Authors: Anne Berry
The overriding tone of the advice sheet is critical. It reminds me that prior to 1976 a mother who placed her baby for adoption would be promised an absolutely confidential service, that her desire to remain anonymous would be honoured by the Salvation Army at all costs. It continues to explain the embarrassment and distress the adopted person may bring to their natural parents’ current families, the disruption they may cause to their lives. What about my distress? I ruminate bitterly. What about my desires? What about my rights? Basically it aims to put me off, to discourage me. It reads more like a warning not to advance another step, not to trespass where I am prohibited, or more than likely the four horsemen of the apocalypse might come clip-clopping by.
Distracted, I am behind with preparations for supper. Scrambled eggs may have to suffice. I get up and make myself a consoling cup of coffee, fresh coffee, a dash of cream, double cream, and a spoonful, heaped, of rich golden honey – pure indulgence! And I give Merlin a biscuit dipped in gravy, which he sets about with the relish of a puppy, gazing up at me adoringly, his single good eye asquint. Perhaps I will live and die in ignorance, and perhaps, as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. But for me it feels more akin to hell. Better to know and drop down into the bubbling cauldron, than live with question marks.
I put myself in my real mother’s position. As the dusk creeps up to the windows, I put on a CD, a favourite piece of baroque, Scarlatti. I curl up in the armchair and recall the births of both my children in turn. Gina, a slow painful labour, an episiotomy, a forceps delivery,
and
then my daughter’s cry, watery, as if she had swum up from the depths of the sea. A wave of love that was tidal in its proportions sweeping over me. Tim was a monstrous nine and a half pounds. The placenta had to be manually removed, making me feel remarkably like a cow being delivered by a hardy vet.
‘You really cannot go on having babies of this size,’ the registrar had remonstrated with me in irritation, his green skullcap dotted with sweat – as if I had deliberately conspired to have an enormous baby.
Could I have given either of them up? Could I have handed them over with a few useful tips? She likes to be well swaddled. It makes her feel secure. He’s fond of having his lower back rubbed. It sends him directly to sleep. Try to slow down her feed or she’ll be up for hours with wind. He adores his dummy. Never leave home without it. Could I have disengaged them from my arms and walked away, then picked up the threads of my life and started spinning, as carefree as if they had never been? The truth fell with a resounding clang into my consciousness. For me it would simply have been an impossibility. To cleave us apart would have meant the suspension of my life. No matter where I went or what I did, I would have carried the moment of our parting with me always, ironically like a birthmark. Why did you do it, Bethan? Was there really no other option? Did you want keep me? Or were you raring to be rid of me? And my father, my German father, who was imprisoned in a foreign land, and while death was everywhere set about making a new life with the enemy, what of him?
The rolling wheel of the seasons duly delivers a snip of frost and blue-black afternoons, a stark Christmas fanfare that results in the usual frenetic activity. We dress up in Victorian costume, and serve mince pies with cream or brandy butter and mulled wine in the restaurant. Very popular with the customers. We light candles and sing carols and have a collection for the nearby Wildlife Shelter. On 23 December, as
per
tradition, Henry dresses up as Santa Claus. We have a lucky dip. Token prizes that each year I’m afraid the children will scoff at. But so far I’ve seen nothing but delight illuminating their small faces. Admittedly only the
tinies
toddle forwards. Though I have seen older brothers and sisters looking on with something resembling envy clouding their carefully arranged sophisticated countenance.
We sit, Henry in his crimson suit trimmed with fake fur, me, in a red and green elf costume, in a grotto adjacent to the plant stands. We have decorated it with yards of cotton wool and tinsel. You’d be surprised how popular our Santa is. Some of the children want to know why his moustache and beard are an unconventional cinnamon brown. The explanation he volunteers is that he dyed them because he was getting sick of all that white.
‘Where I live in the North Pole there’s snow everywhere, and you can get bored of it, you know,’ he elaborates with a ho-ho. Boredom is something they can all relate to, and they nod in understanding. Sometimes he lets them tug on his beard to prove that it’s real. He’s been a wonderful father to our two children, and he’ll be a wonderful grandfather in time. Would the German have been a marvellous father to me if he’d had the opportunity? The children descend for lunch on Christmas Day. Gina, who did a BA at Huddersfield University in Human Ecology, is employed by Kirklees County Council. She lives in Meltham in West Yorkshire, with her husband, Nathan. She has recently been promoted to Senior Ranger Officer, supervising nature trails on the Pennine Way. And Tim, who attended Merton College for three years on a course making and repairing musical instruments, now one of a small team in a specialist workshop in Haslemere, is considering retraining as a psychiatric nurse. Music and psychiatry – I have not yet discovered their common ground, and Tim has yet to enlighten me.
Gina and our son-in-law Nathan are staying over. After the ritually
ridiculously
huge lunch, rosy-cheeked with sherry, my daughter and I opt for a walk and a blow in the reviving wintry air. Merlin, whose flesh is weak these days, but whose nose is as sharp as a starling’s beak, hobbles along in our wake. It is one of those winter days that cannot be bettered. We have had light snowfall, and a wintery sun, a ghostly opal suspended low in the sky, kisses a sparkle into the Christmas card scene. The air is bracing, sobering my tipsy-turvy spirit. I feel the dead weight of overindulgence evanesce as my digestion squares up to its onerous task. We are strolling past the open-air theatre, a raised plateau backed by a thatch of fir trees, when Gina returns to a theme I thought she had all but forgotten.
‘Did anything come of the Salvation Army?’ she asks, her tone deceptively offhand. I have told her of recent developments. That I know now that my father was a German prisoner of war who stayed behind on the farm he worked on. It has reawakened Gina’s romantic streak.
‘No. They don’t trace missing family members.’ We both halt and wait for Merlin to catch up. He is panting from his lopsided exertions, his shallow powder-puff breaths melting away as they are forcefully expelled. ‘Well, not in my circumstances anyway.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ erupts my tempestuous daughter, quick to champion my cause.
‘Oh, I’m not sure really,’ I admit lamely. I hunker down to pat Merlin’s head and whisper some encouragement for him to keep going. ‘Possibly it’s the slightly scandalous association they’re referring to. I don’t know.’
‘What rot!’ Gina declares forthrightly. ‘So your mother was unmarried – big deal! It’s an everyday occurrence. And your father was German. The war was over …’
‘Just barely,’ I reply, ‘And back then a child out of wedlock, let alone a child fathered by the enemy …’ I remind her gently. ‘Let’s just say it
wasn
’t considered quite the thing. The letter they sent came with a caution about proceeding.’ I give a dry mirthless laugh. ‘Like a contraindication on a medicine bottle.’
‘Hypocrites,’ Gina mutters under her breath. I stand rubbing my arms. On the move, the cold is refreshing, bracing, but we have been stationary for some minutes. Our extremities are gradually freezing. Neither of us is wearing gloves or a hat, and only Gina has her neck wreathed in a cheerful red and pink wool scarf. My daughter sets a remedial brisk pace, and Merlin and I bring up the rear. The sun is slipping away and with it the festive cheer. ‘Well, damn it, I want to know who my grandparents are!’ Gina’s brow furrows into creases not yet set in lines. ‘There may be important genetic history Tim and I should know about. A blueprint for some mysterious ailment? Huntington’s or Crohn’s disease? We could be carriers, and just not be aware of it. Have you considered that? Does our grandmother have glaucoma, or is there a tendency to conceive twins in the family?’
‘Oh, darling, I’m sure there’s nothing,’ I reassure, catching up and patting her on the shoulder. But my daughter shrugs me off, her corn-gold hair loose and flying about her reddened cheeks. I suddenly realise that she is really upset, that this loss of identity that strikes me down as unexpectedly as an epileptic fit is not solely my selfish preserve. I am not the only relative who wants answers. ‘Gina, what is it?’ I call as she strides ahead. ‘Gina!’ To begin with she feigns deafness, then she whirls around and almost running rushes back to me. Merlin has quite given up and has collapsed on the path, legs splayed inelegantly. I fear I shall have to carry him home.
‘It’s just that … just that it’s as though I’ve come into a story in the middle, and I may never know how it started, how I started.’ She is very nearly in tears, her shoulders quaking with her dry sobs.
‘Oh, darling … darling, I didn’t understand that it mattered so much to you,’ I confess, guilty that I have hoarded my misery and
perhaps
wallowed in it, believing I alone have suffered, I alone have been cheated of a past. I pull her into my arms, and though she puts up superficial resistance, she soon relents.
‘It is far more horrible for you. I know,’ she mumbles into my shoulder. ‘And I didn’t think I was very bothered, not deep down. ‘But now Nathan and I are thinking … well, we are thinking of starting a family.’
‘But Gina that’s wonderful,’ I say into her tangle of hair that smells sweetly of rosemary shampoo.
‘You see that’s when it hit me. The need, like hunger, to give a family to your child, a wide all-encompassing family that will give him or her a real sense of belonging. I don’t want my baby born into a sealed capsule. We’re part of a continuum. Am I making sense? I reckoned … oh I’m being ridiculous.’ Her arms belting my waist lock for a moment, then speedily she detaches herself and regains her composure. Merlin reacts decisively, heaving himself up and rotating through one hundred and eighty degrees, poised for the route home. ‘Granny Pritchard was always such a beast. I know we hardly ever saw her, but she wasn’t cosy the way grannies should be. And Grandpa Pritchard seemed rather strange as well. Gramps and Nanny Ryan were lovely, but because they both died when we were so young we barely got to know them. When you told me you were adopted and that you hadn’t met your real mum, that you didn’t know where she was, I used to dream her up last thing at night. Do you remember when I did that history project on the war back in school?’ I nodded. Now I wanted to cry too. ‘Well, everybody was talking about their grandparents and what they got up to in the war. But I didn’t feel able to ask Granny and Grandpa Pritchard to tell me their experiences. Even on the phone it felt awkward. So I had nothing to contribute, nothing to give. And here it seems like we had this … amazing story in our past – a German soldier and a Welsh girl fell in love, in spite of everything.’ Brightmore
Hall
hoves into view, the lights on the upper floors, where the family lives, shining out into encroaching dark like golden ingots. I sigh at the enormity of the chasm at my back, at my daughter’s back. ‘Please don’t be put off so easily,’ she implores with a sideways look that is my undoing. And as we trudge on I feel utterly torn, divided by love and the lack of it.
Tim is philosophic about the inadequacies of the Salvation Army. He discusses the situation in desultory fashion, in between serenading us with a ballad on a really quite splendid home-made guitar. Before he leaves, he expresses yet again his tenet that many adopted children regret tracing their birth parents. ‘Think on, Ma,’ he advises, giving me a peck on cheek at our cottage door. ‘I know you’re a dog person but look what curiosity did to cats.’ He does up his duffel coat and grins. ‘Dinner was excellent as per usual, Mother dear. Up to your usual standard, though the pudding could have done with more brandy. But now I’m nit-picking. Tea was good too. Your Christmas cake will keep me going for a good couple of hours.’
‘You are incorrigible,’ I say with affection, as he marches off guitar slung over one shoulder, a hand lifted in a backwards wave. Privately, I muse that fear of the unknown was a problem for Tim even as a toddler!
On 1 January, I walk up to Ranmore Church, with Henry at my side. Merlin refused to be lured from his cushion at the fireside. We listen to the bells ringing in the New Year. The chimes are so clear and optimistic, reverberating through the crisp air. I notice that the snowdrops are showing too, thrusting their deceptively delicate heads through the compacted ground. I shall paint them one day, make a watercolour of their pale feistiness. My easel is set up permanently in one of the bedrooms vacated when the children left home. We joke that it is my studio. I have a painting on the go all the time, all seasons. I like to work in differing light. It inspires me as though it is a living
entity
, an artist’s model available continuously if you make allowances for her moods.
I am in the middle of a landscape of the bluebell woods when I make up my mind. Henry pops his head round the door, sucking contemplatively on the stem of his pipe. With the spicy fragrance of his tobacco, a certain calm descends upon me.
My husband takes the pipe from his mouth, cupping the bowl in one hand and holding it aloft. ‘May one be allowed a preview of the great artist’s latest masterpiece,’ he ventures tentatively.
‘Henry, oh Henry! You do talk nonsense,’ I say, glancing back at him, amused.
‘Ah now,’ he continues as if I have flattered him, ‘your perception is accurate to an astonishing degree. I am in point of fact fluent in the complex language of nonsense. It is no small boast either. I will have you know I have been taken as a native of nonsense, the listener completely convinced that it is my natural tongue.’