SHE AND I

I wonder about her today as I do every year on or around my birthday: I am speaking of my biological mother, who made the greatest sacrifice any woman could make. It seems incredible today but she tried to keep me for three months and the parting must have caused her unimaginable pain.

I have the adoption documents in front of me as I write and I quote verbatim from one of them:

1st May 1950
“The mother of this baby wishes for her to be adopted as she cannot afford to keep her. She has one child already, a girl aged 2, and she and this elder child live with her mother, a widow, who does occasional domestic work to support herself.

The father of Patricia is an American [not coloured – mother says he has blond hair]; little is known about him. He is thought to live in Miami, Florida and is a Captain in the Regular American Airforce.

The mother has no brothers or sisters to help in the financial running of the home.”

Underneath this statement someone has typed in capitals, in a different colour: 

“FAIR, TYPICALLY ENGLISH-LOOKING BABY.”

What a cruel world! Sociologically, the most interesting thing about these documents is the fact that “fair hair, blue eyes” is repeated throughout them, with reference to the father and to me, for who would give a toss these days?

The documents contain happier sections, one of them being this, from the Church of England Adoption Society on 4th December 1950:

“Dear Mr and Mrs Eggleton,
I was delighted to receive your telephone communication and to know that your meeting with baby Patricia was such a very happy one and that she is now in your care. I am so glad to know that she was so good on the journey home and that she is settling down very contentedly.”

And later:

“I was very pleased indeed to receive your letter and to have such very good news of your baby daughter. I can well imagine how much Patricia must already mean to both you and your wife , and I am more than delighted to know that she makes your happiness complete.”

Even now, that last extract brings tears to my eyes, for it shows how very much my parents [by which I mean the two wonderful people who brought me up] wanted a child. In fact, so impressed was the Adoption Society’s officer by the fact that my father was as keen as my mother to adopt that she actually bumped them up the list and here is the proof:

29th November 1950
“Dear Mr and Mrs Eggleton,
I was very pleased to be able to give you the good news that your application had been approved by the Committee. I was intending to write to you today to let you know that your name had been placed on the waiting list until a suitable child becomes available for adoption, but it occurs to me that you might like to have the opportunity of knowing a baby called Patricia although she is rather a long way from Bristol…….”

It seems to me that a lot of nonsense is talked nowadays about the supposed bond with the “natural” parents, to the extent that I have read suggestions that adopted children should have links with them from early on: I can see this idea bringing nothing but heartbreak and confusion for all involved. The strict regulations of the 1950s stated that the natural mother would never be able to have news of the child again and this was, indeed, harsh, but it is easy to forget that those who made these rulings did so for what they thought was the good of the child. If an adoptee or natural mother wish to trace each other later in life then that is up to them and I can understand the reasons other than emotional ones that might lead them to do so [simple curiosity, needing to know medical history, etc.] But such reunions are not always happy and I do not believe that an adoptee has the “right” to suddenly appear and disrupt a life that has been partially repaired. So no, I have never tried to find her, although my parents would have helped me if I had wanted to. This would have broken their hearts and I just couldn’t do it to them; then later on I decided that such sadness as my natural mother went through in 1950 was best not stirred up again. The fact that I have a half –sister somewhere is something I am curious about but one thing that an adopted child learns early on is that blood is not necessarily thicker than water. We become what we are largely through our environment.

I cannot remember a time when I did not know about the adoption: as a child, it was told to me as a story and I loved it! My “real” parents weren’t mentioned in this tale and I wasn’t bothered about them: I was more interested in the fact that I was “special”, that I had gone beamingly and willingly into my father’s arms that day at the orphanage whilst I summed my mother up a bit before surrendering myself to her, and that I had been a good girl on the drive to Bristol in the snow. And I was so happy, so warm , so loved that I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else anyway. But, being a precocious child and reading everything I could get my hands on, including the women’s magazines from our shop, I soon put two and two together and when I asked about my biological parents I was told the truth. So the documents were available to me from an early age, too.

What, then, do I wonder about on my birthday? How my biological mother feels [she would be 87 if alive ] or felt on that day, of course, whether she loved her airman and whether he had any feeling whatsoever for her. He probably knew nothing about me and she perhaps didn’t feel she could tell him. He was back in the USA by the time I appeared and she had no address for him. And I suppose any woman of my generation would ponder upon what would have happened had she had the option of abortion. Regular readers will know that I am ambivalent on the subject and, as I have never been in the position of having to have one I probably shouldn’t pontificate about it. What I do know is that there have always been abortionists – what else were witches? – and you only have to watch Vera Drake to realise that desperate women will resort to desperate measures. It is a subject much on the agenda in Italy at the moment and no woman, having made such a difficult decision, should have to go through this as well. Would my natural mother have done it? Would she have known more or less pain if she had? That I shall never know. But if I have a hope for her it is that the ensuing seasons of her life were kinder to her than that cold, unforgiving winter of 1950 and if I could say anything to her it would be, “Thank you”.

There I am above with my mum, the one who changed the nappies, bought the first sanitary towels, wrapped me in her arms as I sobbed about boys and later men and endured my taunts [for I was no angel] and moods for 43 years. She is pointing at the camera but I like to think she is pointing at life.

VERA DRAKE