Finding Margaret E-Book

Andrew Pierce

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 500

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

At the age of fifty, and despite feeling like he was betraying the adoptive parents who loved him so much, journalist and broadcaster Andrew Pierce began to tentatively search for his birth mother – only to discover that she had done everything she could to ensure he would never find her. When he finally tracks her down, the mystery only deepens, leading him to Ireland to seek out information about the man who may or may not have been his father. During his search, Andrew discovers horrifying revelations about the orphanage where he had spent the first two years of his life and attempts to forge a relationship with the woman who gave him away. This candid story is a heartwarming page-turner that takes the reader on an extraordinary journey. Full of amusing and arresting anecdotes, at its heart lies the inspirational story of one man's search for his birth mother and what happened when he finally found her.

Leseprobe

i“Andrew Pierce turns the tables on himself in this poignant and thoroughly entertaining journey through his life. As long as I’ve known him, Andrew has never failed to amuse.”

Dame Joan Collins

“A warm and vivid read that shows how untidy life can be but that everything can be healed with love. This wickedly gossipy journalist will melt your heart with his own story.”

Jeremy Vine

“A genuinely heartbreaking, heartwarming, heartstopping story of one man’s search to find his long-lost birth mother. Andrew Pierce’s account will bring tears to your eyes – tears of sadness but tears of joy, too.”

Richard Madeley

“Finding Margaret is a moving odyssey of disappointment, yearning, seeking, detective work and ultimately self-discovery. Andrew Pierce’s crisp prose propels the reader on a perilous voyage, sometimes verging on the unbearable. Purchase a box of tissues before embarkation.”

Vanessa Feltz

“Everything that makes Andrew Pierce a brilliant reporter is present here – a gripping story, bracing opinions, emotional honesty and, of course, a big reveal.”

Daniel Finkelstein

“A very human and emotional story which was unpredictable. Searingly honest.”

Iain Dale

“A sensitively written book that is both touching and moving and deserves a wide audience.”

Jeffrey Archer

ii

iii

iv

v

To Betty and George, my real mum and dad.

vi

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONPROLOGUECHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENPOSTSCRIPTACKNOWLEDGEMENTSABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

vii

PROLOGUE

It was a typically autumnal Birmingham day: dreary grey skies overhead and drizzling with soft rain. I’d barely slept a wink before setting off early that morning from London’s Euston Station, along with my good friend Amanda, on what had felt like the longest train journey of my life.

The same agonising question that had kept me awake last night was still hammering away in my head: WasIdoingtherightthing…?

For weeks I’d been organising this trip with all the precision of a military operation. I had known it might not be straightforward, but I’d never expected to find myself feeling so incredibly anxious. Sitting in the stationary black cab – its engine running and with the back window steamed up – my stomach was churning with nervous tension. Almost breathless with fearful anticipation, I could feel my emotions beginning to oscillate out of control. I was obviously in danger of becoming a complete nervous wreck.

Struggling to ignore waves of nausea, I brushed a damp, clammy hand through my hair. I could feel my heart pounding. Hard and fast. Oh my God! Was I in danger of hyperventilating? Or even having a heart attack?

But it seemed that I wasn’t the only one worried. Because the viiitaxi driver, who’d been glancing at me in his mirror, now turned to gaze at me with concern. ‘Are you feeling OK, mate? You’re looking very pale.’

Catching a quick glimpse of my reflection in his mirror, I realised he was right. My face was waxen.

Desperately trying to calm down and pull myself together, I picked up the newspaper I’d bought to read on the train. But it was no good. I couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything. So, almost for something to do, I used the paper to clear the cab’s rear window…

And there she was.

Suddenly I knew, with total certainty, precisely whoI was looking at. The approaching figure was still too far away for me to discern either her age or her features. Nevertheless, I had absolutely no doubt that the small, elderly figure with the distinctive shock of white hair was the reason I was here.

At the age of forty-eight, I had finally found my birth mother.

1

CHAPTER ONE

From a very early age, I’d known that I was adopted. My mum and dad had always told me that at birth, I’d been placed in Nazareth House, an orphanage – or what would nowadays be called a ‘children’s care home’ – in Cheltenham. From there, they had adopted me, when I was known by my first two Christian names, Patrick James, at the age of two years old.

However, although it might seem unbelievable, the truth is that it wasn’t until I had left home and was working as a journalist that I realised I had no idea about the first name, let alone the surname, of the woman who’d given birth to me. Even when I had finally managed to discover those important details, it wasn’t until much later that I decided to make a serious attempt to track down my birth mother.

So why, for so many years, had I made no effort to delve, even superficially, into my past? Well, the truth is that I was very happy and much loved by my parents, who treated me in exactly the same way as my elder brother and two sisters. And, of course, I’d grown up as Andrew James Pierce, the names my adoptive parents had given me. I was perfectly happy with my new name, and as everyone 2knew me as Andrew Pierce, there seemed no reason why I should want to change it or dig into the past.

Besides which, I was the only adopted one in the family. On the very rare occasions when the subject arose, normally just in passing, I used to joke to my siblings, ‘I’m the special one!’ (I’ve always suspected that José Mourinho pinched the idea from me.) But, on the other hand, no matter how loved and cherished you are in a family – and I most certainly was – if the blood that courses through your veins is entirely different to that of the rest of them, it is possible that natural curiosity will cause you to occasionally wonder where you came from.

For instance, I was slightly built, with dark hair and a pale, sallow complexion, while my three siblings were all heavily built, fair-haired and had distinctive Swindon accents.

Swindon is where I grew up, but I never looked or even sounded like my brother and sisters. So, if anyone had to guess which one of us was adopted, there is no doubt that they would have immediately picked me out of a lineup every time!

The background to my life with my adoptive parents began in 1956, when George and Betty Pierce and their two-year-old daughter Susan arrived in Swindon as part of a major exodus of Londoners to the Wiltshire town. They had spent the first three years of married life with my dad’s parents, Daisy and George Pierce, in a 1930s tenement block of council flats on the Isle of Dogs. It’s still there today, dwarfed by the adjacent gleaming towers of multi-million-pound opulence, a testament to the regeneration of London’s Docklands by Margaret Thatcher’s government.

Dad’s sister, Fran, also lived in the flat, along with their brother John and his wife Molly. So, when Mum and Dad’s daughter arrived a year after their marriage in 1953, to say that the flat was 3crowded would be an understatement. Dad had grown up on the Isle of Dogs, leaving only briefly when he was evacuated at the very beginning of the war, but returning with his five siblings in September 1940, the day the first bombs were dropped on London.

Dad’s father, George, who’d lost a leg in the Battle of the Somme during the First World War, was still living dangerously by working as an auxiliary firewatcher in the Second World War. During the Blitz, the government became particularly worried about the Luftwaffe dropping incendiary bombs, so over 6,000 people were recruited to the Auxiliary Fire Service. It was extremely dangerous and exhausting work. Especially for our family, as the Isle of Dogs appeared to be a prime target.

Basically, as far as the enemy was concerned, the Pierce family were a sitting duck. Around the edges of the island and close to the river were timber yards, paint works, various factories, and other businesses producing jams, pickles and confectionery, all highly combustible products. The top of the island contained the three large West India Docks, while down the middle were the Millwall Docks, with most of their docksides lined with shipping from all over the world, together with warehouses stuffed full of the cargoes those ships had carried. At the bottom of the Millwall Docks were the McDougall flour mills, whose tall silos provided an outstanding landmark for the enemy bombers, all of which made the island a highly flammable and thus tempting destination.

Other than the guns operated by the Royal Airforce, the island’s defences consisted of only four anti-aircraft guns, manned by the Royal Artillery. But all fire-fighting – whether spotting enemy bombers, reporting incendiary bombs or desperately trying to deal with raging fires or operating the ack-ack guns – was an extremely dangerous occupation. At the height of the Blitz – between 4September 1940 and May 1941 – an estimated 430 people were killed defending the Isle of Dogs. Moreover, the men and women of the Auxiliary Fire Service were expected to go on duty after having worked at their normal jobs during the day, before trying to stay awake and keep watch over the skies at night.

We were all very proud of Dad’s father. ‘Granddad Pierce’, as we called him, proudly wore his First World War medals throughout the London Blitz. He was also an amazingly modest man. Born in Brighton in June 1895 to a family of fishermen, at the age of nineteen he’d enlisted at the very beginning of the Great War and was posted to the French front in 1915.

Apparently, he never spoke about the horrors he’d witnessed on the battlefield and in the trenches. After losing his leg at the Somme and being mentioned in dispatches, he was evacuated back to England and, following a long spell in a field hospital, was eventually discharged after a year’s convalescence in 1917. He always reckoned that he’d been one of the lucky ones. But besides his war service in the Second World War, Granddad Pierce was known for his favourite party trick. This consisted of pulling up his trouser leg to enable his delighted grandchildren to see, touch and even rap their knuckles on his large, bright-pink false leg.

My mum, Betty Cornish, had grown up in Dagenham. She lived at 8 Elm Gardens, a mid-terraced house on the Becontree Estate, which was one of the largest public-housing estates in the world and was built between 1921 and 1935. Always headstrong and opinionated, Betty was born in January 1934, followed by her two younger brothers, Tony and Mike, who both rose well above their humble beginnings to become high-powered electronics engineers with Reuters in London. Their father John, my granddad, was a meter reader for the London Electricity Board, while their mum, 5Anne, worked at a Lyons Corner House in Fleet Street. I still own my granddad’s clock, which he was awarded after thirty years of service to the Electricity Board. Mum’s early claim to fame was that the 1966 World Cup-winning England manager Sir Alf Ramsey’s mum lived across the road.

All three Cornish children were clever, with Mum winning a scholarship to the Ursuline Convent in Brentwood in Essex. It was a huge achievement, but it wasn’t a happy experience for her. Most of the girls were fee-paying pupils. Unfortunately, even if it wasn’t true, my mother always felt they looked down their noses at the working-class scholarship girl from a Dagenham council estate. The school, which had opened in 1900, was strict and my mother regularly clashed with the nuns who ran it. Although easily clever enough to go into further education or university, she simply wasn’t interested. Because she had always loved looking after children, Mum had already decided to train as a nursery nurse in Stepney, in the East End of London.

Often, on the way home from work or on the weekends, she would take the bus to a roller-skating rink in Forest Gate. The building, originally a theatre and cinema, had a very large auditorium, stage and dance floor. The Art Deco building closed for good as a cinema just before the outbreak of the Second World War, but soon reopened as a roller-skating rink. It’s where my mum and dad first met in 1950, when she was sixteen and he was twenty-three. She’d dropped her ticket. Dad picked up the ticket, saying as he did so, ‘I think I should look after this – and you!’ In fact, he did indeed look after her for the rest of their married life – until he was struck down by Alzheimer’s disease when she, in turn, looked after him. It was a love affair that was to last for more than fifty years.

They often went to the rink on a wet Saturday afternoon, loving 6the roaring sound produced by thousands of clay wheels clattering across the hard wood and particularly enjoying the background organ music that blared out songs from the hit parade. For a while, in the early 1950s, roller skating was all the rage. Then, when the craze for roller skates died down, the rink became a music venue, hosting, among others, The Who and Jimi Hendrix. Sadly, it was demolished in 2005 to make way for an ugly brick building housing a ventilation shaft for a Channel Tunnel rail link.

Mum and Dad were married in the Holy Family Church in Oxbow Lane in Dagenham. Their wedding day was 4 April, Easter Saturday, 1953. Mum was nineteen and Dad was twenty-six. They married against the wishes of her parents, who thought that she was far too young. However, as they were married for forty-nine years, her parents definitely got that one wrong. Ironically, Nat King Cole’s ‘Too Young’ was one of her and Dad’s favourite songs and we played the music at his funeral. We also had Nat King Cole’s ‘Incredible’ – because that’s what he was, a point I made in his eulogy.

After their wedding, Betty and George went to Hastings for a week, with Susan, their eldest child, proving to be a honeymoon baby. But unfortunately, following Susan’s arrival, Mum lost two children who were both stillborn, a boy and a girl. So, while the loss of those babies devastated Mum and Dad, especially coming so soon after their decision to leave the Isle of Dogs for a new life in the countryside, it also seems likely that if either of those babies had lived, I would never have been adopted by the Pierce family.

When Mum and Dad arrived in Swindon in 1956, in a van containing a mattress and not much else – hired, as neither of them could drive – they were delighted to become the very first occupants of 173 Frobisher Drive. It was not only my family’s first home 7of their own but, as the first tenants of the neat three-bedroom, semi-detached house on the bright and newly built Walcot council estate, they were also among the first people to live on Frobisher Drive itself. It subsequently proved to be Betty’s home for fifty-nine years. Mum died peacefully in her sleep in the bedroom that she had shared with George for almost half a century.

As far as my parents were concerned, the house was an absolute palace after the cramped flat on the Isle of Dogs. Happy to have escaped the dirt and pollution of London – not to mention the dreaded winter fogs, thick as pea soup – the family were thrilled to find their house surrounded by rolling green fields, complete with grazing cows and sheep. In contrast to London, life in Swindon seemed idyllic, providing an abundance of fresh air and healthy exercise. I still recall Mum sending us off to pick berries and wild plums from the hedgerows in late summer, not just for making jam but also to make her famous apple and blackberry pies. Moreover, to add to their happiness, Dad had obtained a really good job working as a spot welder on the assembly line of the new Pressed Steel Fisher Car Company, which went on to become British Leyland. It had opened in 1955 and at its peak employed 6,600 workers.

Once a small market town, mentioned in the Domesday Book and set in some of England’s most glorious countryside, when I was a child, Swindon had a population of approximately 60,000. Whereas today, it is nudging towards 200,000, with its close proximity to the M4 and fast trains into London helping to accelerate the town’s expansion.

There’s no doubt that the factory was the magnet that drew so many Londoners to Swindon, which was also a major railway town, where very few of the town’s workforce were ever late for work. This 8was famously due to the fact that every morning, the railway company’s hooter sounded at 6.45 a.m. with a seventeen-second blast continuing intermittently until 7.30 a.m. Not only was the hooter our built-in alarm clock, but according to local legend, it was also possible to hear it well over 25 miles away.

Betty and George loved their new life in Swindon. Following their example, soon after they’d left the Isle of Dogs, two of Dad’s brothers, John and Vic, the latter with his wife Maureen, also moved to the town. And, just to complete Mum and Dad’s joy, it wasn’t long before my eldest sister, Susan, had a sister, Shirley, followed two years later by a brother, Christopher.

Mum, who had been raised as a Roman Catholic – with Dad happily converting to the faith when they married – made sure that they immediately became members of the local Holy Family Catholic church. My parents also joined the choir, although Dad was the more musical of the pair and had the better voice.

One Sunday in 1963, a charismatic priest from the Clifton Catholic Rescue Society officiated at the 11 a.m. mass, delivering a rousing sermon about the importance of the family. He told the parishioners, most of whom worked at Pressed Steel or for the railway, that there were dozens of babies at an orphanage called Nazareth House in Cheltenham, who desperately needed good, loving Catholic homes. He knew that money was tight for most of the congregation. But as he told them, ‘Love costs nothing.’

Following the priest’s urging, Betty and George began to give serious thought to adopting another son. They talked long and hard about it to each other. They also discussed it with Betty’s parents, who by now had also retired to Swindon. Mum’s mother Anne and her husband John were divided on the subject. Anne was all in favour, not least because she loved little boys. But Mum’s father, 9John, was opposed to the idea, fearing that an adopted child might possess bad genes or could upset her other three children.

However, Betty and George had made up their minds, going through a series of interviews with the Clifton Rescue Society to establish that they were suitable adopters. This is how they came into my life for the first time, via a two-hour bus ride from Swindon to Nazareth House Children’s Home in Cheltenham, in early 1963.

As it happened, their own three children, Susan, Shirley and Christopher, were all separated by two years. But, having always wanted four children, Betty and George decided that ideally, they’d like to adopt a second boy, around the age of two, to equalise the numbers. So, in May 1963, they were introduced to me and we all went out for a walk in the local park. They gave me a packet of sweets, Liquorice Allsorts, and they continued to visit Nazareth House regularly, often taking advantage of a lift to Cheltenham from a friend or neighbour as they didn’t have a car of their own. They took me out for walks and for lunch in local cafés. It seems that I never said very much, obviously being very shy and reticent with a limited vocabulary (some people might well think that I’ve made up for lost time since then!).

But whenever Mum and Dad notified Nazareth House that they’d like to come over to Cheltenham to take me out for the day, it always seemed that when they arrived I was dressed in long checked trousers just like Rupert Bear – at that time a popular cartoon in the Daily and Sunday Express. Puzzled, because it was a hot summer and I was only two years old, they also noticed that I seemed to be constantly scratching my legs. Concerned, they decided to try to solve this mystery. So, when George was walking with me around the gardens of Nazareth House, he ducked behind a tree and rolled up my checked trousers. He was utterly shocked 10to discover that my legs were a weeping mass of red-raw sores and blisters, bloody from where I had scratched them.

Later, Mum would tell me that she’d never forgotten the note of anger in her normally mild-mannered husband’s voice as George told her, ‘His legs are in a terrible state,’ adding grimly, ‘We’ve got to get the boy out of here, Bet. As soon as possible!’ It would be the best part of half a century before I would discover the potentially terrible truth behind why the orphanage had allowed my legs to get into such a mess.

There followed a series of weekend visits on the bus or hitching a lift with neighbours and friends who were lucky enough to have cars before Betty and George took a big step, taking me home to meet their own children for the first time. The youngest, Christopher, who was only four years old, was excited at the prospect of having a younger brother to try to boss around. This was a habit that never deserted him as we were growing up.

Mum and Dad also bought me some new clothes. My favourite aunty, Beth, who was married to Mum’s younger brother Mike, recalls one of the first times she met me in Swindon. I clambered onto her lap and declared with great pride, ‘This is my jumper,’ as I pointed to it. ‘This is my shirt. These are my trousers. These are my socks. And these are my pants!’ According to Beth, I ran through my entire wardrobe, which, in retrospect, is not surprising as I’d never had my very own clothes before. In Nazareth House, the children’s clothes were stored haphazardly in a large cupboard, creating a constant free-for-all so that I never knew which clothes I might find available to wear at any one time.

Luckily for me, it also seemed that Susan, Shirley and Christopher enthusiastically approved of the idea to adopt me, which must have been a considerable relief to my soon-to-be parents. In 11November 1963, I was in Swindon on a weekend visit when the orphanage was suddenly struck by a bout of measles. The home was swiftly put into quarantine, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to return to Nazareth House for some time. Ever practical, Betty and George suggested that I should stay with them in Swindon for good and it was agreed with the Clifton Catholic Rescue Society that they would formally become my foster parents. This was a result that suited everyone. Betty and George would no longer have to endure the long and tiresome four-hour round trip to Cheltenham. It would also enable them to more easily integrate me into family life, before the adoption was approved.

Unfortunately, it meant that I never had the opportunity to say goodbye to the nuns and staff at the orphanage, nor to any of the little friends I’d made during the two years I’d spent at Nazareth House, the only home I’d ever known – which must have been hugely unsettling for a toddler and is possibly why, for the next few months, I slept in a cot in Betty and George’s bedroom. Apparently, I regularly endured very disturbing nightmares.

Even now, so many years later, I can still see the ‘nanny goat’, with its menacing horns, gazing down at me from a high arched window, which must have originated from something frightening in Nazareth House. There was also another, terrifying nightmare, where I found myself in a pram, being pushed aimlessly through dimly lit streets by a ghostly female figure whose face I could never clearly see. I’ve often wondered if that could have been my birth mother.

However, as I became part of the Pierce family, the nightmares woke me up less and less. Every night before bed, Betty slathered cream on my chapped, red legs. Thanks to her tender care, the painful sores gradually disappeared, but she never discovered what had 12originally caused this problem. My formal adoption was finalised on 11 March 1964, at the county court in Clarence Street, Swindon, just one month after my third birthday. My parents had to pay a £1 court fee. I’ve always hoped they felt that I turned out to be a real bargain.

As I learned a very long time later, a woman inspector from the Catholic Rescue Society made an official visit to the family home at the end of July 1964 and was delighted by what she saw:

Patrick appears to have settled happily with this family. He was finishing his lunch when I arrived. He greeted me shyly but talked happily and brightly to Mr Pierce and [his brother] Christopher. He has given no trouble, according to Mrs Pierce. It seems that Patrick has settled sufficiently to display his stubbornness occasionally [an attribute I still have today!] but to no great extent and it has been easily handled apparently. The children are very fond of him and have readily accepted him into the family.

By this time, I called Betty ‘Mummy’ or ‘Mum’. Apparently, the word came easily. As I grew older, I sometimes wondered if I’d ever called my birth mother by the same loving term. But it wasn’t the same for George. Try as they might to persuade me to call him ‘Daddy’ or ‘Dad’, in those early days, I always referred to him as ‘Man’, which was probably because there had been only nuns in my life at Nazareth House, apart from a priest at Sunday mass, of course. And my unknown birth father was presumed to be either dead or to have disappeared from my birth mother’s life before I was born.

The following month, there was another report by the now renamed Clifton Catholic Children’s Society: 13

Patrick, now known as Andrew, seems well and happy. He appears to be one of the family and is obviously loved by them all. He has given no trouble – eats and sleeps well, plays happily on his own and with the other children and seems quite content. His speech has improved and his vocabulary has widened considerably since going to the Pierce family.

Clearly, in the orphanage I had been withdrawn, shy and obviously unhappy. This would explain the absence of any conversational skills, even though there had been dozens of other children to talk and play with. As for now being called ‘Andrew’, it seems that my new parents had come up with what they thought of as a clever wheeze to introduce me to my new name. ‘Patrick’s in the cupboard,’ they used to say, pointing to the floor-to-ceiling kitchen pantry cupboard whenever I was confused at being called Andrew. They got this idea from me because I refused to allow the toilet door to be closed, constantly saying, ‘They shut me in the cupboard.’ Warm and loving parents as they were, neither George or Betty realised at the time the amount of potential psychological damage that lay ahead for ‘Patrick’ – the little lost boy from the orphanage who retreated into the deep and dark recesses of his psyche, only to come tumbling out, with totally unforeseen circumstances, at a distant point far in the future.

There’s no doubt that the Catholic Church played a major role in the life of our family. Like my brother and sisters, I went to Catholic junior and secondary schools, which in my case, as I learned much later, would also have been a condition of the adoption agreement with the Rescue Society. And needless to say, our family never missed Sunday mass or a holy day of obligation (often a saint’s feast day, when you are expected to attend mass).

14As kids, however, one drawback to our religion came when we went on holiday, visiting various seaside locations for a precious two weeks in the summer, which meant that we usually travelled on a Saturday. But no sooner had we reached our destination – and were longing to jump into our swimming suits, before dashing off to play on the beach – than we’d find ourselves dispatched into the local town with stern instructions to find the nearest Catholic church, all because Mum needed to know the time and place for mass the next day, which was always a Sunday.

Along with my brother and sisters, I was sent off at the age of four to the local primary school. Just about all of my friends lived locally and, if Catholic, we all went to the same school. Most of my recollections of that time concern the fun we had in the summer holidays – which, in my memory, were always hot and sunny. Practically living on my push-bike – my most treasured possession – I played the usual childish games with my friends, often thoroughly irritating the local adult population. Our favourite, and the most fun, involved sneaking into gardens and orchards, happily ‘scrumping’ apples and other fruit before taking to our heels to escape our inevitable discovery; often laughing so hard as we ran away that more often than not we dropped our booty. I was thin, wiry and a fast runner, so luckily I was never caught, unlike some of my friends who were regularly captured and given a good hiding, although somehow this never seemed to stop them joining in the fun. In the winter, we had regular snowball fights during the Christmas holidays and, of course, on our way to and from school.

The subject of snowballing brings the headmaster of my junior school immediately to mind. A Scotsman, James Valleley prided himself on being what he called ‘a disciplinarian’. In fact, he was a horrible man. An outrageous snob – with absolutely nothing to be 15snobbish about – and a cruel bully. He humiliated me by sacking me as a prefect at the end of the two-week probation period in our final fourth year. I was replaced by a new boy at the school, one Rupert Gordon-Walker. A nice boy. A posh boy. Unlike most of the other kids at our junior school. His uncle, Patrick Gordon Walker, was a former Labour Education Secretary. Valleley would have purred with pleasure at the thought of cosying up to a political luminary. It was my first exposure to elitism.

Many years later, I got a message from Rupert Gordon Walker via a journalist colleague whom he had known at university. Now a big hitter in the City, he apologised for his role in my schoolboy humiliation. It was 1998. I was touched and surprised that all those years later he could even remember his short-lived promotion. He was at the school for only one term – how on earth did he connect me with that bruised eleven-year-old some twenty-five years later? As for Valleley, it was well known he was dissatisfied with not having been promoted to a better and more prestigious school. He seemed to delight in thrashing the young children in his care with a long, thick leather belt. I specifically remember him once ‘belting’, as he called it, over 100 of us for throwing snowballs at one another in the school playground. Looking back now, recalling his flushed cheeks and the manic grin on his face as he excitedly smashed a large piece of chalk on the desk in front of him with the leather belt – to more effectively demonstrate how much it would hurt – I suspect that he was, in fact, gaining some kind of perverse satisfaction from his actions.

After a bit of a rocky start – I struggled with maths, couldn’t stand woodwork and technical drawing lessons and was easily distracted – I was fundamentally much happier at my secondary school St Joseph’s, a Roman Catholic comprehensive. St Joe’s (as 16it was always known) was the only Catholic senior school in the rapidly expanding area, which meant that it was fast becoming one of the largest schools in the county. In fact, it was so huge that by the time I became a pupil it was split between two sites a good mile apart from one another.

I’d always been in the top stream in primary school, where I had, on the whole, got on well with most of my teachers. Enjoying sports, I was in the junior school relay team and was also a champion hurdler. Besides representing the school in speech competitions, I was also the chief altar boy and, until my voice broke, I sang solos at the Christmas and Easter church services. But, despite being placed in the top stream of the senior school, I appear to have found it hard to cope with the hundreds of strange and unknown faces, both in the classroom and the playground. For whatever reason, I definitely seemed to go slightly off the rails during my first year. Disruptive behaviour, such as answering teachers back (never a good idea!), talking too much and regularly being put on detention during school lunch breaks resulted in a first-year report that made for grisly reading.

A no-nonsense disciplinarian at home, my mother exploded when she read the report. In fact, both Mum and Dad were baffled as to why I was behaving so badly at school. Unfortunately, there was worse to come. Following the disastrous school report, I found myself demoted from the A to the B stream for my second year, something I found utterly humiliating and which provoked yet another eruption from Mum, who deployed a slipper with devastating effect, as she had high hopes that I would make a real success of school and go on to better things.

Crushed at having been so stupid, and vowing that I would not let my parents down again, I worked flat out for the next two years 17and was happy to find myself readmitted to the top stream in my fourth year for the start of my GCE syllabus. However, there proved to be a silver lining to my relegation to the B stream, because I was lucky enough to find myself being taught English by Mrs Bennett. A highly inspiring teacher, Mrs Bennett, among many other projects all designed to inspire her pupils, had set up a class newspaper.

I particularly enjoyed writing about local sporting fixtures. Mrs Bennett was so taken with my match reports on Swindon Town Football Club – languishing, as usual, at the lower levels of the football league – that she demanded to know from which newspaper or magazine I’d copied them. When I managed to convince her that they were entirely my own work, she uttered a few prescient words that, unbeknown to her, helped to shape my future adult life. ‘Well, you’ve definitely got the gift of the gab, Pierce!’ she said, before turning to the rest of the class. ‘Instead of chatting endless nonsense in my classroom, especially when I’m trying to teach you all to appreciate some decent English literature, you’d do well to follow this lad’s example. Because, providing he works hard in my class, he’ll be able to chat to his heart’s content as a newspaper reporter. I also happen to think,’ she added with a grin, ‘that he might look quite good in a dirty trench coat and hat.’ The class laughed. But it was the first time that an idea of what could be, maybe, my possible future career began to form in my mind.

Mrs Bennett, to whom I obviously owe so much, was also responsible for pointing out that if I was really serious about going into journalism, I should put together a scrapbook of cuttings. In those days I was sports mad (unlike today!), so – with bare-faced cheek – I wrote to the Daily Mirror, giving my opinion on the day’s burning issues, such as who I thought the next England manager should be after Alf Ramsey was sacked.

18In fact, I often succeeded in winning the £10 ‘Star Letter’ prize, which for a schoolboy on a council estate was, at the time, a huge amount of money. I wrote to the Daily Mirror because that was the Labour-Party supporting newspaper my parents always read. In fact, just about everyone on Walcot read either the Mirror or The Sun. As part of my efforts to become a journalist, I continued bombarding the Daily Mirror with letters to the editor. One of the letters, published when I was fourteen, even made my mother cry. And this would prove to be instrumental in furthering my future attempts to gain a job as a reporter.

19

CHAPTER TWO

By the time I was in the sixth form at school and studying for my A-levels, I’d set my heart on joining a newspaper. I was hoping to go straight from school by gaining a job as a trainee reporter, after having already ruled out any idea of going to university. While I knew that my parents would do their very best to support me, they would have to face the likelihood of making a large financial contribution to my university grant. It would have been very tough on them, particularly as none of my siblings had done A-levels, let alone gone to university. Besides, Mum and Dad had never had much spare cash.

To help with the family finances, I took a job in ‘Bob’s’, a local greengrocer’s in a little row of shops on the Walcot estate. Every Thursday night I traipsed around Walcot selling lottery tickets for Swindon Town Football Club. I also worked on the giant dish-washing machine in Swindon’s BHS. I paid my parents £3 a week housekeeping. So, with three kids off their hands, they could comfortably afford two holidays a year. It was another reason why I didn’t want my attendance at university to prevent my parents from having that second holiday, which I knew meant such a lot to them. So, armed with my book of cuttings, and some six months before 20my final school exams were due to start, I drew up a list of a dozen newspapers within a sixty-mile radius of Swindon. But the process of applying for a job proved to be very dispiriting. If I managed to get a reply – I’d even enclosed stamped, addressed envelopes with my applications – I had the distinct feeling that the editors were sneering at my efforts. ‘We prefer to interview candidates who have a degree’ was the usual comment.

Eventually, there was only one newspaper left to write to on my list. Home from school during the Christmas holidays, I told Mum I wasn’t going to send off that last letter. ‘I’ve written to eleven papers. And every one of those who’ve bothered to reply have all been really snotty,’ I grumbled, feeling heavily depressed at my failure to succeed in securing even one interview. Especially, as I gloomily told myself, I had no degree and couldn’t even guarantee that I was going to get high grades in my A-level exams.

The newspaper I was petulantly refusing to write to was the Gloucestershire Echo in Cheltenham. My mother did her best to change my mind, saying that she had an idea that this time I would succeed. But I had an uneasy feeling about Cheltenham itself. I wasn’t sure why. Was it due to the fact I’d spent the first two years of my life there, in the Nazareth House Orphanage? Eventually, Mum, who never took no for an answer, persuaded me to write to the Echo. But I still remember thinking, as I walked to the post box, that I had little chance of success. Especially for a boy from a comprehensive school, who lived on a council estate and whose dad worked in a local factory, light years away from the likelihood of being employed by a newspaper in a posh spa town like Cheltenham.

So, doing my best to put that last application completely out of my mind, I went back to school, totally unmoved when, about ten 21days later, I got home one evening to find a typed envelope addressed to me. I was pretty sure that it was from the Gloucestershire Echo, and even more certain that it was likely to say something along the lines of, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ But… to my utter amazement I discovered that, against all the odds, I was being invited for an interview. I was ecstatic! All my doubts were immediately forgotten as I realised that my wonderful mum had been proven right, yet again.

On the train to Cheltenham, I felt resplendent in my new sports jacket and slacks. I could even see my reflection in my polished shoes. And, as I was ushered into Tom Hoy’s office, I was thrilled to see that the editor was busy leafing through the sheaf of Daily Mirror cuttings I had included along with my application. Softly but well-spoken, with slicked-back hair and large glasses, he immediately made me feel at ease. I soon got the impression that he wasn’t particularly a sports fan, because the letter he was focused on was the one I had written some four years earlier that had made my mother cry. He asked me to explain the circumstances that had led me to write and send it to the Daily Mirror. So, I took a deep breath and told him the story.

It happened that Mum was home from work one day. And in her lunchbreak, as usual, she was engrossed in the Daily Mirror. I had noticed she was reading a spread by Marje Proops, the paper’s legendary ‘agony aunt’, who was a regular fixture on TV and radio. But I was surprised to note that Mum’s eyes were red. Had she been crying? Before I could say anything, she pushed the paper across the table and said very quietly, her voice sounding wobbly, ‘Your dad and I would never stand in your way if you ever wanted to track down your birth mother.’ I was stunned. What on earth was Mum talking about? I couldn’t remember the subject of my birth 22mother ever having been mentioned. But, before I could gather my scattered wits, my mother rose swiftly from the table and hurried off back to work.

Totally mystified, I picked up the paper to discover that Marje Proops had written an article firmly supporting the government’s decision to allow adopted children to track down their birth parents. Upon reading further, I learned that Marje thought it right that people like me should be able to make contact with their birth mothers. The government had acted to change the law because so many children who were given up for adoption in the 1950s and 1960s, when single mothers were social pariahs, wanted to find out who they really were. Harold Wilson’s government had proved sympathetic to the idea and the law was being changed.

Basically, the idea seemed to be an attempt to try to piece together the first few days, weeks, months or even years of their lives. It took some minutes for me to grasp the full ramifications of what Marje was saying. And even longer to take on board the fact that I was one of the people she was writing about; one of those people she thought had the legal right to know about their heritage. It was the first I’d heard of the change in adoption law. It had certainly never been mentioned at home or school. Mum and Dad must have been painfully aware of the change in legislation but they never mentioned it to me and I must have missed it on the news.

But while I was intrigued by the idea, I really hated to see my usually tough mum so upset. So, no sooner had she left the house than I dashed off a letter to Marje Proops on my mother’s baby Brother typewriter. Among other points, I argued that ‘blood wasn’t necessarily thicker than water’. And why would I need to find my so-called ‘birth mother’, when I had the mum I loved at home? I’d thought that I was writing a personal letter to Marje. But, to 23my astonishment, it was the leading letter on the readers’ letters page a few days later. No one from the paper had contacted me, so it came as a complete surprise. Although, to be fair, we weren’t on the telephone, so the Daily Mirror would have struggled to make contact, even if they’d wanted to.

It was a routine day at work for Mum at WH Smith’s supply depot, when one of the girls in the warehouse where she worked exclaimed, ‘Ooh, Betty! Your Andrew is in the Mirror again.’ Instinctively, my mother turned to the sports pages, but her colleague Peggy said, ‘No. Not there, Betty. It’s here, near the front.’ After Mum read the letter, she dissolved into floods of tears. By this time, all the other girls in the warehouse were crying too. Mum was so moved that she even took the rare step of telephoning my dad at British Leyland, where he was a spot welder on the assembly line, to tell him to read the letters page. Always more emotional than Mum, he also burst into tears on reading his son’s tribute to his mother.

As for me, the first I knew of the letter’s publication was when I went to pick up the front door key from our neighbour, ‘Aunty’ Maureen Tilsley. Like my parents, she had moved from London to Swindon after the war. So, she told me all about the letter when I knocked at her door after school. Like any typical fourteen-year-old, I was deeply embarrassed by all the fuss. I didn’t want to talk about Nazareth House, and certainly not about my birth mother, about whom, at that stage in my life, I knew absolutely nothing. In fact, I could hardly look at Mum, who probably just wanted a big hug from her youngest child, when she came home from work. To be honest, I can remember that my mind was already on school the next day, because I knew the other kids would torment me. And, of course, they did. I had to put up with being called ‘Marje’ for a few 24months until another boy made a right fool of himself by calling me that out loud in the classroom, which earned him a stinging rebuke from our form teacher Mrs Greevy and after which I was left in peace. The nickname vanished.

But winding forward to February 1979, it seemed that Mr Hoy, the editor of the Gloucestershire Echo, loved the letter for one very good reason. He just happened to be the father of two adopted children. ‘I hope my children feel the same way about my wife and me,’ he said. A week later, he wrote to offer me a job, starting immediately after my A-level exams.

It was like a dream come true. It was far and away the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. And, what’s more, I had done it on my own, with no help from my school. So, it’s no wonder that even to this day, I firmly believe that I got my big break in journalism simply because I was adopted. As for my mum, she cherished that letter I’d written as a fourteen-year-old until the day she died, which is why I could never tell her when I eventually broke my teenage promise: that I was finally making the decision to try to find my birth mother.

Needless to say, after I received that wonderful offer from the Gloucestershire Echo, I threw myself even more enthusiastically into my studies, only too well aware that the job offer depended upon my passing at least two exams with good grades. I was studying English, History and Economics and I was pretty sure that if I worked really hard, I could achieve success. The exams came and went in a blur and I was reasonably optimistic that I’d done well. As I was to learn later, I had indeed done so – achieving very good grades in all three subjects. So, as I had two weeks before starting work on the Gloucestershire Echo, I joined some friends from school and enjoyed a week on a religious retreat, operated by the De La 25Salle Brothers at their rambling country house in Berkshire. That brief holiday was followed by a week at home which I spent working full-time at Sainsbury’s in Swindon, stacking shelves and on the checkout, in order to save some money for the deposit on my new home – a small rented bedsit in a house in Cheltenham.

On the first day of my journalism apprenticeship, I was, as you might expect, a bundle of nerves. After all, I had only left school some two weeks earlier. For the past six years, I’d hoped and prayed for the chance to somehow find my way into journalism. And yet now, almost unbelievably, here I was! Actually standing in the newsroom of a well-established and highly respected local newspaper, while all about me typewriters clattered, telephones rang, reporters shouted at one another and photographers, laden down with cameras, frantically came and went. There was absolutely no doubt about it. I had arrived! And what’s more, it was every bit as exciting as I’d dreamed it might be.

I soon found myself pitched straight in at the deep end, being taken to meet the most senior police officer in the town, who chatted to the reporters face to face each morning while updating them on the local crime scene. The ‘job’, or assignment, was listed in the newspaper’s daily diary under the heading ‘Police Calls’. Unfortunately, I can’t recall anything about the conversation with the chief superintendent, who only had some minor misdemeanours to relay, clearly none of which were deemed interesting enough to be written up in that day’s paper. But I do vividly remember a monologue from the deputy news editor Roger Clement, who took me with him as he drove to the police station. On the way, he made a point of advising me to take driving lessons, so that I could buy myself a vehicle like his and thus fiddle the mileage on my expenses. He also talked non-stop about why – if I knew what was good for me 26– I should join the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). I listened politely and made no comment, since clearly none was expected or called for. Interestingly, he omitted to mention the fact that only a few months earlier, when I’d already been offered my new job, there had been an NUJ strike at the Echo, which had clearly made little difference as the paper had managed to be published and sold as usual.

The next day I was introduced to Albert Shipton, the editor of the Echo’s sister paper the Cheltenham Chronicle, which was published weekly. Mr Shipton then proceeded to deliver a lecture about why I should join the Institute of Journalists (IoJ) – the NUJ’s smaller rival. But I knew that the newspaper had only been published during the NUJ strike because the IoJ hacks had carried on working. His speech turned out to be yet another long monologue with, once again, no response being required from me. So, I listened politely in silence. Little did either of my counsellors know or suspect, but I had absolutely no intention of joining either union. My own, private views on the world of trade unions in general had been coloured by the serious economic damage they’d arbitrarily inflicted on my own family – and hundreds of other households in Swindon – during the 1970s. My dad, George, was on the assembly line at British Leyland – a large company, which was proving to be an industrial basket case. He was constantly coming home early from work after yet another wildcat strike had been decreed by an undemocratic and unrepresentative show of hands. It was always the same scenario, with the militant shop steward declaring, ‘It’s a vote for our brother unionists. Out, brothers, out!’

One of the many reasons I was privately rooting for Mrs Thatcher concerned her pledge, as Conservative leader, to bring in secret ballots before strike action could be formally agreed. I thought it 27could prove transformative for my family and was thus why I’d decided to vote for the Tory Party in the 1979 general election. Besides which, Britain had just been dragged through the ‘Winter of Discontent’, when even the dead couldn’t be buried because of the strikes paralysing the country. As far as I was concerned, the Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, had sold out to the militant trade unions. Yet, despite the damage being inflicted on the country, one of our neighbours who had dared to put up a ‘Vote Tory’ poster in her window had her reputation brutally torn to shreds by the women who came into Bob’s – the local greengrocer’s store, where I worked on Sunday mornings. ‘Who does she think she is?’ was the general consensus, which is why I kept silent about my plans to vote for Mrs Thatcher.

Unfortunately, in the polling station in May 1979, my big brother, Chris, loudly and angrily denounced me after looking over my shoulder to see which way I had voted. He was absolutely furious at what I had done, ranting and raving all the way home, loudly telling anyone we passed about how I had, quite deliberately, let down the working class. But, as I’d hoped, Mrs Thatcher duly made history by being elected as our first woman Prime Minister. And, what’s more, she kept her pledge to tame the excesses of the militant trade unions.

Who would have thought that my first adult, permanent job two months after that historic general election would take me back to Cheltenham? The very same town where I’d spent the first two and a half years of my life in the Nazareth House Orphanage. As it turned out, on the very day I was due to begin my new job, my parents were away on their annual two-week factory holiday. So, my eldest sister Sue and her husband Ian kindly drove me to Cheltenham on the Sunday before I started work.

28My sister cried all the way home due to the fact that she’d been utterly repelled by the horrors of my new bedsit accommodation, mainly the overwhelming stench of cats’ urine in the communal hallway. For my part, I was never bothered about the bedsit itself. It was by far the cheapest I’d been able to find, but still cost me the princely sum of £12 a week. Nowadays, of course, the rent seems incredibly cheap, but it was a huge chunk from my £19 weekly take-home pay. However, I was young and all I cared about was doing well at my new job. Although, I have to admit that as Sue and Ian drove away, I did feel a cold hand clutching at my insides. Loneliness? Fear? Nerves? Probably a mixture of all three. Moreover, I couldn’t help thinking about Nazareth House itself. I’d hardly ever visited Cheltenham, so I knew nothing about the layout of the town, nor whether the orphanage might still be there.

I woke early the next day, Monday 16 July 1979, for my first day at work as a reporter. Looking back now, more than forty years since that warm summer day, I can hardly believe my luck at having been in continuous employment as a journalist ever since; particularly in a profession which is renowned for being unstable and insecure.

At the time, of course, I was as green as grass. But luckily, I had the sense to know it. Also, I was thrilled beyond measure to find myself working with eight highly experienced reporters. Yet, even in the middle of a typical noisy newsroom in those far-off days, I’d immediately noticed the long row of large, grey metal filing cabinets. I already knew that they would contain the life-blood of a journalist: the newspaper’s cuttings library. I also remember making a mental note to take a good look, if and when the opportunity arose to do so, because I knew that there was bound to be a file in there on Nazareth House. Although, of course, that would have to wait until I had become an established reporter there. But even 29then, I knew that I could only have a good look through the filing cabinets when I could be absolutely certain of there being no one around, particularly as I was anxious to avoid any difficult, personal questions.

As the new kid on the block, my first few weeks at the Echo were uneventful. I was still a gawky, awkward teenager and suffered the occasional breakout of painful acne. Doing my best to look presentable, I wore a smart jacket, trousers, shirt and tie every day. I had a ’60s haircut and went to the launderette every week. I had only one pair of shoes: black, standard lace-ups. Altogether, I was totally in awe of my much smarter, older colleagues, among whom was the extraordinary Harriet Tongue, who had gone to Cheltenham Ladies’ College – in those days known to be one of the best schools in the world. In fact, the only other time I’d heard such a cut-glass accent was when the Queen delivered her Christmas message! They certainly never made women like Harriet on the council estate where I came from. However, while I initially found her very intimidating, by the end of my four years on the paper, I was proud to regard her not just as a colleague but as a good friend.

Another colleague was Ros Clarke, who, like myself, had been adopted. But Ros had had a very different start in life, since her family were multi-millionaires and owners of the Heart of England newspaper group, while her father, Sir Stanley Clarke, drove a Rolls-Royce. This was certainly very different to my dad, who drove an Austin Allegro – one of the most mocked cars ever to leave a British car factory production line. My father had worked on the car at his British Leyland car factory and was blissfully unaware of the scorn with which it was regarded by sneering motoring pundits. Ros herself, however, couldn’t have been a nicer person, but we rarely swapped notes about our upbringing, other than the fact I knew 30she’d been adopted as a baby. She came home to Swindon with me once for a family wedding. Mum and Dad were a bit nervous, having never met a millionaire’s daughter before. But then neither had I, until I went to live and work in Cheltenham. In the end, they thought she was wonderful and they both absolutely loved her.

Two months after starting work on the Echo, I was working late in the office one evening, when I realised that I was quite alone. This was clearly my big chance. I decided to find and take a good look at the Nazareth House file in the newspaper’s cuttings library. The Echo had been founded in 1873, and I knew that the orphanage had opened around the same time, so there should be no problem in discovering all I needed to know about its history and the current details of the children’s home. My heart fluttered as I drew open the cabinet containing the files beginning with ‘N’. There were several Nazareth House envelopes. My throat was dry. My stomach was churning. But, as I pulled out a cutting at random, my heart nearly missed a beat…