The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers (27 page)

My dear,
dear
son. I’d imagined so many versions of this encounter over the years, spooled so many movie trailer moments in my head of how I’d be and how he might be and all
the things we’d say to each other. But when it came to it, no words were necessary. There was no time for uncomfortable air-kisses or stilted handshaking, and thoughts of exchanging formal
words of greeting got swept away. We just met in the middle and fell into one another’s arms. As I hugged him, all I could think of was that terrible day at the Crusade of Rescue, and the
kiss I hadn’t been able to place on his cheek. To be able to kiss him now felt like a miracle.

I don’t know what anyone must have thought had they seen us – a smart middle-aged woman embracing a good-looking young man. But, actually, would they have thought anything? That we
were mother and son was so gloriously evident.

When we separated, both of us were crying.

‘I wasn’t going to do that,’ James said gruffly. ‘I had promised myself I wasn’t going to do that.’

I was already rummaging in my handbag for tissues for us both. ‘I’m so glad you did,’ I replied.

How do you cover thirty years in an afternoon? It’s impossible, but we did our very best to.

‘It was in Turkey,’ James explained, after we’d revisited almost everything in our letters to each other, and more, ‘where that photo I sent you was taken. That was when
I finally made my mind up. I’d spent so long wanting to, really wanting to, and then – well, just failing to find the courage, I guess. I was just too terrified of being told to go
away.’

‘Oh, how I wish,’ I said, ‘how I so wish you could have known how much I longed for that to happen. I can’t tell you how much.’

‘Well, you have Karen to thank,’ he said. ‘She was the one who made it happen. Because that was what
she
said, pretty much. How did I know I’d be rejected? Why was
I so sure you’d turn me away? And she was right. I’d never really thought of it that way – you know, seen it from that standpoint. For all I thought about you, I suppose it had
never occurred to me to see it from a mother’s point of view.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps it needed a woman’s imagination. The way Karen put it to me, it seemed so much less
terrifying. She said that if she put herself in your shoes – you know, given the time we were in then, the social mores, the conventions – she couldn’t imagine having to give a
child up and
not
spending every day after that wondering about them, worrying about them, hoping for a chance to find them again one day.’

‘Three cheers for Karen, then,’ I said. ‘No, make it four!’

‘So I did it right away,’ he went on, ‘before I could chicken out again. Almost the day after we got back I think it must have been, I got on to the Crusade of Rescue. And then
I went there and saw your file, and it was just so incredibly emotional. You know, finding out what they knew about you, that you had two brothers and so on. And that was emotional in itself,
knowing I had these two uncles and wondering if they even knew of my existence. Weird. And I’m so sorry your mother’s gone. I would have liked to meet my grandmother.’

‘I would, too,’ I said, ‘I really would have loved her to meet you. I think knowing we’d found each other would have been so precious to her. I’m sure it would have
gone a long way towards assuaging her guilt.’

He picked up his coffee and drained the cup – we must have been on our fourth now. Plus we’d had prawn sandwiches – what a joy that we both liked prawn sandwiches. We continued
to make all sorts of joyful discoveries about each other and how alike we were in so many little ways.

‘But listen,’ he said now, his expression serious, ‘I really must make it clear to you that I don’t want to disrupt your life. Not for a minute. Not if this, well, you
know, isn’t what you want. I mean, for me, this is the best thing imaginable – meeting you, getting to know you – but I don’t want you to feel pressured or for this to cause
problems within your family. I would hate that. It wouldn’t be fair.’

I could imagine him speaking to Frances Holmes about this. My heart went out to him for saying what must have been such a difficult thing to contemplate: that, having found me, I might want to
put him back in a box marked ‘the past’. ‘James, believe me,’ I said, once again having to reach for tissues. ‘That couldn’t be further from the truth. I have
longed
for this day. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express to you quite how much. Just ask Michael – my husband. He’s known about you all along. And he’s
been
such
a support to me. As have my whole family – both those brothers, especially, and my lovely sisters-in-law. You might not have been with us physically, but you’ve always
still been
with
us, you know, in our hearts. And as for Kate—’

‘
Is
she okay with this? I mean,
really
okay? I can’t wait to meet
her
, but is she really all right? Surely she must feel some resentment about me coming into
your life? It must be difficult for her, especially if she’s been brought up an only child, surely?’

I shook my head. ‘She couldn’t be more excited about meeting you. She can’t wait.’ I told him about having to wave her off before coming to meet him, and how much she had
wished she could be with us instead. ‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘she thinks you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to her – and I mean that. Those were her exact
words.’

He frowned. ‘Oh, dear, I have a lot to live up to, then. I hope I don’t prove to be a massive disappointment!’

We talked for hours, until the lunch crowd had been replaced by the afternoon stragglers, and by the time we started to think about leaving, the early evening gaggles of men in
suits, carrying briefcases, were beginning to congregate too. We were oblivious to them all, our attention wholly on each other.

It was dark when we emerged and walked back to the car park. His car, it turned out, had been a nondescript Vauxhall. ‘Police car,’ he clarified, with a wink, ‘an unmarked one.
But hang on,’ he said then, as we reached my car, which was nearer. ‘I’ve got something for you. I’ll be back in just a tick.’

I watched as he loped off to his car in the darkness, thrilling again at our physical similarities. My son. This was my
son
. I couldn’t stop marvelling at the fact. And as I watched
him go, I was already imagining telling Michael and Katharine – especially Katharine, whom I now needed to get home for. It was getting late, and I couldn’t miss her call. I really
mustn’t, and in France, of course, she’d already be an hour ahead of me.
He’s gorgeous
, I would tell her.
He’s lovely, he’s funny, he’s clever. He
looks like you do! He’ll be a brilliant big brother. You will love him.

He returned carrying something, and as he got closer I could see it was a bouquet of flowers – lilies and gerberas and beautifully fragrant roses. He handed them to me, looking both
pleased as punch and bashful all at once. I loved that. I loved
him
. It felt as natural as breathing. I took the flowers. There was a card tucked within them, which I could see he had
written himself. It read
‘I’m very, very happy for both of us. Yours always, James xxxx
’

For the umpteenth time that day, I was speechless and in tears. How many tears of joy had I shed today, I wondered? And how many more had been shed in wretchedness and sorrow over the years? So
many – too many. And as I hugged him once again, I think he must have known what I was thinking, for he put his lips close to my ear and spoke for both of us.

‘Drive safely,’ he whispered, as he kissed me farewell. ‘Now I’ve found you, I don’t want to lose you.’

I
n fairy stories, the traditional way to finish is to reassure the reader that all concerned lived happily ever after. And to date, I’m
pleased to say, that has mostly been true for us, though our story has not been without further bouts of heartache.

Finding someone like Michael to share my life with, having my miracle-baby daughter, being blessed with my gorgeous grandchildren – Katharine’s three little ones and James’s
two. These are the things that really matter in life. Being reunited with my son, after three decades of longing, was also one of the happiest times imaginable.

James and I established a relationship, and a friendship, very quickly. Within days of my meeting him, he brought his fiancée Karen down to stay with us, and Katharine was finally able to
meet the brother she’d always wanted. It was, for all of us, a very happy time. To see such likenesses, to introduce him to his other extended family and to have him count us as part of his
were such enriching and rewarding experiences. Beyond rewarding is how I recall thinking of it at the time.

We were also invited to James and Karen’s wedding. And it was then, perhaps, that I first had to confront the reality of the life James had led that hadn’t included me. Where those
thirty years, in my case, had always been tinged with the continuing pain of his absence, he had felt no such lack; at least not until he’d grown into a teenager and had begun to explore his
feelings about where he’d come from and why.

He’d had a mother and father, a younger sister and a whole coterie of relatives and friends. The only difference between him and any other child of his acquaintance was that there was this
‘other mother’ out there, who had always been a mystery.

Looking back now, I wonder how his adoptive mother must have felt when she heard we had been invited to James’s wedding. It’s an intense enough time emotionally, seeing your child
get married, so for her to have to accommodate as big a thing as James wanting to invite us along too must have been difficult, to say the least.

To help minimise any possible awkwardness on the day, we had already met James’s parents. He had arranged for Michael and me to go to Cambridgeshire to visit them. By now they were both
retired schoolteachers – they’d been quite a bit older than me, obviously – and they couldn’t have been more kind and welcoming. Though James’s father, Michael, had
dark hair, his parents bore no physical similarity to him. I wonder how difficult it must have been for them both to see how much James looked like me. Perhaps not at all – they had, after
all, entered into the adoption process, just as we had as potential parents, with a clear idea of what might lie ahead. Even so, I could readily put myself in their shoes. This was a turning point
in their lives every bit as much as in ours. For me, certainly, it was strange to put faces to the voices that I’d heard all that time ago at the Crusade of Rescue, when I was almost
stupefied by pain and mental anguish.

They’d seen me, they told me, as I’d walked out of the building that afternoon. They’d been in that room, Paul now asleep in his new mother’s arms, when they saw me,
lugging my holdall, trudging down the darkening street. They had wondered, as James’s father commented to me when we met him, how I must have been feeling that day.

But, just as I did, they’d left and got on with their lives, and cherished the son they’d felt so lucky to have been blessed with. Though him wanting to seek me out some day
wasn’t inevitable, they’d never shied away from reminding him where he’d come from, and had made it clear that if he did want to find his birth mother, they would never stand in
his way. James’s journey to find me, even so, had been a long one. Once he’d made the decision – on the day he’d set the date for his wedding to Karen – the first
thing he’d done was tell his parents. As he’d put in his letter, they had never tried to dissuade him, but it had taken a great deal of soul-searching for him to pluck up the
courage.

His fear of rejection by me a second time was too great – and he had reason to suspect that might happen. In 1976, there was a significant change in adoption law. To make it easier for
adopted children to trace their birth parents, they now had the legal right of access to their adoption records. But this was not the only change.

Unbeknown to me, there was another important amendment to the law at around that time. It involved the creation of a new Adoption Register, in which the birth parents of adopted children,
previously only traceable with difficulty, could have their names and current contact details put on file. Once he had decided he felt strong enough to accept whatever he uncovered, it was
naturally to this document that James first turned. Not finding my name on it – as he wouldn’t, since I didn’t even know of its existence – he could only conclude that his
reservations were well founded. To his mind, this was evidence that I was one of the overwhelming majority of birth parents who actively didn’t want to be found.

Having got that far, however, he had a change of heart. The closer he got to finding me, it seemed, the more he wavered about doing so, as all the negative scenarios dominated his thoughts.
Having all but decided to abandon his search, for fear of what he might find, he was persuaded by Karen to carry on. Knowing him as well as she unquestionably did, she knew how troubled he’d
always been about not knowing where he came from and how desperately he needed that missing piece of the jigsaw in place. So, supported by her, he continued his search, finally realising himself
that even if he did get rejected in the end, it was still better than living with the mystery.

By now he had enough information to pursue things on his own. He had a name – Angela Brown – and my parents’ address in Rayleigh. He knew that I’d been a codes
translator, and I had two elder brothers.

It was here that his job as a policemen was to give James a great advantage over many people seeking lost relatives. One other piece of information he had about me was my national insurance
number, as it formed a part of my original records. As a person’s NI number stays with them for life, it’s a good tool, if known, with which to track them down. James was lucky, then;
most people don’t have legal access to such information. The world is full of stories of adopted children spending years trying to find their birth parents, only to be too late and find that
by the time they’ve been found, they’ve passed on.