I felt like I was in the middle of a major operation and couldn’t get away from the Battle Axe quickly enough, so I ran to the sluice, only to be reprimanded again.
‘How many times have I had to tell you not to run in the department?’
I was so nervous I couldn’t even find one vomit bowl in the sluice. They were normally always piled up in the corner, but today of all days there were none to be seen. I felt like I was having a panic attack. My heart was racing and I was sweating profusely. I felt in need of a vomit bowl myself. I tried to calm down and took a few slow deep breaths. After a few minutes I went back to face the music.
Back in cubicle two, I discovered that the Irish patient wasn’t vomiting and there was certainly nothing wrong with her vocal cords. The staff nurse appeared to have mellowed slightly when I went back and she was singing, ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary; it’s a long way to go’ with Bridget. I even heard her talking about me in a jovial way, ‘I think Nurse Price has actually gone to Tipperary for that vomit bowl, don’t you?’ At the time I just thought it was her attempt at trying to be sarcastic, but much later I realised that the staff nurse was also Irish and had probably recognised Bridget’s Tipperary accent.
I was sent on my lunch break. I am sure she was losing patience with me and just wanted me out of the way. When I returned there was already another patient in cubicle two and I remember feeling relieved as it was so much quieter. All I wanted to do was finish my shift without getting into any more trouble.
When I first met my mother six years later, and heard her distinctive Tipperary accent and saw her bruised and swollen face, I had a flashback to the woman in cubicle two and realised that my mother was indeed that disruptive drunk. To think she had no idea that I was the daughter she had left at the orphanage many years before. It is upsetting to think that possibly one of the worst days I can ever remember in my nursing career, when I really did need some moral support, my own mother was actually there in cubicle two. She was the woman who nearly choked on her own vomit because of my inexperience of dealing with drunken patients.
By August 1975 I had finished my placement in A & E and was only too glad to be seeing the back of the Battle Axe. To my surprise she actually gave me a good report, but during the rest of my nurse training I had very little involvement with any of the local drunks and avoided the pubs where they hung out.
As I’ve mentioned before, I wasn’t really thinking a lot about my adoption at this time. I was happy, busy studying, and mostly enjoying my placements.
My favourite had been the male surgical ward, especially as I was working with one of my closest friends, Helen. The sister was lovely and she often commented how we brought such laughter to her ward – although at times it also got us into trouble and she would have to separate us, as we got fits of the giggles with the patients.
That in itself could cause problems. The men were usually recovering from some form of abdominal surgery and had stitches, and in those days there were no clips or glue to hold the wound together. Many a time I remember them holding their stomachs and telling us to stop making them laugh as their stitches could burst open. Working on this ward was so much fun. Obviously some of the patients were extremely poorly, but as they started to recover we would do our best to cheer them up.
On one occasion, when I was doing my medication assessment, I asked one of the older patients, who was a little hard of hearing, ‘Have you had your bowels open today?’ Still not understanding what I had said, I showed him this chart where it said ‘B/O’.
He rather abruptly replied, ‘I haven’t got body odour. I had a shower this morning.’
The man in the next bed behind the curtains shouted, ‘Bill, stop making such a fuss. She only wants to know if you’ve had a shit this morning.’
‘Well why didn’t she ask me that in the first place?’ he replied. I ended up with a terrible fit of the giggles.
After completing my training, and working on the new geriatric unit at Dudley Road for nine months, I decided that I needed a change and wanted to gain more experience in another area of nursing. So, early in 1978, I enrolled on a post-natal and neo-natal course for nine months at Sorrento Maternity Hospital in Moseley.
As I was leaving Dudley Road Hospital, I also had to move out of the nurses’ home, which meant moving back to live with my adoptive parents as there was no nurses’ accommodation at Sorrento Hospital.
Carole had got married in 1977. She and her husband had bought an old house, and they lived at Mum’s while doing it up. When I came home, carrying my boxes, Mum told me not to disturb Carole’s husband as he was watching the football in the living room.
I said, ‘Oh, well I’ll just pop my head round the door to say hello.’ But was told, ‘No, no, you go straight upstairs.’ As I walked up to my room, I remember thinking, Nothing’s changed here.
As I was on a course I didn’t have to work shifts, so I was able to drive myself to work each morning. It is strange, but although I hadn’t even started to try to trace my birth mother at that point, it was as if in some way we were always drawn to each other, without either of us realising it.
Unbelievably, for the second time I had to pass by my mother’s house – this time in Balsall Heath, where she would have been living then. Thankfully, I was now in a car and obviously not so vulnerable when driving past what was probably her local pub.
In the afternoon, I usually drove home to Erdington a different way so that I could give my friend a lift home. She sometimes said she felt awful making my journey home so much longer. I always reassured her that it was a much nicer area to drive through and that there were often strange-looking people lurking about in the Balsall Heath area.
By October 1978 I had started working as a district nurse, which is what I had dreamt of doing since talking to Mrs Brewin as a young girl. I always hoped that one day I would be able to do the same job as the district nurse who visited her husband.
I remember she would save newspapers for the nurses, and as a young girl I used to think to myself that they couldn’t be very busy if they had time to be reading the newspaper all day. As a district nurse myself now, working in Stechford in Birmingham, and in Sandwell, I realised that the newspapers were needed to put on the floor when removing soiled bandages. We were always very busy, and certainly didn’t have time to read newspapers! But I soon discovered that I had made the right choice in my career path and had great job satisfaction from it. And it helped me so much when I was finally able to meet my mother.
6
The Search Begins
I met Stephen on 17 February 1976. My friend Christine and I had just given blood and we decided we’d go out for once – after all, the staff had said to drink plenty of fluids (of course, they didn’t mean the fluids we had in mind).
It was a Tuesday night, so after going to a couple of pubs in Birmingham we ended up at the Party Night at the Cedar Club. Everyone was flirting with everyone else and having a great time. The disc jockey said, ‘Ladies, turn to the man on your right and ask him what colour underpants he’s got on?’ So I turned – and Stephen was standing there – I asked him what colour he was wearing, and noticed he had a nice smile. So, when the DJ said, ‘Grab a partner,’ I grabbed him and took him up on stage. There were six couples, and we stood facing each other with a balloon between us. The first couple to put a T-shirt on over the top won a bottle of champagne. Stephen and I won!
We sat down with Christine and her man. Christine was smoking, and Stephen was staring at me, as if weighing me up, waiting for me to do something. I said, ‘I don’t smoke, you know.’
‘Oh that’s good,’ he replied. ‘If you did smoke I wouldn’t go out with you.’
‘What makes you think I want to go out with you anyway?’ I answered back.
We both knew there was an attraction as we went for a taxi later. We arranged to meet a couple of nights after outside Rackham’s. I still have my blood card and the champagne cork from that day.
It became a serious relationship and after two years we decided to tie the knot. Stephen was dependable and caring. We loved each other, but I also felt secure and thought he’d be a good father. I wanted to be part of a normal family, married with my own children. And with Stephen I knew we had a mature relationship.
He was on my side too. When Mum couldn’t come to the engagement party and Carole started making excuses, he was happy to say, ‘Let’s not worry about them, let’s go out for a meal, just us.’
I hadn’t told anyone I was adopted since primary school, and it was when I was busy arranging the wedding in May 1979 that I suddenly realised I hadn’t even told Stephen.
When you get married in a Catholic church, the parish priest needs proof that you have been baptised into that faith. This would normally be a simple enough thing to do but, unsurprisingly, when I asked my adoptive mother for my baptismal certificate she almost had a nervous breakdown. She told me the certificate had been ‘lost’, but that it was nothing for me to worry about and that she would sort it out with the priest.
Instead, my adoptive mother hurried along to the church to give the priest the certificate without my knowledge. What gave her the right to deny me that information about myself?
I tried asking her a few questions about it, how old I was when I was baptised, in which church, and she became very annoyed, bellowing, ‘I knew you were going to be asking too many questions. Will you ever be grateful for what we have done for you? We took you out of the orphanage and gave you a better life, and still you’re not satisfied.’
She really was missing the point. I wasn’t questioning how they had treated me as adoptive parents, it was just a simple question, but she had told so many lies about the circumstances around my adoption and she was terrified that the truth would one day come out.
I really wanted to find out about my origins because I wanted to have a child of my own. I needed to know if there were any hereditary health problems, but in any case it was my human right to be told the truth about my origins. But until I was an adult and took control, it was something I was always denied.
She didn’t even allow me to see the baptismal certificate. In 2010 I received my adoption papers and it was amongst them. Thirty years after my marriage I did finally get to see it.
Of course, I had never been allowed to be open about my adoption, and I almost lived in fear of it becoming public. Then, a few weeks before my wedding, I blurted it out to Stephen. His reaction was surprisingly matter of fact, and I soon realised that it was fine to tell people. It was not a problem! I vividly remember feeling a great sense of relief, the burden I had been carrying with me since my early school years was suddenly lifted. It was a feeling I shall never forget. I realised that being adopted was not something to be ashamed of. I wasn’t a freak, and I wasn’t the only person in the world to have been adopted.
We got married a week after my twenty-third birthday, 26 May 1979. It poured down – you couldn’t even hear the church bells – but it didn’t dampen our day.
We had a week’s honeymoon in St Ives and bought a brand new house in Sandwell, a few miles from Stephen’s parents in West Bromwich. We were mortgaged up to the hilt, and Mum didn’t like that I had a better house than Carole, but we were happy. I also changed districts to work nearer to where I lived.
I felt so liberated, like a bird being let out of a cage and allowed to fly away. I could now start the process of finding out about my true identity. I was no longer living with my adoptive parents, so I wouldn’t have to worry when I had any letters through the post about my adoption.
The only document that I was ever allowed to see was the small re-registered birth certificate, the one which made me feel as though I hadn’t existed for the four years before I was adopted.
However, when I was about ten years old I found out that my birth name was Phyllis Larkin. This happened one Saturday afternoon when I was alone in the house with Kevin. He told me about ‘Dad’s secret suitcase’, where he kept all his important papers, and which he always kept locked. I had no idea what he was talking about.
‘What papers?’ I asked.
His reply was a bolt from the blue. ‘Your adoption papers. They’re all about when Mum and Dad had to go to court to adopt you.’
He showed me where Dad kept the key in a vase on the mantelpiece. He swore me to secrecy and told me I must never tell a living soul, otherwise he would be in a great deal of trouble. I quickly opened the suitcase. My hands were clammy and shaking, my stomach tightened. I was petrified in case I was caught red-handed. I certainly would have been up against the firing squad.
I nervously lifted the lid of a small shoe box that was in the suitcase, and there in front of my eyes were my adoption papers with my birth name: Phyllis Larkin. I shut the box as quickly as I had opened it and didn’t dare go back to those papers ever again. But – what a moment! I actually knew my birth name. It was such a strange feeling.
About two months after I got married I sent off for my original birth certificate from Somerset House in London. I was given some leaflets and the phone numbers of various support groups. Before I could receive my birth certificate I had to go through a statutory interview with a local social worker called John, who was kind and helpful.
He gave me the usual warnings about tracing my mother. He advised me to be careful and asked me if I was prepared for what I might find.
‘Your mother may not even want to meet you,’ he warned me. ‘It’s possible she hasn’t told anyone you even exist. She could be married with other children. You really need to prepare yourself for all eventualities. She may have a dysfunctional life, which could be very traumatic for you.’
Little did he know how close he was to the truth, but he soon realised how determined I was, and I was not going to change my mind. I explained how I hadn’t been given any information from my adoptive parents about the reasons why I was put up for adoption. He seemed shocked, particularly when I said I was told that both my parents had died. He reassured me that he would do his best to help. We arranged a second meeting a few weeks later. By this time, he had received my birth certificate and could give me some information about who I really was.
I glanced nervously over his desk and could see my birth certificate in front of him.
‘Your mother was called Bridget Larkin,’ he said.
Of course I already knew her surname was Larkin, but I hadn’t told him about my dad’s secret suitcase. It had her address as Bryon Street in Coventry, and in the space for listing occupation, it said that she was a waitress for a motor company. My father was ‘unknown’, which didn’t come as any surprise. I’d always felt that she must have been an unmarried mother, and that that was the main reason she’d had me adopted.
As an adopted person every little detail is so important to you. I had been denied this information all my life, and now there it was in front of me. This was the first time I had heard my mother’s name. All her life people had called her Bridget and I never knew. This may sound trivial, but what you have to remember is that from a very early age almost everyone knows their mother’s Christian name. If you are fortunate to have your mother bring you up, then you will constantly hear relatives and friends calling her by that name. When you meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions you usually ask is their name. Yet I was 23 years old before I ever knew my own mother’s name.
The next meeting I had with John was in October 1979. He told me, ‘Now you’ve had a chance to get used to the details about your mother, the next thing we need to do is try and find out where she is living now.’ The address on my birth certificate was the first lead, but I told John I had already driven to that address in Coventry and the houses had long since been demolished.
John looked shocked. He emphasised to me the importance of not going it alone. He asked, ‘What on earth would you have done if your mother was living at that address and she had come to the door?’
I felt rathe
r told off. I hadn’t given it a great deal of thought, I suppose. I had just been impatient, but I realised he was right. I reassured him that in future I would not try to do things by myself.
The next step would be to check the electoral register; and he also asked me the name of the orphanage. John said he would be in touch when he had any more information.
He could see how much it meant to me, and said he was going to do his best to help me trace my mother.
A few days later he phoned with some surprising news. John had contacted Father Hudson’s Homes and to his amazement a woman called May McFadden, who had actually helped arrange my adoption, was still working there. She had been at the orphanage for more than 30 years. She told John that she remembered me and my mother well and was more than happy to arrange a meeting at the orphanage.
It was very emotional returning all those years later. My memories came flooding back. Stephen drove me and waited for me in the car, and as I walked up to the front entrance it looked exactly the same as when I was there all those years ago.
I walked through the main reception area and there were the almost clinical chequered black-and-white tiles. The place still smelt the same: a general mustiness, partly disguised by a strong smell of wax polish. I told myself it was imperative that my emotions were put to one side. I had to be strong, or at least appear that way.
The meeting was surprisingly formal. May McFadden introduced herself to me and explained her role within the orphanage. There was no affectionate embrace or reassuring smile to help put me at my ease.
Miss McFadden explained how the orphanage had been run then. Canon Flynn had been in charge and organised all the adoptions with the help of the Mother Superior, Sister Bernadette. ‘I was top management, you know,’ said Miss McFadden, as if in some way trying to impress me. ‘I had to make a lot of very important decisions about the babies’ futures.’
Finding Tipperary Mary Page 8