My autumn holiday in 1998 – the year of my mother’s death – did not prove very restful. It was coloured by the content of the phone message I had received only 36 hours before we set off. Coloured too by the knowledge that we had been through an almost identical episode before. Nothing had been resolved, and nothing confirmed before we left. I spent my fortnight in the sun back in that state of confusion and disquiet I remembered from twenty years before.
It was fortunate, given the circumstances, that I had that good friend who worked as a professional genealogist. With my brother’s blessing, I had decided before leaving on holiday to turn to this friend for advice. Her reaction to the revelation proved helpful to my peace of mind.
Caught up in such a highly charged personal situation, it is tempting to react in a ‘why me’ frame of mind. To see oneself as somehow singled out for a unique emotional shakedown. My friend though, was able to reassure me. Far from being rare, such stories verge on the commonplace. Even the rather crass means of relaying the news was not unfamiliar to her.
So while I had flown off to the Greek islands, my friend and her genealogical colleagues, furnished with the basic details of the persons involved, had set to work. They would discover whether, in truth, my brother and I did have another unknown half-sister, this time the child of our mother. Born before we were even thought of? We presumed so. Born before her marriage to Gilbert? Surely? Before our father came on the scene? Before the War? Before she left home? We would see.
We returned from holiday to find that the genealogists had been busy. Far from being any sort of scam, this half-sister – this other half-sister – was real. Our friend had even spoken to her on the phone and had got a note of her home address so I could write. Meanwhile, a genealogist colleague in England had traced the birth to Newcastle upon Tyne and had got me a copy of the birth certificate. A girl – named Patricia Mary – had been born in the summer of 1941. It verified that my mother was the parent. And so the revelation was confirmed. It was now definite.
Beyond any doubt it was clear that I did have a second half-sister. It seemed like I was beginning to build up a collection.
* * *
Newcastle proved to be the key. My mother’s case was beginning to gel. The northern English city was the hub around which revolved the mystery of that phone message. It was a city, my genealogist friend explained, that was often the first resort of women from north of the border seeking to bury the secret of an unmarried birth. In many of her own cases it had also been the key.
A brace of genealogists, north and south of the border, pieced together at least the first part of the puzzle. My friend had passed on what I had told her to an associate in England, asking for the English records to be searched. This had turned up the address at which my mother was staying at the time of the birth. That done, it was possible to make a check of official records to discover in whose house she had been a temporary resident. We really had no idea where this might have been. Was my mother secreted in a boarding house, fending for herself? Was it a private nursing home or an establishment specifically for unwed mothers? Was she staying with a friend, a landlord, a private home owner? Or, given family connections, with a relative even?
Numerous establishments existed for the care – or at least the secreting away – of unmarried mothers at the time. Ranging from Salvation Army Mother and Baby Homes to Church of England hostels, these could be found throughout the country. General hospitals, of course, continued to admit mothers-to-be – married or not. In fact, during the War, locally-based maternity services had complained that the number of women in the forces falling pregnant and taking up much needed bed space was causing them severe problems; so much so that in 1943 a new care regime was instituted by the Ministry of Health. But at the bottom end of the range, for potentially disgraced, out-of-wedlock mothers, there remained privately run, dubious-sounding hideaways, one of whose ‘matrons’ was even convicted of baby farming as late as the 1960s. In addition to this, the remnants of the workhouse system were still admitting ‘fallen women’ in some local council areas right into the ’40s.
But it seemed obvious that my mother’s social background would have spared her from such indignities. More likely she would have spent time in one of the private nursing homes for professional women that guaranteed comfort and discretion – but for a price. What seemed unlikely, though, was that she would have been in any way in the care of family members, given the inevitability of the scandal attendant on her condition being revealed.
My brother and I were aware of a family link with Newcastle, albeit a distant one. My mother’s cousin, by then in her late eighties and whom we had seen nothing of for twenty years, had her roots in the city. And her late brother, also a cousin, had spent the best part of his life there, living in the same house all his days. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. Perhaps we should have recognised that, in the circumstances, a family would have pulled together. But in some ways it was a relief to discover that the address my mother gave at the time of her daughter’s birth turned out to be that very one – the home of Bea’s late cousin Jack and his wife Netty. It was this cousin, by then a widower, to whom Bea had been particularly close in the last decade of her life. It would seem there was more than just mutual support behind their affection. A shared secret? A hidden past? A small domestic conspiracy?
By sheer happenstance, my second-cousin Lil was my oldest living relative. Might this close connection mean that Cousin Lil would at least know of Bea’s wartime baby? The War itself meant that Lil might have been anywhere but Newcastle in 1941. She might not even have been in the country. But I had no idea what she had done during the War. There was still a possibility that she would have stayed in her home town. There was still a chance she could throw light on the mystery.
But not for a minute did I suspect precisely how close Lil had been to the circumstances of the birth.
In November of 1998 I wrote to Cousin Lil. Out of the blue. Poor woman. We hadn’t had any contact for upwards of twenty years. Even when we had, such contact had been sporadic. And here I was writing to her with a question dating back to before I was even born. A question centred on a staggering revelation. On a mystery I couldn’t even be certain she was aware of. And one that had prompted a strong desire in another relative to whom I had spoken to keep the whole matter as hidden away and unresolved as it was before.
Of the few other relatives to whom I had mentioned the secret, some had been decidedly cool in their response. There was no understanding of my need to delve further; no seeing that this wasn’t based on prurience but on a desire to somehow relieve my mother of a burden, albeit posthumously. Only one relative had any inkling of what we had discovered, and then only the vaguest notion. Others had no knowledge of it whatsoever. And one, of course, had advised me to keep it all secret as it had been in the past.
How, I wondered, would Lil react?
* * *
I have a few memories of Cousin Lil visiting the family home during my childhood. The fact that she stayed in London, and led a busy professional life meant that, as with so many of my extended family, I saw little of her as a child. A retired professional pianist, she had made her living latterly as a music teacher in a girls’ school in Kensington. She had been an acclaimed classical recitalist and sometime composer before the War, frequently broadcasting to the Home Nations and the Empire. In line with the formality of the day, whatever might be the hour, BBC regulations had required her to wear full evening dress. This regardless of the fact that she was on the radio – or wireless, as it was universally known then – and out of sight to all but the studio engineers. Her career had also taken her all over the country and even abroad to give solo recitals and perform concertos with leading orchestras. She had been in the WRNS for the duration of the War, Lil told me later, and, once peace was declared, had not been able to regain sufficient technique to return to the concert platform.
‘Mr Hitler put paid to that career – like so many others,’ she told me years later, ‘but at least I survived.’
My strongest memory of Cousin Lil had been of a visit she made to the family home in Edinburgh when I had just entered my teens. At that time, I was an enthusiast for the canon of nineteenth century popular classics, one particular favourite being the Grieg piano concerto. The prospect of her visit – given her former profession – excited me greatly. I can remember asking her to play a section of the Grieg on the beat-up piano my parents kept in the study – the same one on which my uncle vamped out show tunes when he visited. The last use I’d made of the piano was to hide in its interior the James Bond paperbacks I was reading when I was supposed to be swotting for my school exams. But despite the all too apparent poor quality of the piano, Cousin Lil stoutly agreed to my request and the opening bars of a favourite concerto, live in my own home, thrilled my imagination.
But Lil fades from my life after that. Apart from her brief appearance at my brother’s wedding in the late ’70s, I had seen nothing of her on reaching adulthood. Happily for me, when we met again the following year after our exchange of letters, Lil proved to be someone with whom I shared many interests. She had even published a few poems in her youth. And she could recall that visit which had been so memorable to me at the start of my teens. She even remembered playing those few bars of the Grieg.
* * *
It didn’t take Lil long to respond to my letter. On receipt of her reply, only four days later, it was immediately clear why. ‘Poor woman,’ I had thought, thinking of her possible alarm at the contents of my letter. Much poorer, though, for the burden she explained she had been bound to carry for over fifty years.
Your letter yesterday came as a shock, bringing back so vividly the past, but I am very glad you wrote to me. I have kept this secret faithfully ever since. Yes, you do indeed have a half-sister – I doubt I can be of much help but at least I can give you the facts as I knew them personally which, if nothing else, is perhaps better than cold statistics on paper. All this must have come as a shock to you but to Bea it was the past and I’m sure she never expected it would come to light, nobody knowing except Jack, Netty and me and not one of us ever spoke of it to anybody.
Far from knowing only a few vague details of the mystery and being able to flesh it out a bit as I’d hoped, Cousin Lil astonished me with what she said next. She had actually encountered the baby, the new born Patricia Mary, as she had been named by her mother – my mother – in the early years of the War.
And so the story came out. My grandmother, Lil’s Aunt Emily, had written to her early in 1941. She had been, as Lil explained in her letter, terribly upset to discover her daughter had fallen pregnant. This was nothing less than an out-and-out scandal according to the standards of the day. As Lil said:
You’ll understand, I’m sure, the older generation at that time saw things very differently and Aunt Emily asked me to destroy her letter and to tell nobody – not even my own father. I have often wondered through the years about that lovely baby but Aunt Emily had made me promise to say nothing to anybody, ever – a promise I have kept. As far as I know, no Edinburgh relations ever knew anything at all. So many questions remain – and one can only remember the feelings and reactions at the time, so little was ever said. So much was kept from us.
This was all particularly scandalous in the context of my mother’s class and family background. Respectability demanded that it be covered up, as respectability would also demand that no mention be made of it ever again. Whatever the circumstances of her pregnancy, my mother would have been held to be entirely blameworthy – the ‘fallen woman’ of popular imagination. Had her condition been revealed she would have been shunned by ‘polite society’, her family would have been regarded as pariahs and her career would have been finished.
Attitudes to extramarital pregnancy had changed little even by as late as my own adolescence in the so-called ‘swinging sixties’. When my wife and I were married in the early ’70s it was without her parents’ approval. It is significant that nine months had to elapse before there was any renewed parental contact. Clearly the suspicion was that we had ‘had to’ get married. In the years immediately before we met, we had both encountered instances of the stigma evoked by illegitimacy continuing to operate – in my case, a student friend who had been forced to resort to an abortion in order to complete her university course; in my wife’s case, a pregnant student room-mate who was obliged to abandon her degree and give birth in secret. This puts my mother’s predicament in historical context. As late as 1940, the powers that be went so far as to arrest a doctor on obscenity charges for no more than publishing a guide to birth control. And the stories are legion of women of all classes stigmatised, banished from their families, exiled from their homes, or forced into contorted relationships through falsifying a baby’s parenthood. Society was not prepared to countenance anything approaching the more liberal morality that pertains today. It was not really until the ’80s or ’90s that illegitimacy lost its attendant shame. Only then, and only in certain quarters, did unmarried parenthood begin to be socially acceptable.
The baby boomers – the generation born after the War – were brought up in families who generally aspired to a respectable lifestyle. With the return of peace, the desire to conform to the conventional image of a perfect family was extreme. Jane Robinson’s In the Family Way puts this across emphatically. ‘Social reconstruction’ she says, wasn’t simply a case of restoring public services, it had ‘moral implications’ as well. A shiny new post-war country was on the make with a ‘bright new public face’, populated by ‘hygienic-looking husbands’ and wives decked out in ‘hand-knitted woollies and tweeds’. Everything was to be back to normal – but some sort of idealised normal handed down from on high.
In the ’50s, and even the ’60s, any idea that physical urges had not been held in check by convention needed to be hidden at all costs. As Jenny Diski points out in her cultural commentary The Sixties, it was essential that the body was under ‘the strict control of the civilized mind’. Shame and embarrassment – ‘the great weapons’, Diski calls them – were constantly brought into play to achieve this end. The mores of the time dictated that it was nothing short of a disgrace to become pregnant outside of, or even prior to, marriage. It was far more important to hide any pregnancy than to acknowledge it. The remedies were there if one looked – ‘shotgun weddings’ with a reluctant groom ‘marched to the altar’; grandparents transposed into parents, with the actual mother in the role of elder sister; babies abandoned in hospital doorways or church steps; shady operatives able to ‘get rid’ of unwanted babies. It was the time portrayed in the Mike Leigh film Vera Drake, the time of the ‘wise woman’ who looked after girls ‘in trouble’ and the last resort of the backstreet abortionist. Small wonder then, that a whole generation previous to this, my mother’s condition caused nothing less than panic on the part of my grandmother.
In that letter, her Aunt Emily had explained the state of affairs to Cousin Lil. She told her that she was arranging for her daughter Beattie to travel down to Newcastle before the pregnancy became obvious. She explained that she had asked Lil’s brother and sister-in-law to put her up for the duration. My grandmother went on to swear Lil to complete and absolute secrecy. No-one – particularly of the older generation – was ever to find out about this disgrace.
Thickening the plot, my grandmother further explained that my mother’s absence was being ascribed to the prospect of a better job. The story given out was that this meant her working in Newcastle for a while. This was an entirely plausible circumstance with all the shifting about of personnel necessitated by the War. As my mother was working in Edinburgh for the government Air Ministry at the time, she would already have been forbidden, or at least discouraged, from talking about her work to anyone. Those ‘careless talk costs lives’ posters spring to mind. It is unlikely in the extreme that anyone would have been irresponsible enough to probe her for details of this new post or question her about the nature of this special job south of the border.
Had anybody tried this with any wartime official worker, a simple ‘mum’s the word’ would have been the general response.
‘It’s classified. I need to keep it under my hat,’ from Bea would have done the trick in such an event.
Lil went on to fill in a few more details of my mother’s time in Newcastle in what proved to be the first of many letters.
Bea came to stay with my brother, Jack and his wife, Netty, at his home in Gosforth and they took care of her for several months and made arrangements for her to go into hospital when the baby was due. In spite of everything, Bea was happy with Jack and Netty and they, I assure you, did all they could for her. Bea went back to Jack’s on leaving hospital and stayed with them a few weeks before finally going home to Edinburgh. She was her old self when we three eventually saw her off at Newcastle, not knowing then to what was to be a much happier life with your dad and her family-to-be.
It is easy, though, to imagine the difficulties my mother must have been under, even removed a hundred miles to the south. Despite the rise in births out of wedlock during the War, I suspect she would have worn a fake wedding ring and used an alias to conceal her true status. As so many women’s husbands were away in the services, a woman alone and pregnant would have caused little or no speculation. And it is equally likely that any who did suspect would have been indulgent, given the desperation of the times.
The subterfuge was made more awkward by the stringent level of secrecy Lil was sworn to by her Aunt Emily. She was not even able to tell her own father about the situation. The fact that he also lived in Newcastle, only a few streets away from Lil’s brother’s home, made things even more fraught. Fortunately, it was her brother’s habit to visit his father at the latter’s house, rather than vice versa. So nothing was uncovered. And Bea was able to spend some time with Lil herself who goes on:
I was in the Wrens, but serving as a ‘plotter’ in Newcastle and saw Bea often at Jack’s. If not on watch, I would meet her in town at times and we’d go places together. As I remember, the hospital at that time was called the General and was in Rye Hill. But it wasn’t too difficult to get to and I visited Bea there a few times.
But how would Lil and my mother have coped when out and about? Lil recounted how they had had to duck into shop doorways or back alleys in the city centre if ever they saw her father approaching in the distance. It’s astonishing they even risked leaving the house, especially as she told me there were a number of near misses when he hove into view. But their luck held and an encounter was avoided. It would all have been very tense – adding to the tenseness of wartime. But any assessment of risk would have been coloured by the dangers of living in a city that was being regularly threatened by bombs.
Thus was Bea looked after in secret by her Cousin Jack and his wife Netty until it was time for her confinement. All the arrangements for her admission to hospital for the birth were made on her behalf by this cousin. My grandmother had made a good choice in her confidants.
* * *
The baby was born in high summer, a birth Cousin Lil was prevented from ever revealing by the promise she had made to her Aunt Emily. Obviously, she could have discussed the secret with her brother and sister-in-law in later years. She could also have done so in private moments with my mother. But, this is to discount the attitudes of the time, and the need to be ever vigilant in maintaining appearances. My guess is that it was never even spoken of again. It had never taken place, being the implication. All Bea told Lil was that the baby was being adopted direct from the hospital. That was an end to the matter.
‘She’ll be going to a new life, well and happy,’ she had said to Lil at the time. The break would be final.
Taking a Letter
The best upper sets do it
Cole Porter
Missing from work, she explained it away
as a family affair. To the family, work was to blame,
wartime posting her south, her stenography skills
just what the doctor ordered.
But not what he said, probing so deep
that it hurt, blaming the thing
on the war, the bad faith it induced. But love
had induced her to do it, just like it said in the song.
Relations all said it was wrong, against every code,
but still booked a hospital bed, kept her hidden
when truth swelled the lie. All those letters
she’d taken, bar one, left unread.
The shorthand for ‘ward’ was for good; for ‘adopted’
it was for best. The letter made it all plain: she won’t see
that baby again. It’s back to pounding the keys.
The bell rings – the line ends. Understood?
Mother and baby were caught in the inevitability Sylvia Plath evokes in the metaphors of her poem ‘Three Women’. The sleeping baby is a small, peaceful island. But the mother is a lone vessel sounding ‘goodbye, goodbye’ on the ship’s klaxon.
Lil closes her thoughts on the adoption by saying, ‘There was nothing else Bea could do – wartime and no way she could keep her.’
* * *
Lil wrote in her letter to me that she never did know the names of the adoptive parents. She had often wondered about how the baby’s life developed. But she was definite in assuring me that she had never broken her promise to my grandmother. She had never revealed the secret to a soul.
That, though, is not the most poignant part of Lil’s letter. Only two days after the birth she had visited my mother.
I went to see Bea in hospital when the baby was born and actually held your little half-sister in my arms when she was two days old. She was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. I loved her for herself and Bea, who would only say she was being adopted. I’m sure it makes no difference to your love and memory of Bea now – it didn’t to us then – or after.
A sentiment that was echoed by every one of the relatives with whom I discussed this revelation. As is by me.
Somewhat strangely, Lil was very clear on one thing. Bea was adamant at that time – underlined in Lil’s letter – that she had no intention of marrying anyone. Had she been deserted or abandoned by the father? Was it a casual wartime affair she immediately regretted? Had she been seduced with a promise of marriage and subsequently betrayed? Whichever it was, Lil’s reporting of these remarks does make my mother sound bitter.
One sentence from Cousin Lil’s letter sums up my mother’s whole position. She was a twenty-seven year old living through the fears and uncertainties of the War. She had, even by that relatively early date in its duration, already lost friends and family members who had been killed arbitrarily and in horrible circumstances. Is it any wonder she seized – as did so many other women at the time – a chance of love or a moment of happiness, even if it might only have been fleeting?
As Lil said, ‘Wartime is very hard – emotions are stronger and one didn’t know if one would ever see tomorrow.’