The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  Next I tackled my mother’s visits, not long after I bought my first house in Atlanta. It was a blue-gray Cape Cod fixer-upper with white trim and a Craftsman door. I was instantly drawn to the small cottage, with its dormer windows and curved walkway shaded by a large oak tree. I rehabilitated a swing that the previous owners had hung on a branch, slathering it with thick white paint to mask the weather-worn wood. I lined the walkway, buckled by a particularly large tree root, with purple and pink impatiens. It was my first real adult home, but it needed work. When my parents announced their intention to visit, I asked them to stay in a hotel. I didn’t even have a bed for them, I explained. A few days later a check arrived in the mail, along with a handwritten message from my father:

  Go buy a bed. We will be staying with you.

  When they arrived, my mother surveyed the house, remarking that it was “quaint” and had some “nice features” for those who might prefer “small houses.” She quickly drew a sketch of how I could renovate it, by which she meant make it more grand, a plan that included moving a staircase and knocking down a few walls, a gargantuan and costly task for a house that boasted only about fourteen hundred square feet. My mother dismissed my objection that I couldn’t afford the renovations on my salary.

  A few days into their visit, I came home from work to find that she had rearranged my furniture and gone through my closet. On the kitchen table she had carefully laid out a pile of clothes she deemed in need of repair, a note affixed with a safety pin to each with instructions in her meticulous handwriting: “iron,” “mend the collar,” “replace the third button.” On my winter coat, she indicated a small tear on the inside of the right front pocket. Somehow that was the final straw.

  Now you’re going through my pockets?

  The fight unfolded in the usual manner.

  You ungrateful brat! I was only trying to help!

  As the weekend approached, my parents offered to take me shopping for furniture, to buy me something as a housewarming gift. I found an old oak wardrobe, modest but full of character. It had a dark brown finish, with lighter spots where the stain couldn’t penetrate the wood’s thick knots. The doors were inlaid with simple hand carvings. On one side there was an old-fashioned keyhole with an oil-rubbed bronze key.

  “It’s too rustic,” my mother complained. She had another one in mind. “Elegant and refined,” she said. The armoire argument lasted for days, and my father begged me to give in. Please, it’s not worth it! My life will be hell if you don’t get it! So I gave in. The oversized shiny lacquered armoire sat like a behemoth in my small cottage home until shortly after my mother’s death, fifteen years later, when I gave it away to a friend.

  The armoire remained in my house, but my mother would not. I firmly informed her that she would need to find another place to stay the next time she visited.

  There were repercussions, of course. I was subjected to a relentless stream of commentary on my selfishness, my lack of feeling, how I didn’t care about family. My father wrote me letters begging me to let them stay with me during the next visit. “Please just keep the peace,” he pleaded.

  I never gave in, resolute in keeping my mother at bay, but my father’s words planted deep seeds of self-doubt. When I confided in friends about my troubled relationship with my mother, I came to expect the familiar refrain: But she’s so charming! Or from those who had never even met her: Every mother and daughter fight sometimes. But I know you still love her. After all, she’s your mother!

  I would find few allies; only my closest friends understood my struggles. It shouldn’t have surprised me. My mother had mastered her public persona, delighting those around her, masking what lurked beneath. She was always gracious, and she carried herself with a captivating air of sophistication, her chin slightly raised when she spoke. Her voice was never too loud. Even her laugh seemed refined. Her clothing was simple—linen suits or wool blazers in muted colors, never anything too bright, her outfit accented with a stylish necklace she had picked up at Neiman Marcus or Gump’s.

  My parents’ home was littered with photos of my sister and me at play, holding wildflowers as we leaned casually up against a tree, photos that told the same misleading story. My mother had painstakingly memorialized a curated version of our lives, hiring professional photographers to take pictures of our happy family. At Christmas she sewed dresses made of green-and-red-plaid taffeta for us to wear, creating elaborate sets on our front porch. One year she hired actual live reindeers. I remember being entranced by the animals I had seen only in fairy-tale picture books, but equally terrified of being impaled by their antlers.

  On one occasion prior to our Christmas fight, I attended a lavish party my mother had organized to benefit the Welsh Society, or some other similar cause. The living room had been cleared of its usual furniture, filled instead with round rental tables adorned with white linen tablecloths, silver place settings, and tasteful floral arrangements. I watched as my mother flitted around the room, checking in with guests, my father by her side. I was placed at a table with several older couples I had never met before. When they learned that I was my mother’s daughter, the conversation focused on how “lovely” she was, and how “lucky” her daughter must be.

  I had heard it all before. Everyone thought my mother was lovely, that our house was lovely, that our life was lovely.

  Everyone except me.

  And so, when I was living in Atlanta in my thirties and opened my mailbox to find a large mustard-yellow envelope addressed in my mother’s meticulous handwriting, I already had a sense of what I was going to do.

  Inside was a sheath of papers bundled together with a thick rubber band, with a note addressed to me. I skimmed the contents of the note impatiently, somehow knowing already what the enclosed pages contained. Several years had gone by since she last brought up the subject of her past, when I was living in Nashville and she sent me the letter telling me that she had been a foundling. Unlike that brief note, what I held in my hands was a tome fifty pages long, bound in a spiral fastener with a sheer plastic cover.

  “I’m also enclosing some material that backs up my story,” my mother wrote. “I thought that you, as an attorney, would appreciate that, since it is out of the ordinary.”

  My mother had written a memoir. The first page was a table of contents, complete with a title: Coram Girl. After years of secrecy, of hiding her past from me and my sister, refusing to answer basic questions about her family and upbringing, she wanted me not only to tell about her past but, presumably, to share it with the world.

  I could only assume that my father had read the manuscript and helped her prepare it. It was carefully typed, and I had never seen my mother use a computer or a typewriter. My sister had also received a copy, and she called a few weeks later, asking what I thought. She had skimmed through it, she said; it was “interesting.” But that was the extent of our conversation.

  To my mind it was simply too late. I had no interest in learning about my mother’s past, and I rejected this incursion into my carefully calibrated, semi-motherless existence. And with the last line of her note, my mother unintentionally affirmed the decision I had already made: “I’m grateful and proud that despite my bad parenting you managed to become a remarkable person.”

  I should have welcomed her admission of guilt, since she usually blamed me for our familial strife. It was the only time she had explicitly acknowledged her role in our troubled relationship. Rereading the note decades later, I see it as an apology, a recognition of her failures. But that was not how I saw it then. My mother wasn’t apologizing; she wanted absolution. She wanted to share her tale of woe, in the hopes that I would forgive her, maybe even love her.

  That was something I simply was not prepared to do.

  I wonder now if anything would have been different between us if I hadn’t put the pages back in the envelope and stuffed them into a file. Tucked away in the back of a filing cabinet, the manuscript remained unread; five years passed, then
ten, then twenty. From time to time I thought about it, but it wasn’t until after that second trip to London that I reached back into that file cabinet to extract my mother’s secrets from the past.

  The manuscript was still in the same envelope, and I slowly opened the flap. I held the manuscript at arm’s length at first, as if the words on the pages could reach out and cut me. Slowly my eyes focused on the black print, and I began to read about my mother’s life as a foundling.

  I was accepted by the Foundling Hospital and my mother handed me over at the institution’s London headquarters at 40 Brunswick Square, on March 2, 1932. I was 2 months and one day old. How thankful she must have felt that I was accepted into the renowned and prestigious Foundling Hospital. I think she imagined that I would be exceptionally well cared for. At least now she could go back to Shropshire without the burden of shame the knowledge of an illegitimate child would have brought her. . . . Thus my mother was liberated from her “disgrace” and saved from scandal and scorn, her secret secure—and I am glad of that. For me, the stigma of illegitimacy would remain.

  The voice my mother adopted, that of a calm, reliable narrator in possession of a factual story to impart, wasn’t one I recognized. The words in the typewritten pages I’d set aside so long ago might as well have come from a stranger. The disturbed woman who’d scrawled a name I didn’t recognize on a crumpled piece of paper, over and over again, was nowhere to be found. Also missing from the pages were the aristocratic airs and closely guarded secrets that were my mother’s defining characteristics. In setting down the memories she’d hoped to share with me before she died, my mother gave me the first of many jolts to come.

  7

  Admission Day

  My mother had no recollection of the day she was left with strangers. She didn’t know whether Lena cried or held her two-month-old baby one last time. Instead, her earliest memories were of a woman with an angry face and a stern voice who found fault in her every action.

  Within a short period of time Dorothy Soames, as she would now be known, was sent to the country to be raised by a foster mother paid from the hospital’s coffers. At the age of five, she would be returned to the custody of the Foundling Hospital, to a facility in Berkhamsted on the periphery of London—a place my mother referred to as “a Dickensian institution, without the squalor.”

  Sending young children out to foster families was a practice that had been adopted nearly two centuries before. Like many outmoded customs at the Foundling Hospital, it was initially born of necessity.

  Contrary to its founder’s aims, the hospital’s earliest iteration had failed to stem the tide of infant deaths; in fact, it was common for more than half of those admitted to perish, and mortality rates sometimes exceeded 80 percent. While admission to the Foundling Hospital yielded better odds than the workhouses where infant deaths were almost certain, to increase the chances of survival, the hospital implemented a work-around—babies would be sent to the countryside to be wet-nursed. Only at the age of five would they return to London, once they were safely past the toddler stage and sturdy enough to survive institutional life. While the new approach yielded dismal statistics by modern standards, in the context of the times, the approach was a success—by some estimates, only 39 percent of the foundlings raised in the country died.

  Medical advances over the next two centuries would improve prenatal care and reduce infant mortality rates all over Europe, but sending young children to live in the country—only to cruelly remove them later—remained part of the Foundling Hospital’s protocol, a tradition ingrained in its fabric. Even if improved health outcomes were no longer the point, for many foundlings these first few years with a foster family yielded some psychological benefits. They would begin their lives in bucolic country settings, nurtured by women who raised them as their sons and daughters, allowing them to play in the fields alongside their own children, as brothers and sisters. For these lucky foundlings, memories of their time in the country were filled with happiness, acceptance, and love.

  That wasn’t my mother’s experience.

  I’m not sure that any of the many foster mothers on the Foundling Hospital payroll took in the children for love over money, but I know of many Foundling girls who had loving, nurturing foster homes. I was not so fortunate.

  The Foundling Hospital’s files didn’t contain any clues as to why Louise and Thomas Vanns decided to take in my mother and two other foundlings, both boys. But the family was poor, and money was hard to come by. The Vanns, their son, and the three foundlings lived in a plain, mock-Tudor council house—the British version of public housing—in Hadlow, a small town south of London. Thomas worked as a laborer at a local brewery and later as an estate gardener; Louise, as a seasonal crop picker.

  My mother’s account of Louise Vanns is remarkably sharp. Louise’s black hair was cut just below the chin and pulled back with a pin to one side. When she wasn’t working in the fields, she wore flowered dresses, sometimes with a pinafore. The floral print and bright colors might have looked cheerful on some women, but on Louise the bright clothing only provided contrast to a weary face wrinkled by age and hard work.

  Louise had no kind words for Dorothy. Maybe the hours spent toiling in the fields, raising children, and tending to her husband left her with little energy for love. Thomas Vanns, Dorothy’s foster father, typically had no words at all for his young charge. He was slight of build and quiet, and often wore a traditional flat cap. He spent most of his time at a pub or going to football games. At home he retired to a small front parlor, where he read the newspaper or listened to the radio behind a closed door. The chapter on my mother’s years in foster care is short, and only once does she remember Mr. Vanns showing her any attention:

  I have one special memory of my foster father when he was attentive to me. I had made a miniature rag floor mat, having sewn a few strips of fabric onto another piece of fabric about a foot square. I must have tried to copy a rag rug already in the house. When he came home from work, I asked him to go back out the door and come back in again and step on my mat, which he did with a big smile and exclamation of approval, stepping on it with one foot, which was all it had room for.

  Dorothy had never forgotten that small moment, and the pages that followed told me everything I needed to know about why. It was no wonder the nonevent had been seared into her memory—it was the only act of kindness she would receive until almost a decade later, when the world was at war.

  Though those early years were bereft of love or tenderness, my mother did manage to find some happiness. During crop-picking season, when Louise Vanns worked in the cherry orchards and hop fields, she would bring her foster children along. Dorothy would play with the other children in piles of vines that had been stripped of their hops. Or they would peek into the pungent and dark interior of the oast house—the kiln where hops were dried for brewing—frightening one another with stories of what lurked within. Other times, the children went “scrumping” for apples, mischievously climbing trees and pinching a few before scampering off to a nearby hiding place to eat their loot. One of those children was Isabel Hockley, another foundling who lived a few doors down from the Vanns on Carpenter Lane, and who would be Dorothy’s closest friend during their years at the Foundling Hospital.

  But the bitter transition that awaited them could not be postponed forever. At age five, nurtured or neglected, loved or unloved, every foundling boy or girl would be removed from the care of his or her foster mother and placed under the charge of the joyless administrators of the Foundling Hospital. As with all the rules of the institution, there were to be no exceptions, even when the child had a chance for love.

  It should have surprised no one that the women hired to raise infants, suckle them, nurture them, and watch over them for five years might grow attached to their charges. But during most of the Foundling Hospital’s history, a woman who wanted to raise a foundling as her own would face considerable legal obstacles. Britain didn’t recognize ad
option until 1926, a legislative change attributed to pressure from child rescue organizations following World War I. Adoption was allowed under ancient Roman law but had all but disappeared in western European systems until the early twentieth century, partly due to the fear that the “bad blood” of an illegitimate child could spoil a family’s pedigree. The Catholic Church opposed adoption, not just for illegitimate children but for orphans as well. One historian offered a particularly nefarious reason for the church’s stance—adoption would have allowed childless couples to designate an heir, removing the opportunity for the church to collect their inheritances upon their deaths.

  In the absence of a recognized legal structure, creative arrangements labeled “apprenticeships” or “wardships” were not uncommon, but they failed to bestow the rights typically granted to parents. Practical work-arounds would offer little hope to a foster parent who had grown attached to a charge of the Foundling Hospital, in any case; the governors refused on principle to accept offers to care for a foundling. As a matter of policy, children were to be removed from the care of their foster family no matter the circumstance. The burden on the family would be too great, the governors claimed.

  More likely this stance was motivated by a belief that foundlings needed to be brought up separately from children born of respectable parents, not raised as their equals. The belief that the illegitimate child occupied the lowest echelon of society was so ironclad that it too was written into the hospital rules: foundlings should be often reminded “of the Lowness of their Condition, that they may early imbibe the Principles of Humility and Gratitude to their Benefactors.”13

  It became apparent to me that the governors viewed foundlings as chattel, a commodity to be managed and raised for the benefit of society. It would have been contrary to the true intent of the Foundling Hospital—the aim of providing able-bodied hands for domestic service or war—to allow a foster family to keep a child for themselves. Indeed, these children were quite valuable! The governors were authorized by law to receive funds for the apprenticing of the children: boys were shipped off to captains, bookbinders, or farmers, while girls were sent into household service. Jonas Hanway, a founding governor and a persuasive advocate for the hospital, even quantified their value, meticulously calculating the gain a foundling provided to society—a whopping £176 per child (equating to tens of thousands of US dollars by today’s standards). Even if these young foundlings had a chance to be raised in an atmosphere of love and tenderness, the governors would not allow such valuable assets to be given up easily.