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 category 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.
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,