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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 I went home again and tried to pretend that none of it had ever happened.

      So on the morning of the day she had hoped would never come, Sheila Tofield packed a small case and caught two buses to Huddersfield. ‘I was setting out on a journey I didn’t want to make, to a town I didn’t want to go to, where I’d do something I didn’t want to do.’

      It was not until the more permissive 1960s that the stigma of illegitimacy began to ebb, and a decisive moment came in 1975 when transparency triumphed. Legislation made it possible for an adoptee to obtain a copy of his or her full birth certificate from the General Register Office; this gave the name and address of the birth mother, and her occupation at the time of her child’s birth, but in the case of unmarried parents, not of the father unless he chose to be named.

      I have never tried to track down my birth mother, though over the years I have gleaned from an aunt who thought I deserved some (but not much) information about my identity the fact that she was Italian – probably from northern Italy. Whether she was a student over here when war broke out and elected to stay, or was interned in 1940 after the fall of France when Mussolini joined the Axis powers (unlikely but not impossible), or whether she was of Italian extraction but her family had lived in Britain for at least a generation, I don’t know.

      When I was a young child I think I was wise enough to realise that this glamorous, brilliant mother I had conjured up was most likely to be an illusion. After all, my friends’ and neighbours’ mothers were much like my own, with their greying, tightly permed hair, felt hats, slightly shabby clothes and sensible shoes. (Clothes only ceased to be rationed in 1949 and the wartime ‘make do and mend’ ethos was still prevalent among British women.)

      As I grew up, I felt I had no need for another mother, since the one I had already had proved less than satisfactory in my view. Soon I had a husband and children of my own and I could not imagine where a spare additional mother would fit into the family structure. Later still I realised that I didn’t want to learn that my mother had been felled by a fearsome hereditary disease that I was likely to develop, or that she was still alive and had some form of senile dementia that would leave me, despite her abrogation of me, somehow bound to take responsibility for her.

      So for these semi-rational reasons, which no doubt hide a deeper, more profound anxiety, I have never tried to find my mother. I was (and still am) more interested in finding out who my father was, but that would be a much harder task since his name does not appear on my birth certificate. Maybe I will someday follow that path to discovery, if time is allowed to me, if only for my children and grandchildren’s sake. They have the right not to have a central branch of their already woefully sparse family tree amputated.

      Chapter Three

       An Education (of Sorts)

      My first memory of my education is a Freudian one. I was standing next to a little boy on my first day at what was grandly called ‘nursery school’ but was a corner of the dining room in a neighbour’s house. There was a toy cash register, some Meccano, a doll’s pram accommodating a doll and a dog-eared teddy bear with a tea towel as a coverlet, and a sandpit in the garden, covered by a tarpaulin which was rolled back in the summer to allow ‘messy play’ with buckets and spades and child-sized watering cans. Perhaps there was a roll of blue sugar paper and wax crayons or poster paints to make pictures with, and blunt scissors and squares of coloured sticky paper too, but I don’t remember.

      What I do remember was the willy this little boy fished out of his shorts and directed at the lavatory (or toilet as I was instructed to call it) as a stream of wee arced precisely where it was intended to go. I felt sheer, gut-wrenching penis envy – the functionality, the utility, a body part with the same straightforward application as a garden hose, no more lifting up skirts, pulling down knickers, balancing precariously on cold porcelain rims. I wanted what he had and carefully checked and rechecked my anatomy to see if somewhere I too had such a tap. I had no idea if this was a usual male adjunct, or if this particular child had been singularly blessed – or maybe adapted? And as far as I remember, I never asked, just coveted.

      I One Potato, Two Potatoes . . .

      The postwar government had other educational priorities so, largely for financial reasons but also in the belief that very young children were best at home with their mothers, it discouraged local authorities from investing in pre-school education when so many resources were needed for the provision of secondary schooling following the 1944 Education Act. Indeed, as late as the 1960s, the percentage of children attending nursery schools had barely increased since the 1930s, and where this was provided it was usually as a result of local authority subsidies for underprivileged areas. My nursery was a private one, paid for weekly, I imagine, with a charge that included a mid-morning beaker of milk and a biscuit. It would be pressure from married women wanting to go back to work in the 1960s and 70s that finally led the government to develop systematic pre-school provision for the children of any parent who wanted to make use of it.

      Since I was an only child with no cohabiting playmates, I was СКАЧАТЬ