Who's there?

The confusing world of the adopted child

Jul 08, 2024

Some years ago a conversation took place involving my father-in-law (Harry), a neighbour (Richard), and me. As it happens, all three of us were adopted and we were talking about how we viewed the situation.

Harry was angry. His mother had rejected him and, as far as he was concerned, he wouldn’t give her the time of day.

Richard was equally dogmatic but from a different direction. His adopted mother had been loving and wonderful. Why would he want to try to find out about his birth parents? That would be disrespectful to those who adopted him, especially his adopted Mum.

Which left me as the only one of us who did want to know more about The Mystery of the Missing Birth Parents.

So, three people and three different views. Maybe there are many more variations but, at the time of the conversation, our divergence was sufficient to motivate me not only to find out more about my own situation but also to try to understand more about the general reverberations of adoption.

If you’re an Aargh! subscriber, you will likely already be aware of this interest of mine. Indeed, a few of my lovely regulars have already forwarded thoughts on the topic to me. I’m really grateful. Thank you. Please keep ‘em coming.

To mention just one, in April, a subscriber, Paul, forwarded a link to a BBC Radio 4 program:

I heard this on Radio 4 whilst driving home today. I thought of you, and thought this was a really superb piece of storytelling/journalism. I think you will discover within the first 2-3 minutes if it is for you – I think it is.

It is.

In the past, I have mentioned the bewildering (to an adopted child) idea that you have been ‘specially chosen’, whatever that means, by the adopters but, in the radio programme, Su Chantry refers to one particular adoption outcome that I have not hitherto referenced - the inevitable negative value judgement that is imposed on the birth parents. Which is to say, if the adopters are to be held up or regarded as ‘the good guys’ who came to your rescue, there is the sense, even if unspoken, that the birth parents must be ‘the bad guys’.

Sadly, both Harry and Richard are now deceased. They both spent their entire lives not knowing who their biological parents were.

You may say it doesn’t matter. You may say that what matters is the way we live our lives. To a large extent that is, of course, true. But our origins are important. Life is bewildering enough without this added, fundamental mystery. The fact that my conversation with Harry and Richard took place at all is surely proof of that fact.

Very recently I have found out some more about my own birth parents and I will share some of this in future posts.

I will also continue my story - not least because, now, in old age, the importance of my origins has become more and more clear to me and, boy, so has the realization of the pervasive influence of the adoption on every stage of my life.

Below, in case you missed it first time round, I’ve put part of a post from June 2023 when I gave some of the background details of my own origins.

At the tender age of just fifteen months I changed my name. I didn’t have a say in the matter but later, when I learned about it, I wasn’t too unhappy because I didn’t like the original. Roger. No disrespect to other Rogers but I can’t say I’m keen. Roger became David. Now, decades later, I think about it only rarely. In fact, I only got to learn what little detail I have about the event when I was in my sixties. That revelation changed my life.

Before it, I could kid myself I was some sort of child of the universe, exempt from the rules that govern the rest of humanity, but when I learned about my real origins there was no escaping the fact that my genesis happened through the same process as everyone else’s. It was comforting in one way, disappointing in another.

As you may have surmised, the Roger-to-David metamorphosis was an adoption. My biological Mum, aged 25 years, who lived in Plymouth, Devon, in south-west England, had a fling (a month, a week, a night, an hour, five minutes? No idea.) with an American soldier.

The few details that I do have I only learned decades later. The vital coupling must have taken place in early 1945. At the moment of my conception World War Two was still in process but drawing to a close. VE (Victory in Europe) Day was 8th May that year, and VJ (Victory over Japan) Day 15th August. So, when I popped out in late October, it was into a world at peace with, presumably, bluebirds fluttering over the white cliffs of Dover1.

World War Two wasn’t a bundle of laughs for any part of the UK but Plymouth came in for particularly aggressive treatment. As home to the leading British naval dockyard at the time it was bound to attract the attention of Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe. In 1940, came the first of what would ratchet up to a total of 59 bombing raids. So, from 1941, to protect little people like me, the area’s maternity care was moved ten miles west to a place of greater safety called Flete House.

Although Flete House, at Ermington, near Ivybridge, is first mentioned in the Domesday Book, the ‘modern’ imposing mansion exists thanks to a rebuilding in the 19th century. The history books reveal that, in its time, a number of distinguished guests crossed its threshold, including Queen Mary, the Prince of Wales who subsequently did a brief turn as King Edward VIII, and the Duke and Duchess of York who later became King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the mother of the late Queen Elizabeth II. For a time, apparently, T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) helped in the gardens. And it was there, in October 1945, that I emerged into the world. Yes, I was born in a stately home. Well, why not?

The trouble was, Mum couldn’t cope with me. I don’t think it was anything I said. More to do with other things going on in her life. Again, the shadowy knowledge that I now have of it all I only learned decades later.

Anyway, it seems I was just one of 22,000 kids born between 1942 and 1945 to women who succumbed to the charms of U.S. soldiers so I shouldn’t make myself out to be too damn special. In fact, I’ve recently been told that in the small Chilterns village where, nearly eighty years after my conception, I now live, eighteen little Anglo-American poppets popped out during those years. Eighteen, in one small village! Those GIs had balls.

Mind you, it is perhaps not so extraordinary when you consider the overall numbers. American military personnel started arriving in the UK in 1942 but the real build-up came in preparation for D-Day. According to an account of this period2, by May 1945, 2,914,843 American servicemen and servicewomen had arrived in the British Isles by sea, together with more than 100,000 by air. The impact on the resident population of just 40 million (with many of the men away at war) was enormous ... including, of course, the fact that one of these guys kindly volunteered to co-create me.

The American forces helped change Britain in other ways, too. Up until that time, ‘decent’ women did not go on their own into public houses – for the most part, they didn’t even accompany their menfolk to public houses. The GIs changed all that. And I know from local history records here in the Chilterns that the U.S. service personnel were deeply unimpressed by some aspects of our lives. So it was, I’m told, that the village where I now live first acquired mains sewerage. Thanks guys.

So, given that I was one of more than 22,000 little fruits of Anglo-American cuddles, I was not exactly a rare commodity. But, of course, we are all special. Very special. It is salutary to remind yourself, dear reader, that you are a one-sperm wonder. Each of us is the result of a multi-million-strong shoal of sperms, fired into a fluid through which they swim like billy-oh to locate an egg. A vicious shoot-‘em-up game ensues, each sperm blindly flailing its way in what it hopes is the general direction of a fallopian tube, all the while having to avoid white blood cells that think the little bastards are intruders to be exterminated. Perhaps one sperm makes it. Bingo. Although, even then, the odds of the newly fertilised egg making its way to the uterus and to term are not assured.

Whatever the outcome, there are no ‘well done for taking part’ badges for the also-swams. They shall grow not. Age shall not weary them. At the going down of the sun and in the morning they won’t merit a single, solitary thought. Only the winner is remembered if and when it makes it through the entire process and kickstarts a brief span in the game of life. So much for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Checking online, I learn that the estimated odds of any of us being born is calculated at around 1 in 400 quadrillion (that’s 1 in 400,000,000,000,000,000 since you ask). Hell, how special do you want to be!

Now, where was I? Oh yes. So, there I am, fifteen months old, having won the Gamete Games but then getting handed off to new parents called George and Nellie, and bussed the 60 or so miles westward from Plymouth, Devon to Truro, Cornwall.

George and Nellie. What a couple! I grew to love them but there’s no denying they were odd. And it’s not just me saying that. When I was seventeen, my ‘adopted godfather’, Rupert (more about him as we go along), declared: “They shouldn’t have been allowed to adopt a cat.”

And last but not least on this occasion, a note about the title of this piece.

Who’s there?

A deceptively simple question, it’s also the first line of one of Shakespeare’s masterpieces, The Tragedy of Hamlet. Not least, that’s why I felt the Shutterstock image at the top to be appropriate.

Who’s there?

It’s the question that, in a multitude of ways, the play goes on to investigate.

Who’s there?

It’s the question we all ask ourselves - at some point in our lives, anyway.

It’s a little more complicated for adoptees to answer.

Aargh! by David Pinder

Discussion about this post