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,