Many things have come out of the revelations that prompted this book. Many have come out of the phone message that started me off on this journey through the maze. And many more may yet be to come. But the most important by far, was that an elderly lady approaching her nineties, who had carried another’s secret for all of fifty-seven years, was at last able to unburden herself. My second cousin Lil, the woman in question, emphasised in every letter she sent to me that she had never breathed a word to a soul. She had never raised the matter again, even with anyone who was a party to the secret. A burden indeed.
Such restraint is almost alien to us now; such propriety seen as bizarre. The atmosphere that prevails in the present day is one of rampant disclosure, gushing confession and often toe-curling self-exposure. All this is largely thanks to media advocated prurience, and the online abjuring of privacy. Such a culture may be uncomfortable, its output repellent. The impulse to ‘share’ may result in outpourings of a demeaning, cringe-worthy nature in overwhelming quantities. Its encouragement of anyone with the slightest grievance to assume victim status may be depressing. But the current climate of openness is preferable to the reticence, obfuscation and denial that gave rise to the burden Cousin Lil had to carry for so long.
Of course, she was not the only one. Lil’s brother and sister-in-law were similarly constrained. Both Jack and Netty have passed away with the secret intact. As has my grandmother, who had the same burden to carry. As did my mother’s sister whom, we discovered later, my grandmother had taken into her confidence. It is hardly surprising that she did. As Lil was emphatic that my grandfather had no inkling of my mother’s pregnancy, my grandmother would have needed at least one sympathetic person she could confide in. We know nothing of this sister’s attitude to the situation, but that could be the reason behind what I always sensed was a certain brittleness between my mother and her bookish elder sister. It could be the true reason for the infrequency of our family visits to my aunt and uncle in Glasgow.
Although I never knew my grandfather, I was always told by Mum – a fact reiterated by Lil – that he was a strict disciplinarian. While he was a kindly man, he adhered to Victorian values. In her letters, Lil was certain he would never have been told anything about my mother’s illegitimate pregnancy.
Bea, I’m sure, only told her mother she was pregnant – whether she told her who was responsible, remained their secret, but I think she refused to tell anybody that. I’m sure she never expected it would come to light, nobody else knowing except Jack, Netty and me, and not one of us ever spoke of it to anybody. Aunt Emily likely told [her daughter] Betsy – she must have needed somebody to confide in at that time, I felt, and still do – but she dared not tell [her husband] Uncle John.
Lil felt this was borne out by my grandmother being so frantic when she had written both to her and her brother. Had my grandfather been made aware of the situation, she felt sure that would have resulted in very dire consequences for my mother. This underlines still further the strain everyone was subjected to by this secret. No-one more so than my mother herself, would seem to be the case. But a further disclosure has convinced me that there was more to it than that.
While I was aware I might uncover further family secrets during my research for this memoir, the last thing I expected was to discover one that had direct bearing on my mother’s situation at the time of her illegitimate pregnancy. The first person she told about this pregnancy was her mother, Cousin Lil’s Aunt Emily, my own grandmother. The fact is, Grandma herself had been born illegitimate. This is late evidence I only discovered recently on downloading her marriage certificate. The space labelled ‘name, surname and rank or profession of father’ is left blank, as it was on the birth certificate of my mother’s daughter half a century later. Although the certificate includes the fact that Grandma’s mother had later married – and gives the name of her husband – the conclusion is inescapable.
The shock nature of such a discovery has not completely faded with changes in attitudes over the years. I will admit to a sudden rush of sadness on making this discovery. Not because I felt any differently about my grandmother. But I was saddened in retrospect that the lovely old lady of whom I had been so fond should have had to cope with the shame attached to a situation for which she bore no responsibility. Given the more judgmental social attitudes of the period, her own illegitimacy must have made Grandma absolutely petrified that her husband might discover Bea’s secret.
At the time, illegitimacy was still regarded as evidence of ‘bad blood’, a taint that could – indeed would – be passed down through the generations. Jane Robinson’s book In the Family Way provides plenty of evidence of this. She quotes an 1895 pamphlet – one published well within my grandmother’s lifetime – that suggests ‘children of immoral parents are no less to be shunned and suspected than the children of diseased, deranged, drunken or low-caste parents.’ Thousands of years old, the concept of ‘bad blood’, Robinson shows, implied ‘an inherent defect in the moral and mental faculties of bastards and their mothers.’ My grandmother must have been horribly exercised in case her husband regarded her as having passed on the ‘taint’ of illegitimacy to my mother, leading directly to Bea’s own illegitimate pregnancy. This makes it doubly clear why it had to be concealed from Bea’s father at all costs. And doubly clear what a climate of fear and foreboding the pregnancy must have brought about. A double exposure to social ostracism was a risk Bea’s mother could not countenance.
The secret of Bea’s pregnancy, the birth and subsequent adoption of her baby was more than enough to keep. But my grandmother had also concocted a cover story whose elements had to be kept in play. It would have been necessary to maintain the subterfuge of Bea’s phantom job in Newcastle, the prospects of the even better job it was supposed to lead to, and the reasons for my mother’s subsequent return without appearing to have secured that better job. There were endless possibilities for her to be caught out.
Yet, as Lil said, ‘None of the Edinburgh relatives ever knew.’
It was wartime. There were rules. People were instructed not to make any unnecessary enquiries. And those instructions were obeyed.
It is easy to imagine Bea, or anyone else an enquiry was directed to saying simply, ‘Oh, the job was classified – it’s all very hush-hush.’
This would have satisfied anyone then. And my mother could have breathed a sigh of relief. Her secret would remain intact.
* * *
In the ’90s, we were not so easily fobbed off. Moving on from our shock at the initial revelation, my brother and I were curious. Naturally eager for more details, we were thinking back to the ’70s when we had discovered the first of our now double ration of half-sisters. Getting to grips with the backstory then had helped us in understanding the whole situation, in not holding any grudges or harbouring ill will. We wanted this new story to be equally resolved, or at least to have its details as complete as possible. Principally, we wondered if there was some way we could solve the mystery of who the father was. The birth certificate my genealogist friend had acquired for us was left blank in the space assigned for the father’s name, so we had literally nothing to go on.
On this question, Lil had been unable even to hazard a guess. She had never been told, nor it would seem had anyone else.
I’m sorry I can’t help at all with regard to who the father was and that is probably what you are most anxious to know. Bea never mentioned any names. She would not allow herself to dwell on what had happened, though privately, she must have felt it very much. There is more than we know in all this.
Aware now that my aunt had been a party to the secret, I was able to speak to another cousin, that aunt’s youngest daughter. She too knew nothing of the father’s identity and even less about the secret than I did. Every path we were following led to a dead end in the maze.
Bea had always been a great storyteller and had often spoken about various times in her past, long before she met my father. On occasion she had waxed lyrical about a ‘lovely weekend’ she and her best friend had spent by the seaside with two boyfriends during the War. One, she had recalled, savouring the glamour of it, had been a trumpeter in a dance band. Could this have been the occasion on which Maria was conceived? Had it been, and given the consequences, would she have described that time as ‘lovely’? Given her predicament, and her mother’s reaction to it, that would seem unlikely.
We were still going through Bea’s photos in the aftermath of her recent death, attempting to restore each to its correct era after the mix-up described in my poem ‘Snap Shots’. Bea – or Beattie as she would still have been in most of them – was there in almost every conceivable aspect. Girlish snaps from the ’20s of picnics in the countryside, the names of chums pencilled on the back. School photographs from earlier – sports teams lined up and classmates in uniform – or pictures of her as an infant playing in the garden with her mother in Aberdeen. Snap shots from the ’40s had her dolled up for parties or posing in her swimming costume on the beach, in the company of brothers, cousins and family friends, all familiar, if distant, faces. Group photos of golf parties and tennis tournaments, action shots of badminton in her back garden; portraits on horseback at her uncle’s stables, of riders cantering along the sands at Gullane. Even an enlargement of a press print with her as one of a troop of performers all got up in sailor suits for an ice dance show. All were there.
Amongst these photographs, there were two intriguingly unexplained snaps from around the right time for our purposes. Both showed someone neither my brother nor I recognised. This was a man in army uniform: one snap with him holding a horse by the bridle, another with him alone. But neither had any identification written on the back of the print and he bore no physical resemblance to any of Mum’s family. Could this be her mysterious lover? Neither Cousin Lil, nor any other relative to whom we showed this picture, had any notion of who this man might be – nor did he even look familiar to anyone. Given her attitude to the man responsible for her pregnancy, as later described by Cousin Lil, does it seem credible that she’d have kept his picture? But still…
A few years previously I had taken my mother out for a drive into the hills to the south of Edinburgh. Stopping off in Tweeddale, at the Borders town of Peebles, Bea had asked to have a look at the war memorial. She spent some time there searching for a name. The person she was looking for, she explained – naming someone I had never heard of – was a man she had been very fond of during the War. She had almost been engaged to him, she said, before he was killed, or died of a tropical disease – she told me she couldn’t now remember which it was. A strange thing to have forgotten. At any rate, his name was not on the memorial and the matter was dropped. Never suspecting any of the subsequent revelations, I never thought to ask her more. It was, I now realise, an opportunity missed.
Knowing all that was revealed after my mother’s death, I naturally wondered if the man she had been looking for in Peebles had been the father of her daughter. Had his death been the reason that no marriage had taken place? Remembering the name, I later found this individual’s address in an old city directory from the 1930s. But, not knowing any more, nor able to find out anything else, I had reached another dead end in the labyrinth of possibilities.
* * *
Does all this not amount to the same sort of prurient curiosity I have objected to earlier? I hope not. My brother and I were intrigued and perplexed by the state of affairs. At this stage, we assumed a meeting with our half-sister Maria would eventually take place. Before that, we wished to be in possession of as much of the story as was possible. In addition, I felt that it was only access to the facts – or as many of them as possible – that would set me back on my equilibrium. The whole experience, oddly symmetrical as it was with the revelations of twenty years previously, was worrying. I find my feelings echoed by Terri Apter in The Sister Knot where she suggests that making ‘a claim on my family story is telling me I’m not who I think I am’. This, she goes on to say, can be ‘very disconcerting’. My brother and I were unquestionably both unnerved by the discoveries themselves but also by the uncertainties they presented.
There is another aspect to take into account. Equally naturally, we hoped that the circumstance through which my mother had become pregnant had not been distressing to her in itself. Given her consequent attitude to men, as recounted by Cousin Lil in later letters, we realised it might have been.
Well aware of the romantically charged, hothouse sexuality of wartime, we imagined some sort of ‘Moonlight Serenade’ affair. The allure of the moment would have seen it consummated, all caution abandoned. No-one then knew if they were going to be alive on the morrow. Young couples in their twenties – in love or otherwise – would have been even more conscious of that.
‘Why wait?’ would have been the prevailing thought.
‘We may never meet again. We may never live to see another day,’ was the mood of the moment.
My mother was not alone in this. The increased independence of young women and their detachment from their communities due to war work gave an enormous boost to their sense of personal freedom. The shared danger and the unpredictability of the future was something everyone was prey to. Companionship and mutual support – leading often inexorably to physical relationships – are only to be expected. The huge increase in illegitimate births during wartime speaks for itself. The rates virtually doubled over the six years of the War and in 1945 were almost treble the pre-war rate. While much of this would have resulted from intended husbands failing to survive the War, a large proportion must have been from the very sort of wartime romance or casual affair I’ve evoked.
Had such a romance happened and the worst fate possible befallen my mother’s lover – being killed in action or succumbing to an air raid – she would have been left alone and pregnant with no possibility of marriage, despite what promises might have been made beforehand. Very many women were in that situation at the time. Making the best of the possible scenarios, we hoped that this had been my mother’s position – a predicament brought about by the widely experienced tragedies of war, rather than anything pertaining solely to her actions and whose outcome she would have been forced to ascribe to her own situation. But hoping so does not make it the case. It was equally possible that Bea had been betrayed by some initially plausible man who had made all sorts of promises to her that he had no intention of keeping.
My mother had been single all her adult years. She had lived the life of a career girl in a busy and bustling city. She had numerous friends of both sexes and had told lots of stories of lively and carefree times in their company. She had holidayed apart from her family on numerous occasions: in the Highlands, in the Lake District, in the Channel Islands and once in Switzerland. In private homes and sophisticated hotels around the capital, at dances and ceilidhs on holiday up north, she and her closest friend Joan had been real party girls. She had told many stories of time spent with previous boyfriends: driving through the country in an open sports car singing at the tops of their voices; ice dancing at midnight on Happy Valley Pond to the tunes of a swing combo; swimming in summer at the beaches of East Lothian; and cocktail ‘dos’ at private clubs in the city centre.
Is it likely that she lived a life of innocence until the age of twenty-eight? Is it likely that her falling pregnant was the result of a first encounter? Her many boyfriends and her liberated approach to male company would seem to deny this, as would all of the gay social whirl I’ve just described. Is it not more probable that she had long been discreetly enjoying the sexual freedom of an unattached young woman? Is she not likely to have indulged in affairs and liaisons for at least a number of years?
In the previous chapter I included the poem ‘Clearance’, written when my mother was in the distressing final phase of her long life. It is a piece of writing I considered to be unsettlingly prophetic of the secrets discovered after her death. Of course, I never showed that poem to my mother. But I did show her others – and one in particular.
This was a poem where I tried to capture her in the flower of youth. In it I try to evoke the carefree enjoyment she described experiencing in the period immediately before the War. It was personally dedicated to her and was published in my first collection; the only one Mum lived to see.
Skating on Happy Valley Pond
On nights of chill but little frost
they would flood the tennis courts
allowing a film of ice to form.
A small band played. You danced,
a hand-made dress of turquoise and black
swirling, like dreams, about you.
And came the greater chill,
the harder frost to freeze the pond,
a happy valley opened at your feet.
The chance support of water in a skin
snapped wings upon your heels, gave grace
its romance, space its sporting chance.
A flash of blades, the lifelines
turned across the ice, opposing, crossing,
merging at your will.
And later, when the fires were lit,
you sat between the knees of men and boys,
held briefly in the slow suspense of time.
My mother never appeared to appreciate either the verse or the dedication. This may well be because of her resistance to the lack of rhyme or meter, her view that only moon/June, ‘dum-de-dum’ type verse could claim to be poetry.
But I still wonder whether there might be more to it than that. She seemed to be put out by the poem’s narrative. Did she think I had somehow intuitively ‘blown her cover’, revealed her to be more of a ‘good time girl’ than her later respectability demanded? Might one of these same ‘men and boys’ from her skating parties have been the individual with whom she had had a wartime affair? Could that reference have led her to think that I’d somehow guessed something of her secret – and that its following on from ‘when the fires were lit’, my metaphor for the start of the War, had correctly located that secret in time. Unlikely, but conceivable. Or was she worried that, if she did respond to the content of the poem, she might reveal something that I had no inkling of at the time. That she might say too much, hint at an affair, or more.
What then if such an affair had gone wrong? What if her pregnancy was an ‘unhappy accident’ – the converse of the ‘happy accident’, as she described my own conception, nearly ten years later? Given the mores of the time, she would have expected her lover to stand by her and make the birth legitimate. Had he not ‘done the decent thing’, this alone would have been sufficient to produce antipathy towards him – even a rejection of all men. Lil reports as much in her letter describing Mum’s attitude after the birth.
Bea gave me the impression that she’d be glad never to see the father again. I remember her attitude well because I was worried for her and didn’t quite know what to do. I wanted to comfort her but there was to be no sharing of feelings.
Of the likely scenarios, subsequent letters from Cousin Lil bear out the betrayal theory. She went on, in the course of our correspondence, to point up my mother’s emphatic opposition to marriage and her feelings of bitterness – at the time, that is – towards all men. She had no interest in marrying any man. She had made that clear, in no uncertain terms, to Lil:
I can tell you when Bea said to me she had ‘no intention of being married to anybody’, she was more angry than anything else. She made it plain she wanted no further involvement and marriage was the last consideration – in fact, no consideration. It was not, I’m sure, a passionate war-time affair, but something which happened which Bea, later, devoutly wished had never happened.
This seems to indicate that she had indeed been betrayed – or at least badly let down – either as a result of promises broken or from the failure of the man to stand by his pregnant lover. Other details in Lil’s letters back this up. She talks about my mother exhibiting anger more than any other emotion. She writes of her not wanting to dwell on what had taken place. Had the pregnancy been the result of a casual affair, in which contraception had failed, there would seem to be little reason for the anger. Disappointment, yes; irritation even; but anger at what seems to be all men – there was more in this than a mere ‘mistake’. But there was to be no sharing of feelings, no woman-to-woman empathy. Lil felt sure that Bea very much regretted what had happened. She had made it very clear she never wanted to see her former lover ever again.
* * *
Making her first visit to the maternity ward two days after the birth, Lil had been surprised that the baby was not in the room with her mother. When she asked to see the new-born girl, a nurse was summoned to bring her along from the nursery.
When I held the little one in my arms Bea ignored us both and soon called the nurse to take the baby back. As soon as the nurse had gone, and taken the baby away, Bea started to talk to me of ‘riding again soon if I can get into my habit’ – which I understand perhaps better now.
With the baby gone, Bea was able to focus on other matters with Lil, matters relating to the life she was returning to, rather than to the new-born life her circumstances were forcing her to abandon. Pondering how soon she’d be able to get back to riding, and whether she’d be able to fit into her kit, was no more than a defence mechanism against the heartache she must have been going through – Bea who was to say repeatedly in later life how she had always wanted a daughter.
While Bea’s actions may seem heartless – even cruel – it is clear to me that my mother was doing her best to protect herself emotionally. At least, that’s how we’d describe her actions in contemporary terms. She knew she would never be able to keep the baby – even if she wanted to – without bringing complete social disgrace down on herself and her family. That’s an outcome she would have been unable to contemplate. She would already have made arrangements for the baby to be adopted and knew there was no going back on that. All she was trying to do was ensure as little bonding as was possible took place.
There were three approaches open to mothers in her situation: they could relinquish their babies immediately at birth; or after ten days; or after six weeks. Even though such babies were already destined for adoption, the legal papers could not be signed until those six weeks had elapsed. This could be the reason behind my mother remaining in Newcastle for a period after the birth. But either way, she had chosen the first option and that was that. There are numerous stories of mothers becoming so attached to babies already put up for adoption that they were unable to go through with the process. One such occurrence, returning to an account from Robinson’s In the Family Way, tells of a woman who had taken the same option as my mother but, being shown her baby by mistake three days after giving birth, completely lost her resolve and was unable to part with the child. The adoption agreement could only be signed at that later date to guard against such an eventuality. Bea was clearly steeling herself against any weakening of her resolve.
However, it is clear that Bea did care about her new-born child. In what may be another reason for her protracted stay in Newcastle, she arranged for the baby to be christened before she went to her adoptive family. A sincere, if somewhat literal Christian, and as long as I remember a life-long church goer, my mother would have considered failure to do so a risk to the child’s soul. Those of a non-religious frame of mind may not consider this to be of any real significance. But, having experienced the doctrinal anguish my mother went through when later family members decided against Christian baptisms for their children, I am certain that having baby Patricia Mary christened is paramount proof of her care for her daughter. She mattered to her, even if she was never going to see her again.
* * *
Several years on from this revelation, in the last letter I received from Maria, my half-sister told me that she had known the name of her father all along. Our speculative peering into my mother’s past had been both fruitless and, we now discovered, pointless. The man in question had been born in 1914 and so was roughly a year younger than my mother. His name, as Maria told us, had been included in her adoption certificate. This was a standard arrangement I was not aware of then. As I subsequently discovered, all mothers offering children for adoption were required to complete forms giving the details – if they were able – of the father’s height, weight, eye and hair colour, general health and so on. They were also asked to name the man. Knowing this, Maria had gone so far as to try and trace her father only to discover that he had died in 1980. (That was, coincidentally, at a very similar age to my own father at his death.)
Not a single person in my extended family had ever heard of this man. Given my mother’s attitude as explained in Cousin Lil’s letters, it is probably just as well that no-one had – and even more fortunate that no-one else was a party to his identity, to the information that my mother had had to include on that form. But the fact that he was named in the adoption papers allows me to discount the most unpleasant theory of all. Happily, given she had freely named the father when required, it would seem that my mother was not a victim of any criminal assault.
No, the most plausible conclusion is that my mother succumbed to the highly emotional atmosphere induced by living through the War. At least, that is the story I tell myself. She was involved with a man who was so persuasively silver-tongued as to be irresistible but who, for whatever reason, failed to stand by her when the time came. Either that or, in the worst case scenario I will allow, the man was a ‘bounder’, a ‘cad’ who made her promises of marriage he never had any intention of keeping. But ‘the jigsaw can never, ever be completed,’ says Jackie Kay in Red Dust Road, her own memoir of adoption searches. ‘There will always be missing parts, or the pieces will be too large or clumsy to fit.’
Whichever it was, my mother was very badly let down. She was literally left holding the baby. That this baby went on to have a happy childhood and a stable upbringing with her adoptive family would have been a real consolation to her. To her mother – my mother.