My mother (Dorothy Fanny – known as Dolly – whose second name never ceased to make my children laugh) had wanted to be an infant school teacher, but that was an aspiration too far for a working-class girl in the aftermath of the First World War, educated only to the age of thirteen at an elementary school. I am not sure what she did for a living before she married; she was always very cagey about that, but I suspect that she was in service. Not in a grand Downton Abbey sort of a house with its life below stairs, its ‘pug’s parlour’, its ladies’ maids, its grooms and butler, but rather as a ‘cook general’, that loneliest of lives, the sole servant in a middle-class suburban villa, ‘doing’ for two bachelor businessmen, cleaning, shopping, cooking plain meals, washing and ironing. A housewife in all respects but those that one might think had meaning.
Things had brightened for her when she met my father, Charles, who was just a rung above her in her carefully calibrated social ladder. He had the ambition to be a doctor, but before he achieved medical school his father, a heavy drinker and, I suspect, a wife-beater, had died and that put paid to his ambition, since his wages were needed to help the family’s meagre income. My parents married in 1927, she in a drop-waisted, flapper-style cream silk dress and narrow satin T-bar shoes. A similar miniature shoe in silver, filled with wax orange blossom, and a silver cardboard horseshoe topped their wedding cake. My parents kept this souvenir, together with a collection of heraldic Goss china and a glass tube filled with layers of different-coloured sand (from Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight, where they had spent their honeymoon), in a glass-fronted display cabinet in the dining room throughout my childhood.
After their wedding, my parents set up home in privately rented accommodation (as most people did in the late 1920s) near Watford in Hertfordshire, moving a few miles to Hemel Hempstead when my father got a job in the local Borough Surveyor’s department. Eventually he would build – or customise the plans of a spec builder – the house in which they would live for some forty-five years. So in the mid-1930s my parents became proud home owners (or rather mortgage holders) of a pebble-dashed detached house with a rectangular garden back and front.
It was some time before they got round to starting the process of adoption. When I once asked my mother why she hadn’t had a child, she replied that the egg ‘kept coming away’, by which I presume she meant that she had had a series of miscarriages. Maybe hope ran out in the early days of the war. Maybe my father needed persuading – though I doubt that. Maybe the vicar had suggested it as a distraction from the nervous headaches my mother suffered from and a Christian gesture towards a cast-out child. They were quite old – in their late forties, which seemed much older then than it does now – to embark on first-time parenthood with a young child. And they were – unsurprisingly – stuck in their ways, rigid in their routines, unused to the noise and tumbling of childhood. ‘Steady, steady’, was the admonition most heard in our house, according to the recollection of childhood friends invited to tea.
I was frequently reminded that I was lucky to have been adopted, otherwise I would have ended up in an orphanage, or a children’s home. After all there were so many illegitimate babies on offer at the end of the Second World War – a regular ‘baby scoop’ the Americans called it. The uncertainty, danger, intensity and impermanence of wartime was conducive to unlikely liaisons and fleeting couplings, since men and women moved around more in wartime, posted away from their home surroundings to places where they knew no one and sought comfort or adventure. Some babies were born to single women, others to wives who’d had an affair while their husbands had been away fighting abroad or working elsewhere in war production. In some cases, the returning husband was prepared to forgive his wife’s ‘lapse’ on condition that the consequence was adopted. However, the novelist Barbara Cartland, who had advised WAAFs on welfare and personal problems during the war and turned to counselling returning war veterans after the war, advised men to try to accept this situation. ‘At first they swore that as soon as it was born the baby would have to be adopted, but then sometimes they would say, half shamefaced at their generosity, “the poor little devil can’t help itself, and after all it’s one of hers”.’
As I grew up I did indeed regard myself as fortunate to have been adopted. It sounds an unkind, and certainly an ungrateful thing to say, but I came to rejoice in my status as an adopted child. I was not ‘one of them’, I realised as I grew up. The traits that I found difficult or irritating about my mother were characteristic of her, not part of my make-up. I was a superior being, I conjectured, since I had no evidence; certainly the child of a very clever and beautiful mother, in the temporary custody of some rather banal earthlings. I did not expect to be reclaimed by this exotic yet warmly maternal creature, but this belief would eventually give me the confidence to strike out a new route to fulfilment and happiness, far from the high laurel hedges, Rexine furniture and conversations that invariably failed to move beyond remarks about the weather or comments on the food: ‘This lamb’s not as tender as last Sunday’s joint, Dolly.’ All I had to do was bide my time. Which is essentially what I did throughout my childhood and school years, waiting, confident that being grown up would change everything.
Despite a more relaxed attitude towards the ‘accidents’ of wartime, opinions hardened again during the postwar years of dreary austerity. Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, the ‘shame’ of illegitimacy still persisted, with the fear of a missed period blighting many young girls’ lives. Middle-class pregnant daughters were invariably sent by private arrangement to mother and baby homes, usually in the country but certainly far from their own neighbourhoods. There, they would give birth, and the baby would usually be taken for adoption, sometimes against the wishes of the mother, who would return to her family home and her old life after ‘a holiday with relatives’ or ‘a temporary job abroad’. She would slip back into her former life as if nothing had happened. But it had, of course. Regardless of how much she accepted that this was the only realistic course, the bereft mother had suffered a profound loss, and many women found themselves forever unable to forget the babies they had carried for nine months, given birth to, nursed for weeks, only to have the infant taken away.
For those without such resources, relatives or charitable institutions were called upon. ‘Being pregnant and unmarried in 1950 was something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy,’ wrote Sheila Tofield, who worked in the typing pool of the National Assistance Board in Rotherham. To her surprise and horror, she recalled in her 2013 memoir The Unmarried Mother, she found she was pregnant after sleeping with a former colleague who washed his hands of any responsibility. ‘If people did something that went against the social norm in those days, no one sympathised or tried to understand. It was simple: there were “nice girls” and there was the other sort, who brought shame on themselves and their families. And that was the sort of girl I had now become.’ Sheila Tofield’s brother effectively disowned her, while her mother was apoplectic at the ‘disgrace’ she had brought on her family. Her response was to half fill a tin bath with boiling water, command her daughter to climb in, and hand her a quarter-bottle of gin, instructing her to ‘drink this and then go to bed’.
When this abortion attempt proved unsuccessful, Miss Tofield wrote to Evelyn Home, the ‘agony aunt’ at the magazine Woman, explaining that she was unmarried and pregnant and her mother was adamant that she could not keep the baby and it would have to be adopted. The reply was the standard one: she should get in touch with an organisation run by the Church of England, in this case in Sheffield. The woman who interviewed her told Sheila that she would be sent to a mother and baby home in Huddersfield:
‘You’ll go there for six weeks before your due date and remain there for six weeks after the birth. When the baby’s born, you’ll take care of it until it’s adopted.’ She didn’t give me any details of what she called ‘the adoption process’ or anything about how the people who would become the parents of my child would be selected. And I didn’t ask. I knew that what I had done was ‘wrong’ and I didn’t expect sympathy or kindness from anyone, or to be offered a choice about anything. I was just thankful there was somewhere I could go to have the baby before