Adoption Heartache

Best, Issue 31/03, 5th August 2003

by Nick Brownlee

Every day I hear my baby's cries as she was taken from me
Not so long ago, thousands of unmarried mothers in Britain were holed up in bleak homes and had their babies taken away from them for adoption. No one cared whether the young mums wanted to keep their babies. Now one of these women is helping hundreds of others track down the children they haven't seen since. But, although the successful reunion stories are heart-warming, for some the search to find their long-lost children can sometimes end in heartbreak...

"They snatched my baby away while I was breast-feeding her", says Pat Basquill, 57

When I was just 16, I gave birth to my precious baby girl, and the moment I held her in my arms I knew I'd do anything to protect her. My parents were furious when I'd got pregnant by my boyfriend who was six years older than me, but I was so ignorant I thought that only married women could get pregnant. I was packed off to an unmarried mothers' home in Newcastle and made to feel I'd done something totally shameful. They treated us like scum. I turned 16 there, but another girl said,"You don't have birthdays in hell."
I called my baby Elaine and I was breast-feeding her when two moral welfare workers came into the dorm, on 9 April 1962. She was just nine weeks old. One pinned me down in my chair, while the other one grabbed my baby. Elaine's tiny fingers were entwined in my locket and I was desperately hanging on to her. She was screaming, but they snatched her and walked off. Within an hour, I was on the street with just my overnight bag and a bottle of orange juice they'd given me.
I found a job in a nursing home for a month and was determined to get Elaine back. I felt like a limb had been ripped from my body. My breasts were in agony as my milk was still coming and I longed to feed her. Every time I passed a pram, I peered inside, obsessed with Elaine.
I had no choice but to go back to my parents' house. I wasn't even allowed to mention Elaine's name. To them, she didn't exist. Luckily I soon found a bedsit and worked in a laboratory for a while.

Pat (above right), at 15 years old and seven months pregnant, had no idea
of the pain that was to come.

I had no idea that I was legally entitled to keep my baby. When I tried to find Elaine, the authorities didn't take me seriously. To them, I was a dirty little tart who should have kept her legs together.
As the years passed, there wasn’t a day when I didn't think of my daughter and pray that she was happy. I married a soldier, Keith, at 26, and we had three children Vicky, Cathy and Brian. I never told my family about Elaine. It was like having a shameful secret.
But on Elaine's birthday and the anniversary of the day she was taken away, I'd be out in the garden wailing at 3am. Eventually, Cathy guessed my secret and my family was really supportive. They couldn't believe I'd kept it to myself for so long. When Elaine was 17, I decided to find her. I wanted her to know the truth of who she really was and how much I loved her. All I knew was that she lived in Scotland id been adopted by an RAF family, so I wrote to all the bases but didn't get anywhere.
Then, by coincidence, someone who'd been at the home with me got in touch out of the blue. She told me she'd overheard that my baby had gone to the Highlands and she also knew the family's surname. I hired a woman who specialised in finding missing persons and finally, eight years after I started searching, she traced Elaine and arranged for her to phone me. I was elated, but terrified that she wouldn't get in touch.
One evening Keith answered the telephone and when he said,"It's Elaine," I thought I was going to faint. I instantly felt an overwhelming love, but Elaine - who'd been renamed Julia - sounded distant.
We talked for 20 minutes, but tears rolled down my face as Elaine told me, "I feel no emotional bond with you". As I put the phone down. I knew she didn't want to see me.
We spoke twice more on the phone and she told me she lived with her partner, had no children and was a social worker, which I found really ironic. Cathy went to her house and demanded a photo for me. I couldn't believe it - they looked like twins. But that's the last I heard from Elaine and now it feels like I've lost her twice.
I wanted to help others whose babies had been forcibly adopted, so I set up Trackers International. I run it from a tiny room at home and have a team of 10 to help find the missing children. We've helped more than 1600 mums. But we don't go blundering into people's lives. We have to be sure that the child wants to meet their birth mother.
Not one day goes by when I don't hear Elaine's frantic cries as she was taken away. But helping others gives me something positive out of losing my first-born, and keeps me driven.

"Now I'll never be able to tell my son I love him", says Alice Timpson, 51

Alice Timpson was 16 when she got pregnant by her black boyfriend in 1968. Mixed relationships were frowned on then, so it was a double taboo for Alice to fall pregnant. Her parents took her away from London to a home in Wales, where she gave birth to a son, Jesse, who was taken from her just hours after the birth. Two years later she married her boyfriend, who became a doctor.
"I went to live with my great-aunt as my parents wouldn't have me back," says Alice. "I was told my baby had been adopted, but I wasn't allowed to have any details about where he was. I wasn't even left with a photo of the baby I'd lost, but I thought about him all the time.
"On our 15th wedding anniversary, my great-aunt told me that my son hadn't been adopted as no one wanted a mixed-race baby - he had ended up in a children's home.
"I was devastated. I'd always thought he'd gone to a loving home and the guilt was unbearable.
"We employed a private detective to track him down, but with no success. Then I heard of an organisation called Trackers International - and six weeks later they told me they'd found out about him.
"Tragically, it was too late. Our son had died six years before, aged 17. He'd been alone on the streets and a drug overdose had killed him.
"I was distraught that I'd not been there for him, then angry that I couldn't save him. But gradually, I became reconciled to the fact that I knew where he was and could visit his grave."

"I prayed for a knock on the door", says Marie, 55

After her three-week-old son David* was taken from her, Marie never gave up hope that one day he'd want to find his mother. Her story began when she got pregnant at 21 and her domineering mother forced her to go to an unmarried mothers' home in Liverpool.
"I was only allowed to bathe and feed David once, then he was taken away. I was heartbroken, but one of the nuns at the convent said, "It's best that you don't see him."
"When he was 23 days old, I was told to pack up and leave. They didn't tell me where my baby was or what was going to happen to him. Back at home, no one mentioned him - it was as if he never existed.
"Years passed. I married, had two more children, John*, now 21, and Sarah*, 17. But I always lived in hope that one day there would be a knock on my front door and he'd be standing there, my baby now a man. All the pain and heartache would vanish, all my tears would be happy ones.
"Unfortunately, all my attempts to find him through the Government's contact register and adoption agency failed.
"Then I tried Trackers International and, within three weeks, I got a call saying they'd found David living in America. We talked for two hours on the phone and his voice sounded so familiar. He was married with two young children.
Shortly afterwards, on Christmas Eve last year, there was a knock on the door. David was standing there - he'd decided to surprise me. It was a magical moment. He was just like I'd imagined and I saw so much of myself in his face.
"My dream had come true and it was the happiest day of my life - I had my son back.
My other kids are special to me, too, and now it felt like my family was complete. Now I'm hoping to go out to visit David and his family in the next few months."

* Names have been changed to protect identities.

Warning!

For birth mums tracking down their adopted babies, it's an emotional minefield that can often end in tears, according to counselling expert Phillip Hodson. "You can understand a woman's overwhelming urge to find her baby again, but it can be psychologically destructive for both sides," he says. "The mothers need to come to terms with what has happened to them rather than just hiring a detective agency to find their children. It's usually much less traumatic for the child to track down its birth mother."

Copyright © Patricia Basquill, 2002 - 2008