The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  When the day finally arrived for the governors to take possession of the charges they purportedly valued so highly, little thought was given to how a five-year-old child should be introduced to institutional life. By all accounts, the day of separation from foster families was horrific. The entry into the institution was conducted with total disregard for the sensibilities of the little children parting from what were in some instances loving foster families, leaving behind the joy and contentment of the only homes they had ever known. It must have been heartbreaking for these children to be given up not once but twice before the age of six.

  Accounts show that the impact of that tragic day would remain seared in the memories of foundlings throughout their lifetimes. In the late 1990s, researchers at the University of London’s Thomas Coram Research Unit interviewed twenty-five children who had been raised in the Foundling Hospital between 1900 and 1955; in 2011, the Foundling Museum launched an oral history project, both efforts focused on memorializing the experience of being raised as a foundling. Echoing my mother’s narrative of the day, these experiences were uniformly traumatic. Young children would journey with their foster mothers to the Foundling Hospital, dressed in their Sunday best. Many were not told where they were going or what would happen to them when they arrived. Some were unaware that the woman who had raised them was not actually their mother.

  Where are we going?

  Will I be coming home for supper?

  Will I see you again?

  Their questions would go unanswered. Perhaps it was too painful for the foster mothers, or maybe the matrons who ran the institution looked down upon providing more information than was necessary. Whatever the reason, the parting of a foster mother and her charge seldom amounted to more than a pat on the head and a reminder to be a “good girl” or a “good boy.”

  Then, with the swish of a skirt, she would be gone.

  Admission day for Dorothy started a bit differently. She was anxious and afraid, but unlike the other children, she knew what was going to happen to her. It had been a common occurrence for Louise Vanns to issue words of warning: “You just wait till you get to the Foundling Hospital, my girl!” The smallest infraction would invoke the refrain.

  Dorothy lived in constant fear of the Foundling Hospital. She didn’t know where or what it was, only that it was a terrifying place.

  On May 27, 1937, the day that her foster mother had warned her about finally came. They set off alone, just the two of them, walking into town before boarding a bus from Hadlow to the small village of Berkhamsted, a trip that took more than two hours, longer than Dorothy had ever remembered traveling. The final leg of the trip was by taxi. After driving through Berkhamsted, they started up a steep and narrow lane. The houses thinned and soon gave way to a large field dotted with cedar and beech trees. At the end of the field, the taxi made a sharp left turn and stopped in front of a gate. Identical small brick cottages stood on each side of the driveway, and a man emerged from one to open the gate, allowing the taxi to pass.

  Just beyond the gate was a road that cut through an open field, and Dorothy got a better look at the buildings she had seen from outside the fence. The compound, enclosed by iron railings topped with ornamental spikes, contained regimented rows of two-story brick buildings with evenly spaced white-trimmed windows. The buildings were connected by covered archways held up by smooth concrete columns. At the center of the compound stood an imposing chapel with four tall columns, larger versions of the ones that adorned the walkways, and a steeple that loomed over the road, casting a wide shadow below. As the taxi slowed to make its way around the chapel, Dorothy’s anxiety overwhelmed her, and she vomited on the floor of the car.

  Passing between the two massive pillars that framed the institution’s heavy oak doors did little to calm Dorothy’s fears. None too pleased with the mess that the little girl had made, Louise Vanns showed little emotion as she pushed her charge into a wood-paneled auditorium with arched ceilings. After a cursory goodbye, Louise left, and a woman in a blue dress and white apron told Dorothy to wait with a handful of children who were seated on chairs along a wall. Earlier in the day a coach had crisscrossed the countryside, picking up foundlings who had reached the age of five, unceremoniously depositing them at the Foundling Hospital steps. Dorothy never learned why she’d traveled separately from the other children she joined, sitting shoulder to shoulder, legs dangling over the polished parquet floor. Some passed the time by gazing around the room, mouths agape as they surveyed the expansive arched ceiling; others sat with heads lowered, quietly weeping, terrified by the unfamiliar surroundings.

  Eventually a portly woman with short brown hair and a round puffy face shuffled toward the children. She called out a list of last names.

  From that day forward, no adult would use the first name of a foundling. The children would only be referred to impersonally, as Jones, Smith, or, in Dorothy’s case, Soames.

  “If I call your name, stand up and come with me!” the heavy-set woman bellowed. She steered them through the door and corralled them into a small group.

  “I am Nurse Rance. I’m in charge of you now, and what I say goes,” she snarled. “You’re mine now. Do you understand? Mine!”

  She led them up a flight of stairs and down long corridors that must have seemed endless to the exhausted children. Next they were herded into a washroom, their clothes stripped from their bodies by another unsmiling woman, ordered into tubs two to three at a time, and scrubbed from head to toe. After a thorough washing, they stood naked and wet, some whimpering, others inconsolably sobbing, crying for the women they knew as their mothers. Nurse Rance, oblivious to their plight, took a pair of scissors and, one by one, grabbed each girl and roughly chopped off her hair down to the roots. By the time she was done, nothing but jagged clumps of hair would remain.

  As I stumbled through my mother’s words, I couldn’t help but summon horrible images of shorn prisoners shuffled into steel-barred penitentiaries where they would languish for a lifetime, my jaw locked against descriptions of institutional protocol that would be considered wildly abusive today. There were no hardened criminals at the Foundling Hospital, only innocent children.

  At first I could only read a few pages at a time. Eventually I became consumed, studying the pages over and over, my clients’ projects sitting untouched in my in-box. I was struck by my mother’s insights into what had happened to her all those years ago.

  Our hair and our foster mothers were not our only losses once the iron gates clanged shut behind us. We lost our individuality, our identity, our freedom, our voice and virtually all contact with the outside world.

  Suddenly a memory surfaced, this one from my own life. I was young, not much older than my mother had been when she entered the Foundling Hospital. It was the day of a school dance, and I was nervous, anxious that no boy would notice me. I grasped a pair of scissors and looked into the mirror, thinking of a TV star with the beautiful feathered hair that was all the rage in the 1970s. I began to cut.

  Snip.

  Snip.

  Snip.

  The results were hideous, disastrous. I began to cry as I looked into the mirror, taking in the sloppy and uneven clumps of hair. As the volume of my wails increased, my mother rushed in. It didn’t take long for her to see what I had done, and only a matter of moments before she was on the phone with a local hairdresser.

  It’s an emergency!

  She was insistent; they must help her daughter. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She scooped me up as I continued to sob, distraught at what I had done, and whisked me off to the hairdresser, saving me from the certain judgment of my peers.

  I have few memories of my mother soothing me, easing a pain or hurt. That day, she was my hero.

  All those years ago, there had been no one to comfort Dorothy. Freshly shorn, she was handed a set of clothes, russet brown, a color chosen centuries before, a symbol of her lowly status, a daily reminder of her poverty and shame. She was to w
ear that uniform, in successive sizes, almost every day for years.

  The next stop was the infirmary, where the children would sleep until assigned to a dormitory.

  “Now get in your beds, and I don’t want to hear a peep out of any of you,” Nurse Rance barked. “If you need to go to the lavatory, I will bring you a chamber pot. No one is to get up for any reason, or you’ll have me to reckon with.”

  Dorothy and the other girls dutifully climbed into their beds. As the lights went out overhead and the room darkened, Dorothy could feel her anxiety growing. There was no one to turn to for consolation; the room was suspended in a tense silence, the children too numbed by grief and fear to cry out, not comprehending what had happened to them. But for Dorothy, the anxiety became too intense.

  Sometime in the night, lying awake in the darkness of the strange new place, I called for a chamber pot, not because of a need but, I believe, seeking reassurance, a test to see if I would be taken care of.

  Nurse Rance lumbered through the shadows toward Dorothy and tossed a chamber pot down next to her bed. Dorothy’s bare feet made no sound as they touched the floor and she straddled the porcelain receptacle. She squatted there in the semidarkness, the steely eyes of Nurse Rance glaring down at her, but her body refused to cooperate. She tried again. It was no use. The chamber pot remained empty.

  That was when Dorothy received the answer to the question she had been posing—whether she would be taken care of, what her life would be like at the Foundling Hospital.

  Nurse Rance thrust her fist into Dorothy’s small abdomen. “Don’t you ever do that again!” she roared.

  Dorothy’s eyes were wide open with fear. Breathless, clutching her stomach to ease the pain, she watched the back of Nurse Rance’s stubby legs recede from view.

  The memory of that day haunted my mother, but not because it was the worst day of her childhood. Instead, it was a warning of what was to come. As she would reflect years later, “no time had been lost initiating me into the Foundling Hospital system.”

  8

  Hope

  Bird.

  It took just one missing four-letter word for me to know that my mother had Alzheimer’s.

  We were having lunch in the main dining room at the Beach and Tennis Club in Pebble Beach. Members paid thousands of dollars for the privilege of dining on garlic-roasted artichokes and freshly harvested Dungeness crab legs while gazing out the panoramic twenty-foot windows that overlooked Carmel Bay and the seventeenth hole of Pebble Beach’s famous golf course.

  My parents and I had come to a certain unspoken truce. I agreed to come home once a year, and they agreed to complain a bit less about my indifference. As usual, conversation between the three of us was a struggle, so we passed the time studying the menu or looking out into the bay, searching for a seal or an otter that might be frolicking among the kelp forests that grew just off the jagged shoreline.

  As the waiter took our order, my mother began pointing out the tall windows as if to alert us to something interesting that we needed to see.

  “Look over there, see, it’s a . . . it’s a . . .”

  “What is it?” my father asked.

  “See right there, it is that thing, over the water.”

  “Mom, there are a lot of things to look at out there. What are you pointing at?” I asked.

  The waiter looked at her and then at us, unsure of how to proceed. She continued to point, her brow furrowed as her frustration increased.

  “What is it, Mom, a seal?” She shook her head. “An otter?” I watched her as she continued to struggle, as if the word she was looking for was just on the tip of her tongue.

  “Is it a bird?”

  I could see a vague look of recognition cross her face. “Yes, yes, that’s it. It was what you said. It was flying.”

  “A bird?” I repeated.

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “That.”

  The word bird was no longer part of my mother’s vocabulary.

  Other words soon followed.

  Lettuce.

  Plate.

  Telephone.

  Next were numbers, and then concepts. Soon after the bird incident, we were in a small café grabbing a snack to tide us over as we were waiting for my father. I looked into my wallet to see if I had enough cash, and my mother looked at the bills in my hand quizzically. She pointed.

  “What is that for? It’s that thing, what is it, that you use for . . .,” my mother stammered.

  “Are you asking how much money I have?” I responded. It hadn’t occurred to me that her question was more basic.

  “No, that, what is it? I think that, well it must be, I have seen it before, I think . . .” She continued to talk about what was in my hands in garbled sentences.

  “Money? Is that your question? Is this money?” I held up my hand. She stared at the crumpled green bills without a hint of recognition. “This is money, Mom. Money. We use it to buy things.” Her face remained blank, expressionless.

  As I watched her words and numbers slip away, I knew that it was my last chance to ask her about Dorothy Soames. But it was only a matter of time before she was placed in an Alzheimer’s care facility. By that point, even if I had wanted to know more, it was too late.

  I did want to know more, it turned out. It was during one of my visits to that health-care facility that my curiosity about my mother’s past was initially piqued. My father and I were waiting outside my mother’s room when he casually mentioned that she had never graduated from high school.

  I was stunned. “What do you mean?” I peppered him with questions. What about the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she learned to play the piano? Why didn’t you tell me before?

  His mumbled answers only led to more questions. I wondered if it was just an issue of semantics. “Do you mean it was called something different in England?” My father just shrugged, then tilted his head and gave me a small, wry smile, as if he’d shared the punch line of a joke I should have been in on. He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t push, perhaps silenced by years of conditioning that the past was off-limits. And then he too was gone.

  But after I started digging into the details of my mother’s life at the Foundling Hospital, I finally understood. It all seemed so obvious, in hindsight. Of course foundlings didn’t go to the Royal Academy of Music in London; they didn’t get accepted to Oxford or Cambridge; they didn’t attend college, or even high school. My mind raced to my own childhood, the endless stream of lessons and tutors, the anxiety I still felt over the smallest of failures. Suddenly the script had flipped. My mother hadn’t raised me in the image of her childhood, but in a warped, dystopian version of what she imagined a proper British upbringing to be. The reality of her own educational experience had been molded by a tribunal of paternalistic decision-makers two centuries before.

  The governors believed from the outset that raising a child beyond his or her station would be cruel, leading to an overeducated adult too discontented or proud to perform servile tasks or accept the low wages befitting his rank. In 1757, they said as much in the lengthily titled Regulations for Managing the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children: By Order of the Governors of the Said Hospital. The foundlings, the regulations specified, were to:

  learn to undergo, with Contentment, the most servile and laborious Offices; for notwithstanding the Innocence of the Children, yet as they are exposed and abandoned by their Parents, they ought to submit to the lowest Stations, and should not be educated in such a manner as may put them upon a Level with the Children of Parents who have Humanity and Virtue to preserve them, and the Industry to Support them.14

  The fear underlying the purple prose was that educating children conceived in sin would risk undermining the very structure of British society. If they were taught to write and use arithmetic, the foundlings could become bookkeepers and accountants, even clerks. They might one day consider themselves equal to legitimate children. The hierarchy ne
eded to be preserved; it would be unjust to allow a foundling to rise above the children of righteous parents. A local satirical paper captured the sentiment in the 1750s with a few lines of verse:

  The Hospital Foundling came out of thy Brains

  To encourage the Progress of vulgar Amours,

  The breeding of Rogues and th’ increasing of Whores,

  While the Children of honest good Husbands and Wives

  Stand expos’d to Oppression and Want all their lives.15

  The breeding of Rogues and th’ increasing of Whores. The phrase, while satirical in nature, was starkly illustrative of the savage public opinion of illegitimate birth. While the hospital had been sanctioned by a king, its governors had to remain vigilant, careful and deliberate in their choices, ever aware that the obstacles that had almost prevented the opening of the Foundling Hospital could threaten its continued existence.

  They stayed true to their stated objective—to raise children for necessary but lowly service—and that goal was reflected in their regulations. For boys, that meant “making Nets, spinning of Packthread, Twine, and small Cordage” so that they could be sent to “Sea or Husbandry.”16 The girls were also productive, engaging in “common Needlework, Knitting and Spinning; and in the Kitchen, Laundry, and Household-work, in order to make them useful Servants to such proper Persons as may apply for them.”17 No time was wasted, and the foundlings were pushed to be as productive as possible. I came across research that calculated exactly how productive foundling girls had been, based on the number of items produced in a given year. It seemed an odd endeavor to me, this study undertaken by a PhD student from the University of Hertfordshire in 2015 as part of her dissertation, but the results were revealing. For example, just twenty-five foundling girls produced more than 6,400 garments and household linens in a single year, ranging from towels and tablecloths to bibs, aprons, and night caps.