At first I got the bus home every weekend to visit Billie and Pop, but the final straw in my relationship with my stepmother came over a cucumber sandwich, of all things. I’d travelled home and was hungry when I arrived, so I went into the kitchen to make said sandwich.
‘What do you think you are doing? You eat far too much!’ Billie snapped.
I looked at her, buttery knife poised in my hand in mid-air, and simply thought, ‘I don’t want this anymore.’ I’d been shoved down by her all through my teens, and now that I was starting to pull myself up I refused to be squashed any more.
I put down the knife, left the sandwich behind on the countertop, walked out the door and never went back to that house again. From then on, Pop had to travel to Canterbury to see me – and, bless him, he did come regularly, although he admitted that it made things ‘a bit tricky’ with Billie. (She later accused him of having an affair with my landlady simply because he put up a kitchen cupboard for her!)
Now that I was my own boss I decided not to study horticulture after all because going to university would have meant I’d still be partly financially dependent on Pop and Billie, and I didn’t want any further involvement with that woman. Instead, I looked for jobs in the newspaper and finally decided to apply to study radiography at Canterbury Hospital, where you could train in-house. I was lucky to be accepted by the lugubrious consultant radiologist Dr Johnson, even though I didn’t have A Level Maths, and I enjoyed hospital life straight away.
It was around this time that I was introduced by a mutual friend to a man named Eric. He was quite a bit older than me, had been a professional footballer and was now practising as a chiropodist in a surgery near my digs. I thought nothing of it when my friend introduced us, but soon I noticed that Eric always seemed to be standing outside when I walked past and would call me over for a chat. One day he invited me to accompany him to a cricket match in which he was playing, so I went along and somehow we just fell into being boyfriend and girlfriend.
There was no great romance. I felt a sense of security with him because he knew more than me about the way the world worked, he was qualified and had a good career, and he seemed to have his whole life planned out. I was still only nineteen years old and, although I didn’t regret the decision to stop having any contact with Billie, I felt very alone in the world, with no one to fall back on should things go wrong. That’s where Eric came in. I thought he would look after me, so two years later when he asked me if I wanted to get engaged, I just said yes. He bought me a diamond ring from an antique shop – quite a decent diamond, it was – which cost £21 (a substantial amount in those days).
In the mid-sixties, late teens to early twenties was the normal age for girls to get married – leave it too late and people described you as being ‘on the shelf’ – and I thought I’d better not miss my chance. The landlady at my digs tried to talk me out of it. ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?’ she asked. ‘He’s quite a lot older than you.’ But my mind was made up simply because, to me, marriage to Eric would mean security. It’s what girls my age did.
Pop came alone to the registry office ceremony in September 1964. I’d bought myself a blue dress, jacket, hat and a pair of shoes in a charity shop, all for three pounds, and my landlady took some photographs in which I look about fifty years old! Standing in front of the registrar, I got my first shock of married life when Eric was asked for his date of birth. As he gave it, I did the arithmetic in my head and realised that he was five years older than I’d thought: thirty-three rather than twenty-eight, making him twelve years my senior. I didn’t say anything, though. I looked at him open-mouthed but didn’t like to make a fuss.
We went for lunch in the Falstaff Hotel in Canterbury – Pop, his sister Blanche, Eric and me. Eric’s family lived in Doncaster and couldn’t travel down for the wedding. Immediately after lunch, Eric and I walked back up the road to strip wallpaper in a house we’d just bought and were doing up. There was no honeymoon; it was straight down to the business of being ‘a married couple’.
Ours was a typical 1950s marriage, a decade too late; although women across the nation were starting to burn their bras, there was certainly none of your Women’s Lib in our household! I did all the shopping, cooking and cleaning while carrying on with my radiography studies, and Eric worked in his chiropody practice during the day then played golf and cricket with his mates in the evening and at weekends.
My weak spot was that I desperately wanted a family, to find somewhere I belonged. When I visited friends’ families I used to analyse the dynamics, trying to figure out how they worked, because family life was something I hadn’t experienced since Mum died. I yearned for lots of children to make a big happy gang in which I was a core member, so I mucked in and cooked and cleaned and did my absolute best to make my marriage a success.
All the same, I remember one moment, a few weeks after the wedding, when I was in a little room at the hospital where I was training. There was a brown rug on the floor, and I stared at it and thought, ‘What have I done?’ Although I’d been dating Eric for two years, agreeing to marry him had been impulsive; it had seemed like something I should do rather than something I wanted to do, and now the reality of the decades stretching in front of me seemed daunting. There was nothing to be done about it, though, so I just snapped myself out of that introspective mood and got on with things.
Soon after the wedding, Pop came to visit, bringing with him a folder of papers. He handed them over, saying, ‘I thought it’s about time you should have these.’
I opened the folder and flicked through. There was a lengthy correspondence with Reginald Johnson & Co Solicitors in Hayes, Middlesex, regarding ‘The Adoption of Paulette’ – and I realised with a start that it was all about me. For some reason my heart started to pound.
It seemed that although I had been born in March 1943 and had gone to live with Mum and Pop (Dorothy and Ernest Vousden) six weeks later, I had not been officially adopted by them until March 1944 because my birth father had been in the army and they hadn’t been able to track him down to get his signature on the paperwork. There was a copy of a sad little letter on blue writing paper from my mum to my birth father, sent care of his unit: ‘We are anxious to adopt her but cannot do so without your written consent, would you kindly do this without further delay & so enable us to get the matters settled.’
It struck me immediately how heart-rending it must have been for Mum and Pop to bring me up for a whole year – doing the nappies and the night feeds, bathing and dressing me – while, at any time, my birth parents could have come to claim me back because the adoption was not formalised. That must have been very stressful for them. How could you let yourself love a baby you might not be able to keep? Yet there was no doubt that Mum and Pop had loved me without reservation from the minute they took me home with them.
‘We were pretty sure they wouldn’t come back for you,’ Pop agreed, ‘but it was certainly a relief when it was all finalised. Your mother and I had been trying for a long time for a baby – since our marriage in 1922 – so as you can imagine we couldn’t wait to have it all confirmed legally.’
‘Twenty-one years!’ I exclaimed. ‘That must have been so hard for you.’
‘It was a particular sorrow for your mother. I had my work but she just had her home to run, and I think she felt it very keenly when friends were talking about their children’s achievements. Thank God she had the nine years of looking after you. It made her so happy.’
I smiled, remembering what a wonderful mother she had been. I was very lucky in that sense … not so much in others.
Next I looked at the four-page certificate that legally made me the child of Dorothy and Ernest Vousden under the 1926 Adoption of Children Act. On the third page, in black and white, there were the names of my birth mother and father: Daisy Louise Noël of Shelburne Road, High Wycombe, and Henri Le Gresley Noël of Saighton Camp, near Chester. I got goosebumps on my arms looking at them.
‘Why do their names sound so foreign?’