‘Poor Daisy,’ I said, trying to imagine what it must be like to give up your baby. I pictured her in floods of tears as she handed over the bundle swathed in a pristine white blanket.
The last page of the certificate was about wills; it explained that adopted children bore all the same rights as children born naturally to a couple, except that they would not automatically inherit any estate unless there was a will naming them as heirs.
‘Don’t worry; you are named as my heir,’ Pop said. ‘Not that there’s much to inherit.’
He looked tired, and I’d noticed he was getting forgetful. When I was younger I’d never minded having older parents, but now I was in my twenties, Dad was in his sixties and starting to succumb to the niggling ailments of old age.
‘Thanks for bringing these, Pop,’ I said. I couldn’t stop looking at those names – Daisy and Henri Le Gresley Noël. What ages would they be now and what were they doing with their lives?
And then a thought struck me: perhaps they had gone on to remarry and have more children. I might have half-brothers and sisters somewhere. Wouldn’t that be lovely! I daydreamed about discovering a big extended family of cousins and aunties, grandparents, nephews and nieces, who all met up for Christmases and birthdays and weddings. Then I snapped myself out of it. I still had a wonderful dad, and I’d once had the best mum in the world; lots of people couldn’t say as much. I should count myself lucky and not hanker after anything more.
5
It was fascinating to learn that my birth parents came from Jersey, meaning that I had a connection with the Channel Islands. I knew very little about the wartime occupation there, but I went to the library and did some reading to try to understand what the people had been through. I read that after the Fall of France in June 1940 and its occupation by German troops, the British government decided they couldn’t spare the manpower to defend the islands, which were much closer to France than they were to Britain. Everyone was aware that it would give the Germans a propaganda coup to say they had conquered part of the British Isles, but there would be no particular strategic advantages for them in having a base there and the islands would simply be too tricky for the British Army to defend.
Each island had its own governing body, and in those rushed, chaotic days of mid-June 1940 they all adopted different policies towards evacuation. Alderney officials recommended that everyone be evacuated; Sark urged everyone to stay; on Guernsey they decided to evacuate all school-age children; on Jersey the advice was to stay, and most followed it, with only around a tenth of the population deciding to leave – including, I supposed, my birth mother. Boats left the islands for the UK mainland between 20 and 23 June 1940, and the Germans took possession on 1 July, so it was all a big rush. I looked at photographs of old women sobbing as they waved at departing boats, of little children perched on their fathers’ shoulders looking bewildered, of decks crammed with people looking fearful, unsure of what awaited them on the mainland. It must have been a terrifying choice: wait for the Germans or leap into the unknown and start a new life.
By the time I was born, my mother, Daisy, was in England and my father was off fighting somewhere. According to the adoption certificate her address was in Shelburne Road, High Wycombe. I knew High Wycombe because my Auntie Wyn (Mum’s sister) and Uncle Frank used to live there. I remembered their next-door neighbours kept chickens and goats in a big uncultivated garden, and I liked to climb over and play with them even though Aunt Wyn kept telling me not to.
‘Stay out, Cherry. You’ll annoy them,’ she chided. But I had always loved goats and I was straight over that fence whenever she wasn’t looking, even after one of the goats butted me and knocked me to the ground.
I wondered if an adoption agency had given me to my mum and dad – the adoption papers didn’t name one. Alternatively, perhaps Auntie Wyn had known Daisy and told her about this couple who couldn’t have children of their own and were desperate to adopt. Was that how it all happened?
For a brief moment I considered writing to the Shelburne Road address to ask if the current occupants had a forwarding address for Daisy, but then I changed my mind. I felt sure Pop would be upset if I tried to contact my birth parents. It was almost like saying that he wasn’t a good enough dad. I couldn’t do that to him, and I certainly didn’t want to do it behind his back, so I put the adoption papers away in a drawer.
Meanwhile, Eric and I were keen to start a family of our own. In the spring of 1965 I had a miscarriage, which was very distressing, but luckily by the end of the year I was pregnant again. I gave birth to my daughter Helen in April 1966, and it was then that I realised I knew absolutely nothing about babies! I’d had no contact with them, and while most girls could ask their mothers for help and advice, I had no one to ask and simply had to muddle through. For example, I didn’t know that your milk doesn’t come in for three days; I had no idea what to do when Helen was obviously hungry and I had hardly anything in my breasts to feed her. (I’d decided from the start that I wanted to breastfeed, even though it wasn’t the fashion at the time, because to me it felt more natural. That’s what we have breasts for, isn’t it?)
There was no one you could ask in those days. I’d met a few women at antenatal classes and we exchanged notes, but they were mostly young and clueless like me. I felt a complete amateur but somehow I managed to master breast-feeding, then weaning her on mashed bananas and stewed apples. There was endless hand-washing of terry towelling nappies in a sink down in the basement then struggling to get them dry because there was no heating in the house. When my son Graham came along in December 1967, I was an old hand at rearing babies and it all went more smoothly, although there were double the number of nappies to wash.
Our house in Canterbury was a Victorian building, four storeys tall. On the ground floor was the surgery and waiting room for Eric’s chiropody practice. I had to share the only bathroom, on the first floor, with all the old ladies who’d come in to have their feet done, and I hated that. The kitchen was on the same level as the surgery, and our sitting/dining room was on the top floor so if we sat down to dinner and I realised I’d forgotten the salt, it was a trek down four flights of stairs to retrieve it then another four flights back up again. It obviously wasn’t an ideal house in which to live with two babies; when I arrived home with a pram, several bags of shopping and the two of them wailing for a feed, there was many a time I could have done with an extra pair of arms.
I had loads of memories of my own mum – how warm and cuddly she had been, the feeling of safety when I was snuggling on her lap and the peacefulness of lying in bed, tucked under the covers, while she played the piano to lull me to sleep. I wasn’t very good at doing these things for my own children, though. I did all the physical, practical things – feeding, washing, clothing, nursing them when they were sick, taking them for dental check-ups and registering them for schools – but emotionally I felt shut off. I think it went back to the first time I returned to the house after Mum’s death, when I was sitting on Pop’s knee and he told me not to cry but to be a brave girl. In everything that had happened to me since then, I’d suppressed my emotions and simply coped, so when it came to my own children I found I was unable to be demonstrative and loving. We weren’t a cuddly family, although I loved them to pieces.
Apart from anything else, I was always short of time. Eric liked his routines: breakfast on the table at eight, lunch at twelve, supper at six, so looking after the kids had to fit around that. I had finished my radiography course before getting pregnant, but there was no part-time radiography work in our area, so instead I took odd jobs to make money. In summer I’d be out fruit-picking while the kids snoozed in their prams or toddled around trying to help; in winter I made teddy bears for a market stall, stuffing them, sewing them up and sticking in those eerie glass eyes.
Eric gave me housekeeping money (when