Killing Karoline

by Sara-Jayne King

  In their bid to become parents, Mum and Dad wrote to nearly a dozen adoption agencies. It was the early seventies and, socially, things were beginning to change. There was no longer such a stigma against unmarried mothers, and the contraceptive pill was readily available. This meant there were considerably fewer babies available for adoption. Eight organisations wrote back saying that their waiting lists were closed, but the Independent Adoption Agency wrote back asking them to fill in a questionnaire.

  The questions included whether they would consider adopting a child with learning difficulties. Dad thought he couldn’t cope with this and Mum thought she couldn’t cope with a child with ongoing physical needs. But they both agreed, believing it to be a good thing, that the colour of a child’s skin made no difference to them.

  Eventually, in 1979, they were approved to adopt. They were initially introduced to George. George’s story is every adopted child’s worst nightmare. As a small boy, he had been adopted by a British couple living in Hong Kong. When, a few years later, the couple had a child of their own, they decided they no longer wanted George and apparently tried to convince him that he didn’t want to live with them. They succeeded and George was bought to England to be put up for adoption again. After a weekend with George, Mum and Dad decided he was not the child for them. I often wonder about George and pray he cannot remember any of this.

  A few months later they were told about another boy, a toddler of eighteen months living in a children’s home on the small Channel Island of Jersey, having been given up by his biological mother, a woman named Margaret. Margaret was a chronic alcoholic with a history of mental health issues, who claimed to have had a fleeting relationship with a Jamaican man, resulting in her becoming pregnant. (Years later we discovered that she had fabricated the story and had no recollection of the father, least of all his country of origin.) She gave her son the name Aaron. She was a big Elvis Presley fan and named him after the The King, Aaron being the singer’s middle name. My parents flew to Jersey to meet and bring Aaron back to their home in Surrey where he would be their son and, later, my brother. They changed his first name to Adam, they say to avoid bullying, but I wonder if, in part, it was also to make him more ‘theirs’.

  At eighteen months, Adam spent the entire flight back to London trying to drink from the gin and tonic my mother had ordered from the air steward. No one realised then that the incident was a precursor to what would follow in the years to come.

  After Adam had been living with my parents for a while, they decided it would be nice if he had a sibling. A sister. It was suggested to them by the social workers that their second child be ‘similar’ to their first. Less contrast, similar ‘challenges’. I asked my mother once what ‘challenges’ they were referring to; ‘Raising non-white children in a white community,’ she said. Strangely, though, none of these ‘challenges’ would ever be discussed in our family. They simply brewed under the surface of the smooth, yet unhelpful veneer of colour-blindness, naïvety, denial and, ultimately, I think, in my parents’ defence, love.

  I once asked my mum if she would ever have married a black man. She replied with an answer that troubled me. She said that she didn’t think she would because they would have nothing in common. I realised then that Mum did not, perhaps could not see who I was outside of being her daughter. Where the colour of my skin had been the very reason I had been given away by Kris, to Mum it was no more than an aesthetic difference between us. And so while we knew we were loved, my parents’ ignorance and inability to acknowledge our skin colour as being crucial to our identities ultimately led to both Adam and I navigating, in isolation and confusion, a painful and self-destructive path to make sense of who we were as individuals and in the world at large.

  By the time my parents adopt me, they are both forty, although my mother, having been born in March, has eight months on my father. I think this is strange; daddies should be older than mummies. That’s just the way it is. Like Tom always chases Jerry and teachers don’t have first names. They’re always Mrs So-and-So, or sometimes Miss So-and-So, but never Sally or Anne or Lucy. Either way, forty is old. Much older than my friends’ mummies, who are all in their mid- to late twenties, maybe early thirties. When I am old enough to be concerned by such things I am embarrassed by Mum’s ‘old-fashioned’ clothes (particularly her disregard of ‘pointy’ heels), her refusal to let us eat McDonald’s (I have my first Big Mac aged twelve at a friend’s birthday outing), or even have sugar in our tea. She is so old fashioned. Only Jessica Hartley-Moore’s mummy is older than mine, and that doesn’t really count because she’s got a much older sister who’s already a grown-up and Jessica was an accident anyway, whatever that means. As a child, I often think to myself that Mummy should have adopted me when she was younger. It would be nice to have a younger mummy, I think. It doesn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t even have been born a few years before! As far as I am concerned, there is no kismet between the time Kris decides to give me up and the time my parents are ready to adopt another child. It’s as if I believe they were somehow given a choice as to when I arrived, as is the case with ‘normal’ babies.

  Not only were Mum and Dad not given a choice as to when I arrived, they certainly weren’t given much notice either. They were asked if they’d like to be considered to adopt a baby girl coming from South Africa only two weeks before I came to live with them and were only told Kris had chosen them from a list of potential parents some 48 hours before they collected me. My mother has described those two days as a frantic rush to acquire all the necessary paraphernalia required for an eight-week-old baby. How she rushed off to buy bottles, baby formula, nappies and baby clothes, having been told I would be arriving with nothing. She loves to tell the story of how none of the clothes she bought me fit, despite them being for a baby zero to three months old. She had to return them and exchange them because I was fat, like a ‘little Michelin Man,’ Mum says.

  I am eight and a half weeks old when they collect me from the adoption agency in Camberwell in South London on 30 September. It is a Tuesday. I am handed over by Kris with just three babygros, a tube of baby cream (my mum still has the pink Johnson & Johnson tube with the swirly blue writing) and a yellow blanket. I often wonder whether those were all the clothes I ever had (perhaps because she knew she wasn’t keeping me, she only bought the bare minimum?) or whether she kept some.

  I bond well with my new parents, am a ‘good’ baby, and Angela and Malcolm are delighted by the new addition to their family, although Mum loves to tell the story of how Dad went into blind panic when, a few days after my arrival, he is literally left holding the baby as my mother announces she is heading to her upholstery class.

  Mum loves to upholster. Most of the things she upholsters are things no one wants any more, cast off by their owners; they are things she has found in junk yards, and at antique fairs and the like. Mum does her best to make them like new again. Not new actually, because she doesn’t make them look exactly like they where when they were new, but rather more to suit her taste. One of the pieces she has worked on at evening class is a Regency-style armchair, which when she found it had been discarded in a hedge covered in ugly black leather. On the seat part, some of the leather has been torn in places and you can see the white foam padding trying to escape. After a few weeks, Mum stuffs the padding back inside and sews a nice new flowery fabric over the tears. The chair is then good enough to be put around the dining table and for years everyone declares what a wonderful job she’s done fixing something most people would have just left to rot in the undergrowth.

  According to my mother, I showed absolutely no sign of distress at being parted from Kris. But while that may have seemed to be the case when I was a baby, years later the distress would rise to the surface in the form of an uncontrollable fear of abandonment, crippling self-doubt, relationship problems and pityingly low self-worth. And these feelings would, in turn, come to manifest in a number of self-destructive behaviours.

 
; People often ask me when I found out I was adopted. They want to know how my parents told me. The question always makes me feel like a curiosity. I know what they’re hoping for – something worthy of a soap opera, a story involving some theatrical revelation, but I don’t have one. To my parents’ credit, I don’t ever remember being told. I just feel as though I’ve always known. The same way I know that fire is hot and that one’s brain is in one’s head and not one’s feet. Interestingly, I often wonder whether they hadn’t told me at such a young age, when I would have worked out for myself that I couldn’t logically be my parents’ biological child. When I was little, ‘adopted’ was never a dirty word in our house. It wasn’t an anything word. It was just a word. We didn’t celebrate it, we didn’t revere it, we didn’t have a special adoption song or a sanctimonious spiel that we trotted out every time it was mentioned. Adopted just meant that because Mummy couldn’t grow a baby, that I didn’t grow in her tummy, I grew in another lady’s tummy and when I was a baby she gave me to Mummy and Daddy. It really was very simple. Plus, I had a book that told me all about it which I read over and over. I could read by the age of three, thanks largely to Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Grover and the other residents of Sesame Street.

  On Sesame Street, there are a couple of kids whose skin is brown like mine. They talk to a scary creature who lives in a dustbin. I close my eyes when he comes on the TV. It is, in part, thanks to Jim Henson and his strange band of Muppet friends that I love to read and one of my favourite books is Jane is Adopted. Because I know I am adopted and because Jane is my middle name, I think it has been written for me. In the book, Jane’s skin is not the same colour as mine and the mummy doesn’t look quite right, but I am prepared to overlook this.

  The pictures in Jane is Adopted show me how it works. A lady with red hair and a smiley face has a big tummy. Then on the next page she is holding a baby. Then she gives the baby to a lady in a green dress and a man with a moustache like Daddy’s. They are smiling too. At the end, there is a little girl sitting on the lap of the lady with the green dress; she is smiling too. Adoption just means lots of smiles and everyone is happy. When I am much, much older, I will write to the author of Jane is Adopted and tell her how much her book meant to me as a child. She will sign a copy and send it back to me, but by then I will know the truth about adoption.

  CHAPTER 5

  Unhappy birthday

  * * *

  1 August 1982

  ‘Am two today!’ I awkwardly hold up two pudgy fingers. ‘That’s this many!’

  The mummy at the door, who is not mine, looks amused. I don’t understand why.

  Because I’m two, other small people – assumed, by virtue of our similar ages, to be my friends – have been invited to my birthday party at our house in the tiny, green-belt village of Tandridge in the South of England. People are here to see me being two and, best of all, give me things. Presents. I have presence of my own already, holding court at the front door, welcoming my guests and their tag-along grown-ups.

  It is summer and my brown skin, browner than usual, having been touched by the sun, is the colour of moderately strong coffee and makes my cherubic arms and legs even more biteable than usual. I am the only brown little girl at my nursery school – in fact the only brown child. Adam is the only brown boy at his school of seventy-five pupils. We both stand out a lot. We say ‘brown’ because that’s what colour our skin is. We say ‘half-caste’ because that is what other people say. We also say ‘gollywog’ because Robertson’s says it on their jam jars and we don’t know any better.

  My hair is a short, but unruly mass of what, according to some, looks like wire wool. I have on a blue summer dress, covered with delicate white-and-yellow stitching that is supposed to look like little daisies. The dress has been made, by hand, by Granny from a pattern she found in a magazine. She does that a lot, Granny. She makes me clothes, because she is from the war and in the war you had to make do and sometimes there weren’t even bananas. The pictures in the magazine show you how to make your own dress, where to cut and where to sew, using your own material. Making your own is better, because then whatever you are making will fit perfectly. Fitting is important. Sometimes things fit. They are snug and comfortable; they become a part of us. But sometimes even things that are new do not mould to us and they occupy an awkward space. In us, they do not find a home or footrest. They twitch uneasily, arching their backs against our outstretched arms and open chests. When things don’t fit, we panic. Terrified of consequences, unfinished pictures, spilling over the edges and blurred lines.

  But when things do fit, it is a moment of deliverance as each atom clicks into its pre-ordained position, finding its way effortlessly, gently, like fingers along a collarbone, like a journey back home. Ultimately, we decide whether something fits or not. We cannot force or manipulate, but we can stroke, encourage, exhale and make space. Sometimes, clothes that you see in the shop, clothes made by someone else, don’t fit properly and they make you uncomfortable. Although the end result is the same, it’s still better to make your own from scratch, rather than taking something off the rack that you might not like as much.

  Because my birthday falls in August, often the hottest month of the year in England, I spend most of my life under the logical impression that I was born in the summer. It becomes a fundamental belief, something I hold on to as a type of validation of who I am, who I always was and who I will always be. The concept grounds me somehow, providing a context for my existence where none, save for a few scribbled notes on a social worker’s pad, exists. In my child’s imagination I create a make-believe memory of my biological mother in the last few weeks of her pregnancy, heavy and sweating, constantly fanning herself against the punishing sun and standing in a garden on a sticky summer evening, belly swollen, desperate for respite from the heat. It is not until I am approaching my thirty-third birthday, and have returned to live in South Africa, the country of my birth, that it strikes me that I am not in fact a summer baby. August, in South Africa, signals the beginning of the end of winter. The realisation hits me one frigid Johannesburg morning in July while preparing to leave for work, wrapping myself up against the crisp pre-dawn bite and watching my breath create misty ghosts in the morning air. Suddenly, something I have held on to my whole life is torn asunder. Although it is not the first time I am forced to reframe my beliefs of how I came to be in the world, it unseats and unsettles me for a long time. Adoption, I have found, is like that. It creates gaps for assumptions, false imaginings and, ultimately, disappointments.

  As a child, my birthday becomes synonymous with end of the school summer term, coordinating my birthday party around friends’ family holidays and being able to swim in Granny’s pool again. I come to equate other things with my birthday too. The annual return of three glorious hours of children’s television programming every morning for two months during the summer. Why Don’t You? is a real favourite. ‘Why don’t you switch off your TV set and do something less boring instead!’ A strange choice of lyrics for the theme tune to a children’s TV show, but we stay glued to the box nonetheless, often for hours afterwards until, one day in complete exasperation at our continued inertia, my mother removes the fuse from the television plug, locks it away in her bedroom and drives off to work, leaving us staring and mute at a purely ornamental television set. My brother Adam becomes my absolute hero that day when he deftly removes the fuse from the kitchen kettle, inserts it in the TV plug and lights up the fool’s lantern again before my mother has even made it out of the driveway.

  Other things that signal the advent of my birthday are getting all sweaty and sticky when strawberry picking (although the magic is taken out of it somewhat the day I realise we must pay for what we have picked, and that we are not simply the beneficiaries of an altruistic fruit magnate) and the sickly sweet smell of rape seed that invades the fields near our house as a shock of bright yellow. Summer is now, and was for me then, my favourite season. Winter feeds my melancholy and c
oaxes my black dog out of hibernation.

  I soon learn that the thing about birthdays is that you are supposed to be happy. Those are just the rules. You must be happy and you must smile and be happy for being happy and, more than anything, be happy for being born. From a young age I understand this notion and do my best to play along. But, despite all the happy and the smiling and the trick candles that relight (even when you think you’ve blown them out for good), I am always plagued by feelings of sadness and despair when my birthday comes around. It becomes 24 hours of unmet expectations and angst and a historical certainty that at some point during the day I will cry. I find a place, somewhere my aching and I can be alone, and I weep. I then feel ashamed by my tears, and my inside voice gives me a brusque talking to and I turn the smile back up to ten again, inhale and blow out the damn candles once and for all. Because actually, for me, having been given up for adoption at just a few weeks old, my birthday doesn’t represent happiness or joy or celebration; it represents loss, rejection and abandonment at the most crucial moment of my life. Of course, at only a couple of months old, I would have had no words to express those feelings, and even later, when the words are there, the deep and profound sadness I feel will be compounded by a sense of shame. Shame, that to the rest of the world I am showing myself to be ‘ungrateful’ for the good fortune that has been bestowed upon me by being so selflessly ‘taken in’ by my adoptive parents. Because, how can one who has been rejected by their mother, their own mother, as a babe in arms, be anything other than the most unlovable, unworthy, unwanted wretch to ever take breath?