It brought to light some of the issues she was dealing with. Sadly, there was little to no help back then for Mum, even if she had confessed her feelings at the time. She was not fully equipped to deal with some of the consequences of adopting a child, let alone a black child in the ‘60s, but she most certainly did her best.
Maybe all this was what had drawn me to the stage. Even as I child I was always putting on dance displays and singing for my parents and their friends. I suppose it was my way of getting attention. But I never had the confidence to take it to the next level—until Frankie died.
Fairy Tales and the Death of Innocence
Whenever I was sad or needed to work things through, I wrote. At the time Frankie died, my writing became songs, and so I penned a song for Frankie and put music to it. I tried to do a home recording to send back to the family in Scotland, but it just didn’t sound good enough. I wanted it to be special. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to book time at a local recording studio in Ottawa called Raven Street Studios. I had never recorded before and had no idea how long it would take. The studio had package deals, so I decided to go for the three-hour package. When I got there, I was incredibly nervous. I was introduced to the sound engineer Steve Tevlin. Steve was a tall, laid back bloke and did his best to put me at ease. However, seeing the concert grand piano and all the studio equipment and various recording booths was intimidating. Steve sat me down at the piano and allowed me time to get familiar with the keys while he set up the microphone and adjusted the sound levels. A short while later he was ready to start recording. I sang the song and played the piano at the same time. After I was finished, much to my surprise, Steve said through the headphones, “That sounded great. Want to come through and hear it?”
Performing at the Cannes Film Festival
Steve played it back. I was so surprised! My voice sounded much deeper than I thought and sounded enormous over the big studio speakers. It was quite something to hear it being played back to me for the first time in a studio. I kept saying, “Is that me; is that really what I sound like?” Steve assured me he hadn’t used any tricks and it was indeed me. He asked if I had any other songs as I had booked three hours. So, unrehearsed I sat back down at the piano and recorded six songs I had written.
A few days later I got a call from Breen Murray, the owner of the studio, asking me to meet him to discuss a contract. I talked to a few musicians and their advice was to send the recording to some record companies before signing with a studio. I did and much to my astonishment, Bonnie Fedrau, an Artists and Repertoire talent scout from Warren Records at the time, called me and said she loved it! But she wanted to hear what kind of sound I was looking for and asked me to do a full demo track with a band and send it to her. So, I worked on a demo with
a fabulous local musician and producer, James Stephens, and then started sending it out. Within a relatively short time frame, much to my amazement, I had won some songwriting competitions, including the Majic100 Radio station Songwriter’s competition. I therefore got a fair bit of radio play. Bonnie had by then moved to EMI records and managed to bring the EMI president out to hear me play a solo gig in Toronto. That night the champagne got opened. He loved my performance!
Within a year of Frankie’s death, I was dealing with producers and record companies in Toronto. The following year, I left my day job in a clothing store in Ottawa, signed a production deal with Juno award-winning producer Greg Kavanagh and headed to Toronto to produce my first album.
There were days after Frankie’s death I thought I would never live again. It felt like I was in a posture of mourning and always would be. During that time, having my music to focus on was such a blessing. It took my greatest loss in life to fulfill a dream and create a new beginning. It was like a fairy tale.
But, like all fairy tales, they have tremendous highs and tremendous lows. During the recording of the album, my dad died of Hepatitis C which he had contracted through bad blood given to him during open heart surgery twelve years previously. When I was ten years old, my dad had a massive heart attack in front of me and I had always lived in fear of his death. You can never prepare yourself. I was distraught at losing my dad so soon after Frankie. One of my greatest disappointments in life is that my dad died having never seen me perform on stage or heard my CD. Dad loved to write, like me, he was always scribbling away and often sent me some lyrics to put music to. Two of those songs we did together I wanted to include in the album.
I was working in the studio and knew Dad wasn’t well. Greg and I were rushing to get those two tracks finished so I could mail them to Dad. That afternoon Greg got a call from EMI; someone much more important than me needed a remix of a song done right away. Greg told me I might as well go back to Ottawa, as he’d be working on it all week. However, he made sure he produced a mix of the two songs for my dad and handed them to me as I was leaving. I put them in my coat pocket, and just as I was about to leave he said, “If you’re about to mail those to your dad, don’t. Just take them home first and make sure they are okay. I’m having problems with my recording machine.”
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