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

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СКАЧАТЬ be told that they were adopted as soon as they were able to comprehend what that meant – somewhere between three and six years was reckoned to be optimum.

      I can’t remember when I was told that I was adopted, but I must have been quite young. However, once this information had been imparted, it was never referred to again and I was discouraged from asking more or alluding to the fact. Once, after being bought a doll in a toyshop, I remarked, ‘She’s adopted like me’, and was hustled out of the shop by my mother who said sharply: ‘We don’t talk about that.’

      If I ever asked who my birth mother was, my adoptive mother would reply: ‘You don’t need to know that. You are ours now.’ This seems reasonable since in the immediate postwar world ‘birth mother’ was not a phrase in common currency, rather it would have been ‘real mother’, which must have been immensely hurtful to a woman who had done everything for the child short of pushing her out into the world. Who was the ‘real’ mother in this context? The bearer or the carer?

      I understood, and I was prepared to believe – I think – that I was more special because I had been specifically chosen; rather than just slithering into my mother’s life with no chance of return or refund. I was told that I had been picked out because I had blue eyes and a nice smile – and in any case two-thirds of those wishing to adopt expressed a preference for a girl.

      But what I did find very hurtful for many years were the veiled allusions, the snide remarks – ‘I’m afraid that you are fast growing up to be like your [birth] mother’ – with no more insight as to what that meant and why it was something I should not want to happen. And worst of all was my mother’s occasional taunt of ‘If only you knew who your father was …’, and no matter how much I begged to be told, my mother’s lips would purse into a stony silence leaving me none the wiser as to whether he might have been the Duke of Windsor, General Montgomery, or an American GI ‘over here’ to prepare for D Day (as I often fantasised).

      My adoption was not terribly successful. My mother and I were a disappointment to each other. I was not the daughter she had hoped for, nor she the mother I would have chosen if such a reversal of choice had been on offer. She was, like so many mid-century women, I suspect, disappointed by life. She was of working-class origin but had a burning desire to be middle-class, with all the attributes and appurtenances that implied. Her father had been a railwayman, a signal keeper, I think, living in Walton, near Peterborough, who was dead before I came into the lives of Mr and Mrs Wells. Her mother, of whom she had been very fond, was also dead. My maternal grandmother had been nursed by her in our house in her dying months, though I cannot reliably remember her. I suspect that my mother was deeply saddened that she seemed unable to recreate with me the mother–daughter bond she’d had with her own mother.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ