The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers (22 page)

‘Michael,’ I hissed at him, removing the gas and air mouthpiece. ‘You have to get the midwife! The baby’s coming!’

I released his hand and he leapt up and shot through the curtains. I could hear him calling out, like an extra from a
Carry On
film. ‘Nurse! We need a midwife! Where’s the
midwife! We need a midwife!’ I would have smiled but my teeth were now clamped tight together. I knew the drill now. I must
not
push. I must stop myself from pushing. I couldn’t
recall why now, because I was dizzy with the need to, but I knew I must not – not till the nurse came. Thankfully, she was back in moments.

‘Oh, my,’ she declared, as she examined me. She sounded worried. ‘I can see the head! Nurse!’ she bellowed to someone else I couldn’t see. ‘We need to get Mrs
Patrick to the delivery room – NOW!’

I couldn’t have cared less which room I gave birth in. All I knew was that I was about to, whether I, or any of my baby manuals, liked it or not. Nevertheless, my bed and I were rushed out
of the labour ward to the delivery suite, and less than ten minutes later our baby was with us. But then I realised not with
us
, just with
me.
I looked around, confused. Where was
Michael?

‘It’s a girl! A baby girl!’ the midwife told me, delightedly. ‘And, goodness me – would you look at that mop of hair on her!’

Panting and dazed, I looked around for my husband, whom I realised I’d not seen since he’d been running along beside me in the mad panic to get me where they wanted me. What had
happened to him? Was he on the floor, having fainted? And then, just as I was about to ask, the door to the delivery room opened. ‘Oh, Mr Patrick!’ one of the nurses said, seeing him.
‘I’m so sorry. Quick, come in. Come on in and meet your daughter!’

So he did, looking almost as dazed and confused as I was. ‘They shut me out!’ he protested. ‘So I thought I wasn’t allowed in!’ Though there was no annoyance in his
voice as he looked at our baby, just an expression of profound relief. By now they’d cut the cord and she was nestled against my chest. He stood and gazed in apparent wonder at this new life
we’d created. Then he looked back at me. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, grinning now. ‘She looks like she’s done ten rounds with Henry Cooper!’

As he was to confess to me only a couple of days later, it would be 2.30 in the morning before it really sank in for him. While he was driving home to bed along deserted streets, Christmas
lights twinkling everywhere, Johnny Mathis came on the radio singing ‘A Child Is Born’. Michael cried the rest of the way home.

We’d had no preference, of course. All we wanted was a healthy child, but when our baby was born I was secretly so glad we’d been blessed with a daughter. I would
have loved a son equally, but there was always this nagging sense that, for me, a boy might feel like a replacement for Paul, who was now in my mind every moment. We named her Katharine, and I was
shocked at how much like her brother she looked, from the tone of her skin to her cute little features to that same unruly thatch of black hair; both were born on a Sunday, both Sagittarians. I
cherished all these points of connection.

I stayed in hospital for five days, and how different those days were to those I’d spent in the lying-in room at Loreto Convent. Swamped with presents and visitors, and love and attention,
I felt wrapped in a warm bubble of love and gratitude. Here I could properly care for my baby. I could cuddle her at any time I wanted, I could put her to my breast and feed her, I could pick her
up and soothe her when she cried. As the roof in the soon-to-be-demolished nursery was leaking, I had her by my side every minute of every day. Some things were similar – the exhaustion, the
sore boobs, the painful stitches – but the experience of having her couldn’t have been more different. Despite my great joy, it made my heart ache for my little boy, now thirteen years
old, for whom this wonderful start in life had been denied.

As I write, the early days of Katharine’s life are now the blur of fond memories that such a joyous experience should be. I remember those first precious days of just me,
her and Michael, and how we tucked ourselves away, shunning the usual round of Christmas trips and visitors, in order that we could get to know our daughter better.

I remember Boxing Day, and being so keen to sit down and watch
Oliver!
, and waking up just as the closing credits rolled. I recall her little nursery, which we’d decorated together
for her: the wallpaper dotted with red bunnies, the matching curtains, the Italian cot, the cream carpet (so impractical but at the same time so perfect), the tiny clothes, the white cot bumper,
the little mobile.

I recall the presents, including the twenty-three dresses we were sent as gifts for her. It astonished me, the kindness of people I barely knew. Even the waitress in the restaurant where Michael
sometimes had lunch bought Katharine a present – a pink teddy bear, which she still has today.

I remember our lovely pram – solidly coach built and so stately – and how thrilling it was to go out and push it around Tenterden after so many years of seeing other mothers with
other prams, and trying to quell the feeling of desperate longing. I remember how good it felt, now I’d swapped baby-bump for baby, when people wanted to peek in and say hello to our
daughter, and I was finally allowed to be a proud mum.

I particularly recall driving up to Essex to visit my mother and stepfather, and how genuinely thrilled they were to see us. My mother was sixty-nine now, Sam seventy-two, and I knew how much it
meant to her to see me happy.

And I
was
happy now – the happiest I’d been in such a long time. I often wondered: did this mean that God had forgiven me at long last? It certainly felt that, in giving me
this perfect baby daughter, He had decided to give me a second chance. But had He forgiven me sufficiently to answer my prayers? Would He reunite me with her brother one day? I wanted that so very
much, but I could only hope and wait.

And I did wait – for the next seventeen years.

19 January 1994

I
didn’t know anything about it until much later in the day, but there was something about the letter that dropped on the doormat that
morning which stopped Michael dead in his tracks. I was still in bed. He liked to enjoy a quiet five minutes with his newspaper on weekday mornings, so we’d evolved a routine before going to
our respective jobs: he’d bring me up cereal, toast and tea, and one of the newspapers, then return downstairs to eat his own breakfast in the kitchen with the other.

He’d just brought mine up when the postman arrived, and reached the hall as the letter slid through the letterbox. He didn’t know why, but as soon as he saw the unfamiliar
handwriting he had a powerful sense of what it might be about. He turned around then, and made his way back up the stairs, brought it to me and left the bedroom.

Thirty years is a very long time by anyone’s yardstick, so lacking my husband’s impressive intuitive powers, I had no such inkling about what I now held in my hands. Not straight
away, anyway. I had never given up hope that Paul might one day try to find me. On his twenty-first birthday I’d even gone back to St Andrew’s church. I’d prayed so hard that day
that he might find me. But once that birthday was behind us, my hope had begun to fade. It was still there, but with each passing year it lessened. Had he wanted to find me, surely by now he
would
have found me? I knew the law had changed to make the process easier for adopted children; they could now have access to their adoption files. Though knowing that had initially filled
me with hope, as the years following the legislation had passed without contact, it actually made it harder. I could no longer tell myself that he was trying to find me but couldn’t.

Now here in my hands was this ordinary letter: this letter with its unfamiliar handwriting, its London postmark and its air of mystery. I put my tray carefully to one side on the duvet, turned
the letter over and slipped my finger under the envelope’s flap. I’m not even sure what I might have been thinking as I did this, because every detail of those moments is gone now. They
were all swept away in the instant I pulled out the single page inside, opened it out flat and saw the address. For, neatly handwritten in the top right-hand corner, I read the words
73 St
Charles Square, London W10.

People talk lots about hearts skipping beats, don’t they? Or breath being taken away, worlds tilting on their axes, sudden pyrotechnics exploding in the sky . . . I don’t doubt that,
for some, there are moments like these. But I can’t adequately describe the emotion that overcame me when I saw that address.

I read on:

I cried out then, involuntarily. I let out a howl of such magnitude that, seconds later, I could hear Michael bounding back up the stairs.

The paper trembled in my hand now, so I steadied it with my other one. By the time Michael appeared in the doorway – in a matter of seconds – I had homed in on three
of those neatly penned phrases, and rereading them caused tears to spring to my eyes.
All moved on . . . hope you’ll at least . . . even if you don’t wish to meet us . . .
They
swam before me, all of them such perfectly formed letters, all of them joined to create perfectly formed words, all of them gently yet earnestly entreating that I would at least consider the
possibility of getting in touch.

I was now sobbing uncontrollably, as thoughts began to clamour, as I imagined the journey Paul must have made to get to this point. Just how much had it taken for this letter to reach my hands?
It had been so long now – he would be thirty – how hard must it have been for him to make this decision?

To think that he might be waiting somewhere, braced for my rejection, broke my heart. If I could have been granted one wish at that moment it would have been that I could be immediately spirited
to wherever he was, so I could hold him tight, and tell him, that no, no, no,
no
! He need not worry for an instant longer. He needn’t doubt he’d done the right thing. That I had
not
moved on, ever. That he
didn’t
need to hope. That I
did
wish – oh, God, I could not have wished harder! For it was so painful, in that instant of rereading, to
know somewhere out there my child was suffering the agony of not knowing. That he’d searched for me, and found me – though did he even know he
had
yet? No, he didn’t.
Because he had to wait some more, didn’t he? For me to get the message back to him that I
was
here and that I loved him and that I had never once stopped loving him. That he need never
wonder how much ever again.

Still unable to speak for sobbing, having read and reread the letter, I passed it over to Michael. He read through it silently before coming to sit beside me on the bed, putting his arm around
me and holding me close.

‘Hmm, I was right then,’ he said quietly.

Michael counselled, wisely – more than once that day – that I must try not to get overexcited. There were so many potential potholes down this road I was about to
travel, and he was anxious that I set off forewarned. This man – my lost son – was going to be an unknown quantity, a stranger. Suppose we didn’t click? Suppose we didn’t
warm to each other? Suppose the issues he might have about being given up for adoption were so great that we couldn’t get beyond them? There was, Michael also pointed out, every possibility
that his curiosity, once satisfied, would abate. How would I feel if, now he’d tracked me down and knew where he came from, he didn’t want any further communication? But no amount of
wise counsel, however important it was that I absorb it, could stop my brain from fizzing with questions.

‘Oh, what will he look like?’ I wondered both aloud and in my head. ‘What will he sound like? What will he
be
like?’ Would he be studious? Gregarious? Shy? A
jack-the-lad type? Would he wear glasses? Would he be short? Would he be tall? I was so consumed by excitement that I could hardly keep still, and though I kept trying to temper it, and heed
Michael’s cautions, I honestly can’t imagine ever feeling such an intense level of emotion or excitement again.

‘This is the most wonderful news I could have possibly received ever,’ I told Frances Holmes when I was finally able to call her that lunchtime. I had been trying
hard to concentrate on my job at the Town Hall all morning, but had to keep disappearing into the ladies’ loo at regular intervals; I just kept welling up with tears, overcome. I
couldn’t seem to stop it, and the clock couldn’t creep round to 1.00 soon enough. When I got home I was like a woman possessed. I flew through the front door, hustled our golden
retriever, Monty, out through the back into the garden, pulled off my coat and dumped it, even as I rushed to the phone.

There was a pause now – quite a long one. ‘Really?’ she said.

‘Of course!’ I responded, shocked. ‘How could it
not
be?’

Her tone was measured. ‘Then you’re very unusual.’

‘Unusual?’ I was even more shocked. ‘Why?’

‘Because that’s not the response I usually get,’ she explained. ‘That is, if I get one at all. It might seem impossible to imagine but, you know, something like
ninety-eight per cent of all the birth mothers I’m asked to write to don’t wish to be contacted by their child.’