Marc still had the job of telling his own parents that they would be grandparents for the first time. He took the train back to Penarth and told them he had met a girl called Penny, who was now pregnant. His father John, a strong-minded, masculine man, wasn’t a touchy-feely chap, but took it well enough.
During the next nine months, Marc and, particularly, Penny had some important decisions to make. He moved into a shared house in Crouch End, nearer his round, when his pal Nigel got a job as a surveyor with Tower Hamlets and moved to Chingford in North East London. Penny, meanwhile, decided to give up her college course and become a full-time mum. Fiercely independent, she left home and moved into emergency accommodation for unmarried mothers on Queen’s Drive, an unappealing street near Finsbury Park Station. She also received support from the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) charity.
Marc saw her regularly, but it would be stretching it to suggest they were a devoted couple. He wasn’t the sort of man to hold her hand while she practised her breathing at antenatal classes.
Two weeks before the baby was due, he was eating breakfast at home in Crouch End when the phone rang. It was Penny’s mum Doreen. ‘Congratulations, Marc. You are the father of a baby girl.’ Despite being premature, there were no complications and the baby weighed a healthy 5lb 10½oz.
Marc dashed to the florists, bought an extravagant bunch of flowers and hopped on a bus to the North Middlesex Hospital in Edmonton, just off the North Circular Road, to see his daughter for the first time. It was 5 May 1988.
The new parents needed to decide on a name for their baby. Marc suggested Blue, his favourite colour. It was nothing to do with enjoying blues music; he just really liked the name. Penny considered that for a second or two before replying firmly, ‘I’m not calling her Blue.’
She had, in fact, already made up her mind that her daughter would be called Adele. It was an unusual choice, which perhaps was the point. In literature, Adele features in the classic novel Jane Eyre as Rochester’s young French ward. Jane takes the girl under her wing when she is employed as her governess. An art student might know that the Countess Adele was the mother of the Post-Impressionist master Toulouse-Lautrec.
For her second name, Penny chose Laurie, something suitable for either a boy or a girl. As a sop to Marc, she agreed that her third name could be Blue. He was delighted. Penny didn’t appreciate it, however, when Marc started calling his daughter Blue. She would snap, ‘Don’t call her that. Her name’s Adele.’ Penny never shortened it to Addie or Della. It was unusual in both their families for someone to have three first names. Adele Laurie Blue was certainly something to remember.
Fortunately, Penny, who had been kept in hospital for only a day, didn’t have to stay long in Queen’s Drive either. She was rehoused in a two-bedroom council flat in Shelbourne Road, Tottenham. If the wind was blowing in the right direction, she could hear the Saturday roar from the crowd at White Hart Lane. The famous Spurs ground was less than a mile away down the ironically named Park Lane, which bears no resemblance to the famous West End thoroughfare that is a byword for opulence.
The sight of football fans wearing the black and white scarves of Tottenham Hotspur as they strode to the match was a familiar sight throughout Adele’s childhood and helped generate a feeling of community in what was a drab neighbourhood. On match days, Shelbourne Road and the surrounding streets would be turned into one enormous car park.
The football club was somewhat in the shadow of neighbours Arsenal, but back in 1988 the prospects for the future seemed brighter with the signing of Paul Gascoigne from Newcastle for £2.2 million. Gazza helped them to finish sixth that season, but the champions were once again their North London rivals – much to the delight of the Adkins family.
Tottenham, at that time, would have won votes in a contest to decide the least attractive place to live in England. Much of the negativity came from the fallout from the notorious Broadwater Farm riots in October 1985. Penny was still a schoolgirl when the disenchanted young black men of the neighbourhood took to the streets following the death of local mum Cynthia Jarrett. She died from a heart attack when four police officers arrived unannounced to search her home in nearby Thorpe Road. During the subsequent unrest, which included the use of guns and petrol bombs, a policeman, PC Keith Blakelock, was hacked to death.
Marc helped Penny move in to an upstairs unfurnished flat in a street that had little to recommend it. It would be home to her and her daughter for the next nine years. An elderly couple, Henry and Jane Barley, lived downstairs and, in the years to come, they would watch Adele if her mother had to pop out. Marc wasn’t living there at first. About a month after they had settled in, he gave up his own place and joined them.
Together the new family took the train to Penarth to introduce Adele to her Welsh grandparents. Penny could be forgiven for being apprehensive. She had never met Marc’s parents before and here she was arriving on the doorstep with a baby in her arms. His mother, however, had a natural empathy with her. She’d had Marc when she was eighteen and understood perfectly what it was like to be a teenage mum. His father, too, appreciated the difficulties of being young parents starting out in life.
Marc recalled, ‘My mum was very gooey about the baby, while my father was more like, “Oh, very nice”, because all babies look the same, don’t they? It was very daunting for Penny, as you can imagine, but they are very easy-going and laid-back people and they made her very welcome. She was relaxed within an hour and they were the best of friends from then on.’
South Wales would be a home from home for Adele over the coming years. Her Welsh grandparents were important people in her life and the frequent trips across the Severn Bridge were among the best times of her childhood.
Back in London, Penny set about turning the flat into the home she wanted, grabbing unwanted furniture from her sisters or searching vintage shops for a bargain. Adele has often described her mother as ‘arty’ and their flat reflected her taste. It helped that she could fill the wall space with her own work. Marc had his window-cleaning round and, in the early years, Penny claimed the benefits she was entitled to. Adele didn’t go short of the things that every baby needs. As Marc observed, ‘Penny was never skint. She had a huge family, she had me, she had my parents and she didn’t want for anything.’
Penny is particularly close to her sisters, Kim and Nita, who have seven children between them. She also has two brothers, Gary and John Anthony. In total, Adele had something like thirteen cousins living in the Tottenham area, so there were always playmates growing up. She has often joked that she would visit her relations and enjoy the chaos of so many children playing together and then go home to her neat bedroom, where everything was in its place. Her room was never that tidy though.
Everyone clubbed together to buy Penny an old Citroën 2CV, one of those timeless designs with the roll-top roof, which perfectly suited a young woman with bohemian tastes. She could strap her baby in and be round at her mum’s or elder sisters’ houses in a couple of minutes.
Marc was proud to be the dad of such a sweet baby, who didn’t give her parents many sleepless nights. He liked nothing better than to come home and find Penny playing lullabies on her guitar to her sleeping daughter. ‘She was very talented with a guitar,’ he recalled.
All should have been set fair for the couple, but the reality was that they were two young people thrown together more by fate than compatibility. ‘I loved Penny,’ said Marc, ‘but after a few months the chemistry began to go.’ Eventually, when Adele was nine months old, they split up.
It had never been a secret that Marc was Adele’s dad,