Ep. 2 Dustbin Baby

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

It was a cold November morning in 1968 in a small block of flats in the east end of London. An elderly lady who was a resident of this block of flats knocked on the door of the policeman who lived in the ground floor flats because she'd heard a crying noise outside. She was worried that some kittens may have been abandoned and asked him if he'd go and have a look. Followed the sounds to the outside dustbin area and to a plastic laundry bag which was resting against the larger metal bins. He looked inside and found a newborn baby wrapped in a t-shirt and toweling. He immediately wrecked the baby into the walk of his flat and called the police. The baby, me, was taken to hospital with mild hypothermia. On investigation a little bit further, it turned out that the other resident had heard crying in the night and just assumed that someone had friends staying over with a baby. The man in the other ground floor sat confessed to having found a bag on his doorstep in the internal hallway the day before. Then tugging to himself, he had taken the bag out and waited to go to put it in the bins as they were full. He just left the bag next to them, hoping that the bin man would still take it. That was how I was originally found. That's all I originally knew.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

You're listening to Born a Secret, Abandon at Birth. A Foundling Podcast. You might be wondering what a family is. A foundling is an infant that was abandoned, found, and raised by someone else other than their mother or father. Each episode will cover a family's unique story, how they coped with life as a family, and their pursuit to find out why their life started the way it did.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

I was legally adopted at the age of two after they'd exhausted all their searches and everything, so yeah, I was legally adopted and grew up happily with my adopted parents. I always knew I was adopted because I had dark curly hair, olivey skin, they had white blonde hair, so it was obvious people used to ask me why I didn't look like them. All I remember is my dad telling me the usual nice little story that he'd gone to the orphanage or whatever, and I was chosen from amongst babies lying in cribs, and when he came up to me, I put my arms out to him. So that's a story I remember him telling me. Mum used to think she told me the story about being abandoned, but I don't remember that at all. When I was 21, one of my adopted brothers was living with me in my house at the time, and we were watching a program about adopted people, and he said to me at the end, Oh uh, have you ever thought about finding your adopted mum? And then he said, Oh no, you wouldn't be healthier, would you? Because you were left in a box or something. And I said, What? Because he was a bit of a joker in our family. I thought, is he having a laugh? And I didn't even want to ask my mum and and sort of embarrass her. So I went the long way around it and I um wrote off to the local area where I was found and said, Have you got any news articles about any babies that have been abandoned around the date of my birth? And that's when people turned up assuming that I was that baby, and they wanted to find out my story. It was almost more like it was a novelty in in a third party. I it wasn't happening to me. You know, it was like um a bit surreal. So I didn't relate it to myself, I didn't take it personally. It's strange, I know, but hanging I just assumed that I would always go to McGrave, never knowing who I was, because there was no there was no way of doing it then, you know. When I first took the DNA test was 2011, so it was all very new and in its infancy, especially in no one in this country did anything like that, and no one knew what I was talking about when I was trying to find the actual tests. It took a bit of hard work because the only tests anyone would talk about is the one-to-one test, and no one had even heard about this test. So I had to do quite a lot of um research to actually find it. But I was determined to see what it came out with. You know, it's a chance, isn't it? You know, I didn't know whether I actually believed in it or not as such, but I thought I'd give it a go. When I first got my results back, it was quite surprising because being English uh and having dark curly hair, you automatically assume that maybe your mother was English and that your dad might be Spanish or you know, something European nearby. But when my results came back, all the people that matched me at that time were all Jewish. So and I came back as a quarter Ashkenazi Jewish. So I was like, whoa, never even thought of that, you know. So that was uh quite unusual. And I also came back with four percent Nigerian and a little bit Middle Eastern, a bit of you know, 27% Scandinavian. So it was a complete cocktail. In fact, it would it was only about 40 odd percent of English, I think. So it was most of the people that I contacted at that time were the obviously Jewish matches, including the founder of the actual site came up as a match to me as well as but only as a third or fourth cousin. Um and then he was saying to me that all the Jewish people tend to come up as much closer matches than they really are, because of all the generations of interbreeding marrying cousins, and so you could come up with much closer falser matches than you thought they would be. So if it came up as a second or as a it might actually be a four, fifth, or sixth cousin. So I thought, oh well, they might not be as close as as all that then. So I just sort of carried on looking at it every now and then, and it wasn't until two years later that I actually got a a match from someone who came up as a possible first cousin or aunt. And I was like, oh wow, who's this person? All the other matches had been like in America because no one in this country had really had much to do with it then. But this new match was living in England, so I thought, oh, I must get in touch with her straight away. I contacted her by email and I tried to you know, I found details of her as you do online when you search for someone, and I was trying to contact her and I hadn't heard anything back straight away because you get a bit excited and wanting to to sort of reach out to them. Eventually she got back to me that evening and said, Oh, so sorry not to have got back to you sooner. How exciting! But my mother died today of a heart attack, and I couldn't. And I was like, Oh my god, sorry, I didn't mean for you to contact me on the day that your mother's died, and she was like, Oh no, it was a bit of a strange relationship. And she said, actually, this is really good news. It's given me something positive to focus on. She'd actually only been on the site trying to find out whether the rumors that we had African ancestry in the family were true. So she was doing the DNA test to see if she actually came out as as African at all. And strangely enough, she only came out at 1%. But I came out at 4%. So, you know, that's sort of like uh verified. And she's now been able to work out exactly who it was in the family tree and how far back and the and you know, all the information. She's just doing a very, very advanced family tree, really. So But she said, Oh, who are you anyway? And I said, I don't know. I was left in Warbomster near this block of track. She said, Oh, my I had two uncles from there. She said, One of them was very sensible and and a bit sort of moody. He was an ambulance driver and he was married, and she said, But the other one, he was a milkman and he was single for quite a long time, and she said that he would definitely be my first choice for a father for you. She says, because he was always a bit of a ladies' man, and he, you know, being single, his wife had run off and left him from that moment. He was a bit, you know, once bitten twice shy. So he sort of uh stayed single right the way through from I think that was about 1965. He was single all the way through till 1978 when he met his final wife. So he had quite a few years of being single, so he was the obvious choice. So we obviously contacted him. I think I found them by Facebook and looked at all the photos. I thought, mm, yeah, they look a little bit like me as well. So I contacted him and he said, Oh, yes, you think you're definitely my daughter, but I'll do the DNA test, but you're definitely my daughter, and if it comes back as not, I'm gonna adopt you anyway. He was a very charming, charming man. He came back as definitely being my father, and also he came back as eight percent African, so that furthered the course of my cousin's research as well. So, you know, we felt it was definitely going down that side of the family. So he was over the moon. He said, Oh wow, DNA is amazing. He's you know, I think he was almost waiting to see if any more would turn off the blessing, but he was very ill at the time and you know with cancer, and he'd lost his wife to cancer the year before. And I think that gave him a whole new lease of life. He took it, you know, he was spinning a bit down, it just lifted him right up again and just made him feel a bit more positive. He only lived for about another six months after I found him, but he was such a character. If I'd have waited six months longer, I never would have met him. And you wouldn't believe the amount of love that he would have had for you, considering he'd never known you all your life. My sister says that I've got so many of his mannerisms and I just say things and it reminds her of him. So, you know, it's quite bizarre that you've got all these similarities to your family, even though you've never met them. I did an article about finding my dad via DNA, and I was on all the main newspapers and magazines, and then I said to the journalist that writes my articles, I said to her, Can we just do a little clip in the local newspaper where I was found? Because I've just got a feeling, you know, it might be better to do it there. And she was like, Oh no, we've all we can't go back towards the local papers once we've been in the nationals because you won't be able to uh and I said, Oh no, I've just got a feeling, please can we just do it? She said, Oh, okay then, and she basically did a quick article and she said she finished it at about two in the morning, and then she said she went to bed and found a feather on her bed, and she just had a feeling that that she'd done the right thing. But she um posted it off to the local paper and the only person that responded to it was my birth mum. So I didn't actually have to search for her via DNA. She came forward and said, as as I already found my dad, I deserve to know who she was as well. I went to her flat where she lives in London, and she actually lives in within a mile of where I was found. So I went to her flat and I stayed there basically uh overnight. She made me some lunch and had some tea, and then we sat and looked through all sorts of. I remember she'd gone to make us a cup of tea in the kitchen, and I just popped by and I could hear her muttering under her breath, That's my daughter in there, that's my daughter, you know, to herself. She was always a bit nervous and excited, so it's yeah, it was quite sweet, really. She was very quiet and reserved with it because she felt almost like she didn't have a right to me and that my adopted mum must always come first. Yeah, she gets very respectful to her, you know, she felt like she didn't want to step on her toes. You can tell she was just holding back because she feels that's her place. I mean, so we had that little bit of time together. And then the the next day my three brothers turned up to the house and I met them as well, so that broke the ice a bit more because they they're all lucky boys and they all they all took it really well as well. They were in shock because they couldn't believe that they never knew that their mother had done that, but they said it did actually explain a few things because they said that she would often get a bit upset and she'd often just take herself off somewhere for a week or something, you know, on her own. And she had seen a psychiatrist as well, so she obviously had effects from it from it all, but um they didn't know what it was. So looking back to them, it kind of made sense. I think it all stems from she had a very strict mother, but she always felt like she was a failure. My mother was a very slight woman and she was always very fashion conscious, and she wanted a daughter who could go out with her shopping. She said to you regionally you wanted a son because she was only going to have one child, and the fact that she had a daughter was a bit of a letdown, but then when she did have a daughter, she wanted one that she could take out with her shopping and dress up. My mum took more after her father's side of the family, and she was a very large woman. So I think she always felt like she was a bit a bit of a disappointment to her mum. She was very bookish and she loved the library at school, you know, she was not what you would expect. So her parents wanted her to go to university, and she didn't want to, so she ended up starting a relationship with a Nigerian man, and then she ended up having to have a shotgun wedding when she found out she was pregnant, so she got married to him. Unfortunately, he was obviously a bit of a womanizing guy, and and when she was pregnant with their second child, he ran off with another woman, so she was left with two small boys that she she had to go running back to her mum and dad with. And basically, her mum had said to her at that point, if you do anything else to disgrace this family, I'll have you declared an unfit mother and have your children taken away from you. So she was obviously always a bit paranoid. So when she accidentally got pregnant with me, she was like absolutely distraught, she was worried she really believed that her children would be taken away from her as well as me. I think she came to the conclusion that she had to keep it secret and that it would be give either giving up two children that she knew and loved or one that she hadn't got to know yet. So that was the way she saw it. She was just desperate. And uh the mother was that controlling that she just thought that she didn't have any choice in the matter. She kept the whole pregnancy hidden and she was still going to work every day as a librarian, and she was also coming home and looking after her children and feeding them. She felt she'd gone into labour with me, and as she came home from work, she fed her children, she put them to bed, and then she just took herself off quietly to the garden chest at the end of the garden where no one would be able to hear her. She literally went in there until she'd given birth to me and cut the cord herself and then she took me quietly back up to her room where she had one of the boys still sleeping in with her. So she took me there for that night and the next day. She told her mum she was going to do the laundry for her. She took all the washing and she also took me in another laundry bag. She actually went to the launderette. She was thinking about leaving me in there because she thought that would be warm and and sort of safe because it was it was November, it's cold here then. It was full of people, so she decided that she'd better go off with me before anyone heard anything. So she left the washing, went off with me, trying to find somewhere safe to leave me. She was thinking about the church, but then she realised it was Sunday, so it would be full of people. And then she went to look for somewhere sort of inside that would be safe, and she saw this little block of flats, and she said they had an internal hallway, so she thought, Oh, that'll be safe and dry and sort of warmer. And it it was lit up as well. So she went in there, and that's why she left me on the uh doorstep of the first flat there, and then sort of hurriedly what ran back to the launderette to finish her washing and take it back to her mum, like you know, so as far as her mum was concerned, she'd just been to the launderette to do the washing for her. But obviously, as I said before, the uh man in that flat, you know, obviously moved the bag, and that's how I ended up being called the dustbin baby. So she obviously had no intentions of me ending up there, and she said that when she read about it in the paper a couple of days later, she was absolutely horrified and she was she always been worried that I might have been affected being left out overnight in the cold. She she did say to me, even though she'd been married and had two children, she says she couldn't believe how naive she still was when it came to the birth control, but they didn't have any sex education in those days. She still was really naive about, you know, getting pregnant, so it obviously happened again. She'd actually met my dad at a divorced and separated club, and they were actually both running it together, and they were kind of like they got on really well, but they were kind of like both of them as a little bit, you know, like I said, they've all once bitten twice shy, so they were enjoying the relationship, but they were not taking it all too seriously. And by the time she was pregnant with me, and relationship had been kind of like no string, so she kind of thought, no, I don't think he's gonna be far the material and And she just kept it hidden from everyone. He never knew anything about it. And they must have still stayed friends because when she decided to change her name, my biological dad happened to be the witness for her change of name, so they were obviously still good friends. Later on at that very same club, she met her final husband there. He was happy to take on her two children. Back in the day, that we it was hard to find a man that would take on a divorcee, you know, with two small children, but he took her on quite happily and he was 25 years older than her. And they were happily married. They had my third brother about three years later next. I have a younger brother as well as two older brothers. They lived happily together till basically he died in the armchair next to her in his 90s. But my dad didn't know anything about it, my brothers didn't know anything about it. She told me she'd told her uh house day last night. She told him about it that they kept it quite. I think he introduced her to the church. She ended up just finding solace in religion, and I think that's what helped her the most over the years, you know, having her faith, so it kept her going. She obviously had to keep it all a secret, so that was obviously a big uh weight on her. You hear so many stories afterwards of people that are you know can't cope with it, they're in denial, they're still worried about all their family thinks. But I mean, obviously my mum's brave about telling my brothers, but as far as the rest of the time, she decided that I had my own life now and I was probably happy with my own adoptive family. I might not have known anything about it. So I think a lot of mums just let you get on with your life in the hope that maybe one day somehow you might be able to find them again or or that you're just happy. I get on really well with all my siblings on both sides. They come up and give me a big hug every time they see me. In fact, it's a novelty because they never had a sister, so I'm their first and only ever sister. My oldest brother likes to mess around and play fight because he says, Oh, we missed out on all this growing up, so he'll single me and pull my hair and just mess around like he might have done if he was younger. So we all have a good time. It was my 60th birthday recently, and they all stopped together and bought me a watch and had it engraved with all their names on it. So that you know, they're all a really thoughtful, lovely bunch of boys, really, because that that's quite unusual for boys anyway, to be thoughtful like that. So yeah, but they're they're they're all lovely, all of them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

The Born a Secret Podcast is on a mission to inspire compassion among all sides of a search streak and to raise awareness for the safe haven law. Please go to born a secret.com for more information about the podcast and ways to contribute. Please like and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. Are you or someone you know, pregnant and unsure of what to do now? For information about the Safe Haven Law and Safe Haven Resources, please go to www.national safe haven alliance dot or call one eight eight eight five one zero two two two two two two two two two two two two two two nine for twenty-four seven confidential support.