Joining the Dots: A Woman In Her Time. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ hand over her baby for adoption and thus relieve herself of any responsibility for it, it was deemed likely that she would not learn her lesson and moral turpitude would go unchecked. Moreover, many eugenicists considered that personality traits were genetic and likely to be inherited: they would ‘out’ like physical characteristics such as blue eyes or blond hair. So an infant born out of wedlock was seen as preordained to have a not entirely reliable moral compass: as clear as an unsightly birth mark, an irremovable moral stain tainted the innocent bastard.

      Most people looking to adopt wanted a no-strings orphan of two or three years old, whereas in fact most children on offer were illegitimate and most of these were babies. In her book on adoption (A Child for Keeps), Jenny Keating explains the preference at this time for a toddler rather than a newborn as proof that the child came from sufficiently good stock to survive infancy, since its genetics, its inborn nature, would be the defining characteristic in its development. Subsequently, with more awareness of psychoanalytic theories’ emphasis on the dominance of nurture over nature, potential adopters were more attracted to the idea of a newborn infant as being a tabula rasa on whom they could imprint their own ideas and values.

      Indeed, over the course of the twentieth century, the notion of intuitive mothering was increasingly challenged by the popularity of manuals from a growing number of experts in both child health and child psychology. From Truby King, with his belief in fresh air and rigidly regulated feeding and cuddling routines, to the altogether more relaxed and more permissive Dr Benjamin Spock, who encouraged mothers to trust their babies’ instincts, or on to the middle-way Penelope Leach or the draconian, childless Gina Ford, the zeitgeist of the nursery had changed. Mothering was not purely instinctive: it could be learned, it had a scientific, research-based dimension. The effect of this could hardly fail to narrow the gap between the ‘natural’ or birth mother and the adoptive mother, since both could be seen clutching the same latest fashionable mothering manual, both as perplexed by questions of babies sleeping on their back or front, of yes or no to dummies, the right age to potty-train, how to deal with the tantrums of the ‘terrible twos’.

      A newborn baby being brought home from hospital was also a simulacrum of the natural arrival of an infant, its provenance obscured in the soft folds of the lacy white shawl in which it was likely to be enveloped. This was apparently particularly pleasing to middle-class adopters, for whom the unpleasant miasma of the ‘baby farm’ still obstinately tended to cling to the idea of adoption. In any case, the appearance of a toddler in the household of a childless couple announced in a starkly obvious way their failure, with no IVF or other aids to fertility available, to produce a child in the time-honoured way, whereas the arrival of a newborn baby was a more ambiguous event. If the arrival of a child signalled a ‘normal family’, why would adoptive parents wish to disrupt that conventionality if they could avoid it by proclaiming to the world that their family was ‘different’, their child a foundling of uncertain pedigree?

      II Arrival

      Given my age, I did not, of course, arrive at my new home wrapped in a shawl but, I was told – though I have been unable to find any photographic corroboration – dressed in a tweed coat with a velvet collar, tweed bonnet and tweed leggings (which were not like today’s leggings but more like trousers with elastic that went under the shoe). I was, I think, about two and a half years old, the paperwork required by the 1926 Adoption of Children Act completed, and only a short court hearing in front of a magistrate still to come, followed by the issue of a shortened birth certificate. This was half the size of a usual one and with no space for the name, occupation or parish of either parent, but was nevertheless a legal document of irrevocable status that gave an adopted child the same rights and legal status as a natural-born one when it came to inheritance. It was a ‘fresh start’, ‘a new page’ in my life. And stark evidence for evermore that I had been adopted.

      I was illegitimate, as were more than 40,000 babies born during or just after the Second World War. I was adopted from the Church of England Incorporated Society for Providing Homes for Waifs and Strays (subsequently the Dickensian evocation of Waifs and Strays was dropped in favour of the simple ‘Children’s Society’), where I’d been placed when I was probably about two months old after the original adoption arrangements made at birth had fallen through, since a severe case of bronchitis suggested that I might have a congenital chest condition and thus could not be granted the clean bill of health required for the adoption to go ahead. I believe it is the same with cows: they have to be certified fit before they can leave the cattle market for new byres.

      A warning here. ‘All Cretans are liars,’ said the Cretan. ‘All adoptees are fantasists,’ said the adoptee. Certainly I am; a natural spinner of a skewed family romance. I not only exist in a personal historical void, I am a void, officially a filius nullius. I have no given past, no known sidebars. I am obliged to answer ‘I don’t know, I am adopted’, when asked if there is a history of diabetes, or high blood pressure, or insanity, in my family. Thus, it seems not unreasonable that given a blank sheet of paper, a true tabula rasa, one is unable to distinguish, or chooses not to distinguish, fact from fiction in the narrative of one’s life. I fill in the void, inscribing the abyss in ways that make my free-floating self seem more interesting, more desirable, by the construction of grander birth parents and more intriguing circumstances surrounding my birth. If I am rootless, why not sink my roots in the richest, most friable soil possible?

      I sometimes say now that I am not entirely sure what the truth about me is, and that at least is true, but that is because over the decades, my memories and fantasies about my memories have calcified with what little I have been told, and that edifice is now the truth and I have no certain way of dismantling it. I may even occasionally find myself adding another layer or smear of obfuscation.

      Under the terms of the 1926 Adoption Act, adoption had been intended to be an open process; the adopters’ names and addresses appeared on the consent form the parents (or more likely the mother) who gave a child up for adoption signed to enable this. But this transparency could prove to be an inhibition to would-be adopters who wanted the child they had adopted to be considered to be theirs, just as a birth child was. They were not prepared to trade the ambiguity of their family’s formation for legal regulation. They preferred their unregulated parental status to taking the possible consequences when not only the adopted child, but the world at large, could know the truth. This was considered particularly true of ‘villadom’, presumably the lower middle classes who guarded their privacy fiercely from neighbours ‘poking their noses into other people’s business’. But some working-class parents stated that they had chosen to move to another town to obscure the knowledge of their status as adoptive parents, whilst ‘some hunting people’ (presumably upper-class) admitted that ‘if we had to go into court, even a magistrate’s room to have this legalised, we would not do it. We would give up the child rather than that it should be known that it came through a society.’

      This blotting-out of an adopted child’s origins was concretised by the 1949 Adoption Act, which raised a high wall of secrecy. It decreed that the birth mother would not in future be informed of the name of her child’s adoptive parents nor where they lived: in future, only a serial number would appear on the adoption papers, in place of the previously uncoded information. The sponsor of the bill in the Lords, Viscount Simon, insisted that ‘it was in the interest of the child that the birth mother should not haunt the home of the new family’. An iron curtain was to be dropped between the natural and adoptive parent so that it would be extremely difficult for a mother to trace the child she had relinquished.

      However, despite this officially erected fence, it was increasingly accepted that it was unrealistic to imagine such an intimate secret could be kept in perpetuity. Furthermore, it would be traumatic for a young person to find out, perhaps at puberty, that the people he or she had regarded as its ‘natural parents’ were in fact not biological relations. The rock on which the young person’s identity had been grounded could crumble; they would be most likely to feel vulnerable, deceived and betrayed in the most fundamental manner. What else in their young lives was not true? Where СКАЧАТЬ