Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (3 page)

There was one question, however, that I felt compelled to ask.

‘Mother,’ I said, ‘is Dad going to come home?’

My mother looked at me in amazement.

‘What a strange question. What do you mean?’

‘I want to know if Dad’s coming home, because his hat and coat are still on the stand in the hall.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear, that’s to let people think there’s a man in the house. You know he’s gone to heaven.’

That might have been part of the truth, but I was sure she felt, too, that as long as his hat and coat were still there, then so was he. For a while I was genuinely uncertain about whether my father had really died; after all, I had neither attended his funeral nor said goodbye.

Like most children, grief was a mystery to me. But I had learned three important lessons about death: when parents died you never talked about them any more; you kept their hat and coat in the hall, and you sang their favourite hymn – ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’ – every Sunday at church.

Many, many things confused me. As the day of my parents’ wedding anniversary approached, I said to one of my sisters, ‘Do I have to go and buy a card for Mum now that Dad’s died?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped. ‘Of course you don’t, there’s nobody to celebrate it with.’

‘There’s me,’ I said.

‘She doesn’t want to celebrate it with you!’

Over the next few months, the foundations continued to crumble. The sudden death of both Dr O’Gorman and my grandfather dealt two powerful blows to the body of our family.

Those next few teenage years remind me of the English weather on an unpredictable early-summer day: a weak sun shines fitfully, but only occasionally pierces the gloom of a dark sky, heavy with threatening clouds. Two generations of my family died during this time, including my mother and grandmother. Both of these losses shook me to the core.

I had made a child’s assumption that because my parents had been a permanent feature of my early years, they would remain as reliable, consistent figures in the future. I had never had reason to see my parents as being on loan to me for a limited but unspecified period. The foundations which I had assumed to be built of solid rock crumbled beneath me like moist sand.

Shortly after my mother’s funeral, one of her longstanding customers innocently asked me in the street, ‘How’s your mother, Margaret?’

‘Oh, she’s fine,’ I replied, hurrying on my way to avoid both embarrassment to her and the possibility that she might feel sorry for me.

I went with my sisters to help clear my family home before it was sold.

‘Mum said that whatever you want here is yours,’ they said. ‘One day, you will have a place of your own – you’ve got to be practical. Anything can be stored.’

‘I don’t want anything,’ I said.

‘Perhaps you don’t today, but later on you will.’

We were standing in the bedroom.

‘Well, I’d like Mother’s scarf,’ I said, spotting it draped over the back of a chair. ‘But that’s all I can cope with now.’

Although I had attended my mother’s funeral, it was simply too much for me to deal with my grandmother’s death. I didn’t appreciate this until I was in one of the funeral cars on my way to the church. When the car stopped, I dashed out and began running as fast as I could.

I ran down to the river, across the suspension bridge where I had spent so much of my childhood, and into our old street. I was drawn to places that had meant a lot to me – familiar places where we had all been happy together. There was too much grief, with too little time to absorb it all. When was it all going to stop? And why was it happening to me?

When I left school at sixteen after passing some of my examinations, I had no definite career plans. I really needed time and space to work out some answers. So many familiar faces and landmarks had disappeared that I had difficulty contemplating the fact that I had a future. The world seemed an absurd place, one where you couldn’t count on much to last for very long. The only thing that offered me solace was classical music: it was a comforting reminder of times spent listening with my parents to concerts on the radio. There were occasions when these memories carried me through difficult times.

My father had instilled in me an aversion to a defeatist approach to any of life’s problems. This seemed even more relevant after his death than during his life. On a material level my life was fairly comfortable. I had a variety of jobs which paid for occasional holidays abroad and a series of small cars, most as unreliable as my father’s. With the passing of time and the healing support of close family and friends, I began to enjoy life again. I felt that I had laid the more painful times in my past to rest.

During my twenties, I felt settled and mature enough to decide upon a career in social work. There were several options to work as a trainee within the Children’s Department of Nottingham City Council and later attend university for professional training.

The hours were long, but I felt totally committed to the people I was working with – whether they were children who’d had to leave home because they were abused, or parents who were unable to care for their children.

The Social Services Department in Nottinghamshire was a close-knit group. We’d work until late and then find a pub still open, talking shop and complaining about the decision-makers. Social work was different back then and I remember during the coal miners’ strike we loaded up our cars and at nine o’clock at night we were still delivering bags of coal to the old and vulnerable.

By my late twenties, I was qualified, married to a fellow social worker, Mervyn Humphreys, and had a baby daughter. As the midwife put Rachel in my arms I looked at Mervyn and said, ‘Please God, don’t let me die until she’s forty!’

‘Whatever do you mean?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want her to be lonely,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t bear to think of her having nowhere to go at Christmas, or not receiving birthday cards from her mum and dad.’

‘But our children will always have somebody,’ Merv said.

‘It’s not that, Merv,’ I said. ‘It’s not having your mum and dad …’

I was one of the first women to take maternity leave in the department, and returned to work with a very young baby. I was part of the new wave of women who were going to have children and continue with their careers.

I worked full time, which sometimes included weekends on emergency duties.

Mervyn and I devoted every spare minute to Rachel and then Ben, who was born in 1980. There was very little energy for anything else. Many people we knew were moving around the country for promotion, better jobs or more money, but Merv and I decided early on that we weren’t going to move our kids from pillar to post and risk disrupting their education. We resolved to stay put in Nottingham.

In those far distant days, a few optimistic souls imagined that the new, all-purpose social services departments would herald a brave new world of exciting opportunities and extra resources. If some of these hopes proved to be illusions, it was certainly not due to a lack of effort on the part of my enthusiastic and dedicated colleagues.

Working with children and families had become perhaps the most important and largest area of social work. It was also, without doubt, the saddest. By the mid-eighties, I had a heavy workload of high-risk cases – children at severe risk of injury or grave neglect if allowed to stay with their families.

If I could help a family stay together, whatever it took, it was worth while; but sometimes there was little choice. There is no social worker who does not feel great sadness when children have to be moved permanently from their families. If we felt any other way, we would be less than human.

I remember having to take a new-born baby from her mother, a woman with severe learning difficulties, who I knew could not possibly have coped. It was the second time I had taken a child from her and it affected me deeply. I was driving away with a colleague holding the baby girl on the back seat of my car and I wondered, What will she think, years from now, about the decisions being made for her? What will she want to know about her mother and father? What will I tell her, if, in the future, she seeks me out and asks me why I took her away from her mother?

These are questions that every social worker asks themselves. This kind of intervention requires enormous compassion and skill because you are dealing with the most fundamental and important aspect of our well-being, our families.

In 1975, a change in the legislation meant that, for the first time, adopted adults had access to their birth certificates – and, in turn, a part of their identity that had been missing. It made me consider the importance of an individual’s identity and of knowing how we define who we really are. It’s an issue that hasn’t been well researched.

I counselled many adults who had been adopted as children and now wished to take advantage of their new rights to information by obtaining their original birth certificates. They faced many new and difficult dilemmas. The most common is feeling torn between the need to find their roots and the fear that the search will upset their adoptive parents. This conflict can create an enormous level of anxiety which can dominate every waking hour.

Although some people avoid this problem by waiting until their adoptive parents have died before researching their family background, there is still nearly always an underlying fear of rejection. What if their birth parents find it difficult to deal with the past? What if they don’t want to be reminded of it?

There were literally thousands of mothers and fathers in Britain who were affected – a large, silent group of people – and from a social-work perspective we had no knowledge of how they would respond to these new developments.

Nationally, there was a reluctance to fund adequate services to cope with these issues, and many social workers had to face the tasks without the necessary training or adjustments to their workload.

In 1984 I decided to establish a small project to explore this area. I thought it would be helpful to bring people together to talk about their experiences of adoption from their different perspectives. I wanted to find out what adoption had meant to them at different stages in their lives.

I put a small ad in the local paper, having no idea if anybody would respond, and eventually received a handful of replies – one from as far away as Surrey. Because it wasn’t an ‘official’ department project, I had no funds and had to arrange meetings outside work hours.

My bosses at Nottinghamshire Social Services were quietly supportive but feared I was stepping into a minefield.

I called the service Triangle, since it was open to all the adult members of the adoption triangle: birth and adoptive parents, as well as adults who had been adopted as children.

We met every fortnight in an attic room in a building shared with other self-help organizations. The furniture was sparse but there were just enough chairs for the seven or eight members who attended the Thursday evening meetings. It was adequate, but cold in winter. However, at least it provided a forum: adoption was one of those vital issues like sex or death which seemed to be rarely discussed in a relaxed atmosphere. We’d sit there with our coats on, deep in debate, until the caretaker asked us politely to leave the building. ‘I don’t know what you talk about in here,’ he used to mutter, ‘but none of you seems to want to go home.’ Sometimes the conversations would continue on the pavement, or in the pub if we finished reasonably early.

The group had been running for two years when, one winter night in 1986, something happened that was to turn my world completely upside down.

My home town boasts many attractive features, but the evening rush-hour traffic is not one of them. Nor, at the unfestive end of December, is the weather. As my car crept slowly across Trent Bridge, thunder rumbled overhead and lightning flashed across the dark sky. By the time I reached the city centre, rain was hammering against the windscreen and the wipers were finding it hard to cope.

I turned up the radio to catch the news headlines. 4 December 1986 was dominated by two major scandals. Admiral James Poindexter had just resigned as the American president’s National Security Adviser, and Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, a member of the National Security Council staff, had been dismissed. President Reagan had been forced to admit that he had been involved in secret negotiations with Iran for eighteen months trying to free American hostages, and that he had authorized the transfer of ‘small amounts’ of arms to Tehran. It had also emerged that ‘Ollie’ North not only made a profit on the deal, but passed it on to the Contra rebels fighting the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua when Congress cut off official US funds. Reagan pronounced: ‘I was not fully informed of one of the activities undertaken in connection with this initiative.’

The second major news item concerned progress in the Spycatcher trial. Sir Robert Armstrong, Britain’s cabinet secretary, had apologized to an Australian court for unintentionally giving misleading evidence. He said that he had been ‘economical with the truth’. Sir Robert was the Government’s chief witness in the action to try to suppress publication of the memoirs of Peter Wright, the former MI5 officer. In a courtroom clash Mr Wright’s lawyer demanded of him, ‘Can any of your evidence be trusted?’ It seemed the case was going badly for Her Majesty’s Government.

I found myself shaking my head in disbelief. Government-sanctioned conspiracies and cover-ups were a long way removed from the everyday life of a forty-something wife, mother and social worker.

I turned off the news and listened to the wipers on the windscreen. My mind drifted back to a letter that had been waiting for me when I got home from work. The envelope bore an Australian stamp which surprised me.

A few weeks earlier I’d received the first letter from Madeleine, a married mother in her forties who lived in Adelaide. She’d heard about the Triangle group from a friend of hers visiting Nottingham, and turned to me for help.

‘I was four years old when I left England,’ she wrote. ‘I was living in a children’s home because my parents were dead, and was put on a boat with other children and sent to Australia. I don’t even know if my name or birthdate are right. All I know for certain is that I once lived in Nottingham.’