MARCH 7, SATURDAY. Spring. The weekend sun is already stronger. Today is close to 15°C. The plot is calling. It’s really too early to sow too much but it’s time to sort seed. I root around the house, collecting packets from bags and boxes and tins. I lay them out on the floor, grouped into herbs and salads, root vegetables, fruits, flowers, kales and chards. This may come in useful later. Some I should maybe throw away but I’ll give them a chance, like someone once gave me (and yes, I know how that sounds). On site, the unfinished pond is teeming with frogs. The males are noisy, overactive, the females overwhelmed. I trudge a few more buckets of water to the pond. I sit in the sun, watching bees, even butterflies. The hives are alive. I sow more garlic. I lay in a row of radishes. You never know.
Sometimes when I think of this book, I am almost bewildered it has taken such a turn. It was to be about gardening, a year in the life of a piece of land, with personal stuff added in. The tone has taken me by surprise. It is lacking in laughter, the growing the only light to balance shade. When I read it back, my voice softens, becomes smaller. Writing it is like dropping down a mine. I head out to the seam and see what’s to be found. It’s not properly planned like my other work, with quotes, a beginning, a middle, an end. It’s more like my gardening. I have to listen before I have something to say.
MARCH 9, SUNDAY. We are measuring the boardwalk at the bottom of the plot. Mary has put her foot through a plank. Back from Istanbul, she is here today with more feed for her birds. Her bag is bursting with plants. A vivid green angelica sticks out of the top. Our neighbour Jeffrey is digging David’s plot. It is overgrown and the committee has warned they will take it off him if it isn’t fixed. David is a retired Africa hand for the Financial Times. He visits his plot most days, eats a banana, throws its skin in his compost bin. He isn’t up to digging. His wife has asked Jeffrey for help. Howard and I give him a hand. We slice the grassy top layer off, careful not to disturb the asparagus, the one bold leek standing proud. It is like cutting turf, tiring. We clear a bed, fill a couple of wheelbarrows with weed, before Howard has to leave. Rose needs help with her homework.
12.3.59. Alan is very excitable and chatters constantly, both are looking well except Christopher is so small.
1970. Fried rice is one of my first discoveries that show how I am different from Dudley. There are other strands in my DNA. I am 16, living on carbon tetrachloride and cartons of takeaway rice. It is Chinese, cheaper than chips. A box of something exotic, bland and comforting. There are greasy pictures on the wall: softly shaped islands and boats with Asian sails. I never venture far from the rice. I don’t have the same feeling for sweet and sour, though the pineapple has an appeal like my first curry with raisins in boarding school. I have a thing for Kentucky fried chicken for a short while, the crisp crust concealing the sweet meat inside. I try it again when I come to London. It is somehow slimy, tasting of fear and fish.
MARCH 13. There is a message from Barnardo’s. The tone has changed, my records should be ready in a couple of weeks. I can come in or receive them by post. The choice is mine, the mail says.
14.3.59. Impetigo, scabies, herpes simplex.
I crave hugs. I long to be held. I have felt incomplete without it much of my life. I can do cuddles and massage. I have worked on this. But don’t come quietly up behind me. Never stroke my neck. It is instant, the reaction, like a trip wire or the emergency cord on a train. Just a loving brush near the back of my head and I am flooded with fear. I go into lockdown. My emergency shutters crash. I can’t connect to the kindness or any loving intent. All I get is a body memory that my brain no longer holds. Something bad happened. My mind is amnesiac but my body less so.
MARCH 15. On the Danish coast. I am caught in heavy rain cycling the coastal road in Denmark. I have a puncture. I am soaked to the skin. Too far from home, I make it to my mother-in-law’s. I put my clothes in her dryer. I sit in my underpants, my modesty covered by a desk. We drink tea, we wait for the rain to stop and my jeans and woollen jacket to dry. An hour or two later, on my way to the summerhouse, I am happy, my tyre repaired. My hand snakes to my pocket, fingers search for three beans that are no longer there …
MARCH 16. Waves lap at the shore, I pick white seashells, gather them in my pocket. The beach is still. Me too, rare in these days of digging deep. I feel worries wash away, comforting memories wrap round me, soft like angora. The rhythmical song of the water reorders my anxieties. You belong here, it says, like Lilian once said. This is your home. The hare’s here too. I am not sure why it matters so much – seeing it wander through the plot. I watch as it takes its time, scratches at the grass, sits up, all ears, super alert, moves fluidly through the space. Stop, look, listen, unhurry away. Spring is always a month later here, snowdrops are spreading, wood anemones streaming out into the grass, but it’s the hepatica that catches the moment, flashes a subdued violet among the dead leaves in the hedgerow. It is easy to miss. I lie in the ditch to admire the nodding flower as yet unready. The firewood has arrived. Beech and oak, Denmark and England, slow-burning, heat-giving hardwood. Five cubic metres is a small mountain. We are lucky with the weather, bright sun but not too warm. The neighbours arrive with a wheelbarrow, my brother-in-law and mother-in-law are here. We set up a system: some stacking, some freighting. Others sorting by size. The shed fills with patterns of logs and light. There is new space for another blackbird nest, another hazelnut hiding place: the red squirrel stash. In three hours or so, it is done. We stop, we drink Easter beer or tea, or both. We light a bonfire in a barrel, like the one Mum used to incinerate my jeans. We burn the cleared bramble. I break up small branches and feed them in. White smoke and the day drifts easy. The woodpile is gone. The shed is packed. The bonfire space is cleared. The summerhouse plot is ready for spring. The outdoor housekeeping’s done. Before we leave, we plant violets in the bank and pot up lily of the valley for later in the year. I have been sleeping nine or 10 hours a night, twice the rest I get in London.
MARCH 18, WEDNESDAY MORNING. I am in Barnardo’s in east London reading my records – the familiar language, the familiar tone, the familiar players: I am being put up for adoption, the notes say. Sheila is 19, pregnant for the third time. She had a miscarriage at 17. Christopher at 18. I will be next. Billy and Doris have had enough so they have brought her here. Sheila is described as ‘medium build, mid-brown hair, brown eyes – dull and suppressed in presence of M.Gd-fa [maternal grandfather: Billy] who was curt with her’. She’s been seen by Dr Matheson of the mental health department who ‘did not consider her certifiable as a feeble-minded person’, though my great-aunt, Marina Beale, ‘is in the care of the Royal Western Counties Mental Institution’. Poor woman, whoever she was.
The records state that my grandparents are respectable people and their home is overcrowded. Four of my uncles live in one room, aged 11 to 17. Christopher is there too, in a cot. It says they are devoted to him. My mother will not be allowed to bring me back from the maternity home. Something must be done quickly, my grandmother says. Sheila’s ‘character’ and ‘morals’ are reported to be ‘weak’. I feel like an intruder. We are here at last, before the beginning. The start of my life in single-spaced type.
12.02.1954. Four weeks old:
Dr Barnardo’s Homes: National Incorporated Association.
Head Offices – 1–26, Stepney Causeway London, E1
[Sixpence stamp]
I Sheila Irene Beale
of 57, Grassendale Avenue, Swilly, Plymouth
being the mother of Allan Peter Beale
hereby agree with the Association:
to the child entering into the care of Dr. Barnardo’s Homes and to the child being brought up by the Association in any of its branches, or in any of its boarding-out homes in the British Isles:
to the child being brought up in the Protestant Faith:
to the Association, without further consultation, taking such action in respect of the child as may be deemed necessary in the child’s interest:
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to the Association placing the child when it deems it proper in that occupation which it considers best for the child.
To abide by the rules of the Association, and to co-operate with its officers in their efforts on the child’s behalf:
to receive back the child in my care if at any time requested to do so.
Dated this Friday 12th day of February 1954
Signature and address SI Beale
57 Grassendale Ave
Swilly
Signatures and addresses of two witnesses [redacted]
Four weeks old and the right to choose my occupation is on the list? I break it all down into bite-sized pieces: the photo of my Barnardo’s Home with prams outside, the details of my mother’s room. Ray is on the scene now, they are going to be married. He will take my brother but I am too much to ask. My grandmother describes me as a ‘handsome baby – much nicer than Christopher when he was born’. The comparisons begin. There is another note from Billy pleading for speed but Barnardo’s still doesn’t have space. It may take three months. Time enough to be breastfed, time enough to bond. The notes ask what I will be weaned on when the escort comes to take me. But bigger news waits innocent as a kitten, unexploded ordinance in eight-point type.
There is a name where it asks for father: FRANCIS O’TOOLE, AGED 22, LEADING COOK ON HMS DECOY. Of course, I have never heard of him, it isn’t the name Sheila had ready. I’m unprepared. It feels right and wrong.
Their short story is written here: there had been ‘misconduct, intimacy’, an offer of marriage, later withdrawn. Billy had asked the navy to pressure him but he disappeared. Until now. Is it finally him, the man who made me, or is he legend for Barnardo’s to make my adoption more agreeable? Have I found the one person I wasn’t looking for? Is the gap too real to feel? I leave with my notes neat in an elasticated file.
Next stop a London address around the corner where the records say my mother had once stayed. I never knew she’d been in London. Her side of Valetta Grove, a stunted Plaistow street, is now a park. Her plot, number 3, is a rubbish tip, chained up and high-fenced off. It feels like an omen. By the time I get off the tube in town my legs are weak. A fuse lit long ago has finally blown.
MARCH 20. Spring equinox, the day I may have read my father’s death certificate. There is a Francis O’Toole, killed at 26 when I was three, run over by a car in Kirkdale, Liverpool. He died of shock and cerebral laceration, a fractured skull. A labourer’s short life snuffed out. Misadventure, the coroner says. This Francis O’Toole has the same name, the same age but it is too early to say if he’s mine. I need more time for more research. All I know is the pain it must have brought his family. For now, I want to get lost, feel soil under my nails.
Branch Hill is bathed in sun, warm enough for sowing. It is a leaf day. I put out jute string, green today. I cut short sticks. I weed, I hoe, I rake. I mark out eight short rows, divide seed into groups. Howard arrives. I stop for a while. A kestrel flashes by, very low at head height. It feels like benediction. It flies into the border trees above us, sits framed by the blue sky. Its feet readjust their grip on a skinny white branch. Its head bobs, turns and watches, scans the site. Its feathers puff in the afternoon sun. Its markings are clear, its wild profile perfect. It sits still, silent, as do we. Suddenly it swoops, fast, flies to us, banks steeply and turns less than six feet away, like a fighter aircraft flypast, a sort of salute. We watch as it flits from trees, sectioning the site, eyes alert. It knows this place. Finally, we gather seed, drop packets by the rows. A coloured chard here, a coloured lettuce there, companion planting with my good companion. For a long moment I feel lucky. We water in, we sow. We shift chervil. The sun drops. The air cools. There is time for two last rows across the middle. Fast-growing rocket to dissect the space, a signal of intent. It is spring, the sun is on our side. I hold to the healing.
MARCH 21, SATURDAY. I am sitting in an intensive therapy workshop. Twelve other ‘adopted adults’, a ‘trainer’ and me. The session is about finding your birth parent and what happens then. I normally wouldn’t have come, not my thing, but the invite landed in my inbox two days after my sisters’ stories. I didn’t know what to do with the information, lovingly given, of how my mother gifted her children to men. My fellow therapees are mostly veterans of the workshop circuit. Their sad stories come easily, though there is real hurt and rage. Voices choke, there are many tears but not mine. I don’t feel the connection. Maybe because I am the only man or maybe because I wasn’t part of an adopted family, I can’t feel part of theirs. It is a long day. I am exhausted. Most of the group want to go for a drink and carry on while they can, share their stories with people who understand. They want to meet up again soon. I want to go home.
MARCH 22, SUNDAY. It’s the allotment spring-clean working party, time to tackle and finish the pond. I have brought sharp knives and pair off with Bill, my early-morning friend. We trim the excess plastic and dig a ditch around the perimeter to bury the edges in. We stop to watch frogs watching us, heads alert and eyes intrigued. The ‘old’ pond is alive with excited movement, oblivious to anything but spring and spawn. They are overcrowded and need more space. We move in the marsh marigolds and uprooted iris. As summer comes, the edges will blur and blend. People come to admire our work, ferry buckets of muddy water. Ian goes home to get the key that turns on the mains supply. The pond fills. The frogs might just forgive us. Two barbecues are topped up. There is soup burbling on the stove. Someone is grilling chorizo. We sit in the early-year sun and bask in joining in for the joy of it, communal jobs well done. Mary is here and other faces unseen since the last growing season. David has brought pink prosecco. He is pleased with the revival of his plot. I steal away to sow calendula. It is early but I have hope. I have been here four or five hours, getting muddy and happy. I haven’t thought about anything else.
MARCH 25, WEDNESDAY. At work. An email has come through with another copy of another death certificate for another Francis O’Toole. I’d first ordered in copies of marriage certificates for the five I could find in the UK who’d married in the 10 years following my birth. Better to gatecrash a wedding than intrude into grief. None, though, were the right fit. I am now, hesitantly, looking into the dead. One had been a baby, another the young man knocked down by a car; now it is the turn of Francis Anthony O’Toole, who died at the Royal Liverpool Hospital in November 1984. His death is registered by his brother Christopher, who had been with him at the time. I like to think they were holding hands, that perhaps there was peace. There is a birth registered for Christopher in 1936 and his marriage to Margaret in 1961. They are on the electoral roll at the same address given when he registered Francis’s death. I feel a bit faint for the office as I write to him. I don’t say why I am looking, just that I am. A first-class stamp and it is done. I have a sneaking feeling for this Francis I am trying to suppress. It might be because he had a brother called Christopher. It might be because he had lung cancer, but I feel disturbed (welling up, close to incontinent crying) as I return to reading proofs.
MARCH 26. It’s our wedding anniversary. I am cooking. Plans to eat out are put on hold as Henri is working late. Christy O’Toole calls from Liverpool. His brother Frank was in the navy for nine years, he says. He was a cook based out of Plymouth. He was the right height. His name and age and size, his place and occupation all match. I think I may have found and lost my father. I only had him for a day. I couldn’t help but be excited at the thought of seeing him. We would meet and eat if he’d wanted. Drink beer and talk late into the night. He would share stories about ships and family. He would tell me about meeting my mother. He would talk to me of how it was. I would hold on to him for dear life if he wanted, my dear old dad.
I couldn’t help wanting my father. Christy is warm and welcoming. I tell him why I’ve written. He says a woman came to his parents’ house once searching for Frank. She stayed a few days. The brothers showed her Liverpool. She left a photo when she went away, but Frank tore it up wh
en he returned.
Frank was one of 13 kids, he says, an Irish Catholic potato-famine family, though only four are alive. I say I am sorry to disturb him. I am trying to put together pieces. His mother had never said anything about a baby, he says, but he would talk to his older brother and see what they could find. Frank’s wife had died recently, 30 years after him. He had been a heavy smoker: navy cigarettes. He liked a drink. His children loved him very much. It is good to hear.
He will ask if they have their father’s discharge papers. See if it says anything about serving on HMS Decoy. He will find a photo, have a copy made. There’s one of Frank in the navy. He will call me when he sends it. I like this man. After we talk, I finish preparing the food. I wish Henri was here. I’d like to mull it through with someone who may understand. I need to lie down while I wait. In minutes I am fast asleep. It’s not yet 8pm. When Henri comes, we go to bed. We will talk it through in the morning. Our anniversary is on hold.
MARCH 28, SATURDAY 8AM. The allotment. The boards arrive for Mary’s walkway. Howard and I carry them to the plot. It’s too early to fit them now and the weather forecast isn’t good. The allotment is covered in sycamore seedlings, which seem to have sprung the same day. There are too many to pull. Howard takes the long-handled hoe, while I use a hand tool to cut in close. Order is restored and the wild repelled. I return to beautify the pond, which still looks a little industrial. I wander the site perimeter gathering logs and bits of bark. I wrap them around like building a wooden bridge. I am looking to soften the hard edges and naturalise the space. I top up the level with water. A stubborn frog sits on a lily leaf as it rocks up and down. I have brought calendula to sow: pure orange only, English old-school. I sow nasturtiums in the gaps beneath the boardwalk. I have been thinking a lot about my brother Christopher lately. I am looking for a riot of colour, something exuberant in gypsy tones. Common, like foster kids.
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