Over the next few weeks we wooed each other in fonts and pixels – an email courtship that couldn’t be happening, I thought, because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women. But something was going on and I had no idea what to do about it.
I had lunch with my friend, the writer Ali Smith. She said, ‘Just kiss her.’
Susie went to talk to her daughter in New York. Lianna said, ‘Just kiss her, Mummy.’
So we did.
In the place of trust with her I felt I could keep going with my search. Adoption begins on your own – you are solitary. The baby knows it has been abandoned – I am sure of that. Therefore, the journey back should not be done alone. The terrors and fears are unexpected and out of control. You need someone to hold on to. Someone who will hold on to you. That’s what Susie did for me day by day. Others of my friends did their part. Whatever else, the crazy time, and the adoption search, taught me to ask for help; not to act like Wonder Woman.
I had confided my fears to my friend Ruth Rendell. Ruth has known me since I was twenty-six, and she lent me a cottage to write in when I was trying to make my way. I wrote The Passion in her house. She had been the Good Mother – never judging, quietly supporting, letting me talk, letting me be.
She is a Labour peer, and therefore a member of the House of Lords. She knows a lot of people and she thought she could help. She summoned a few baronessess for a private discussion, and the consensus was that I should proceed with the utmost caution.
I am well known in the UK and if I was going to meet my mother I wanted her to meet me, not my public profile. And I could not face the newspapers getting hold of the story. Oranges is an adoption story, and Oranges is the book that is identified with me.
I may be paranoid but it is justified paranoia. I have had journalists stationed in my garden to ‘discover’ my girlfriends, and I fretted that some journalists would be only too happy to ‘discover’ lost mothers too.
So I just didn’t feel comfortable filling in a form and putting it in the post and going and telling my story to a social worker – a mandatory requirement in the UK, if you want to open a closed adoption file.
My search was complicated by the fact that prior to 1976, all UK adoptions were made on the basis of closed records. Mothers and children alike were assured of lifetime anonymity. When the law changed, people like me could apply for our original birth certificates, and perhaps then contact our long-lost relatives. But everything has to be done visibly and formally. This seemed fraught to me.
Ruth put me in touch with Anthony Douglas, chief of Cafcass – the UK children and family court advisory service. He is adopted himself, and after a meeting where he understood my predicament, he offered to help me to trace my mother without the risk of the whole thing leaking into the public domain before I was ready.
I gave Anthony the names I had carried with me for forty-two years – the names of my parents -Jessica and John – and their surnames, but I can’t write those here.
A few weeks later he called me to say that my file had been found – but only just, because the Southport Records Office – in my case the basement – had been flooded with seawater and many files had been irretrievably damaged. I looked up to heaven. Mrs Winterson had obviously heard that I was hunting and arranged a flood.
A week later Anthony called again – my file had been opened but the names I had given him did not match the names on the file.
So whose was that birth certificate that I had found in the drawer?
And who am I?
*
The next step was to take the risk I was so afraid of taking and apply to the Home Office in the usual way, which meant visiting a social worker at the General Register Office in Southport, Lancashire.
Susie took the day off work to come with me and we agreed that I would travel up to London and meet her on the day, because it is better to sleep in your own bed the night before such things.
That morning the train I had intended to catch was cancelled, and the next train slowed and slowed with a faulty engine. The slower the train the faster my heart rate. And I had ended up sitting beside someone I knew vaguely, who talked more the less we moved.
I realised that by the time I reached Paddington I would have exactly fourteen minutes to get over to King’s Cross. Impossible. This was London. It was at least twenty minutes in a taxi. There was only one hope and that was Virgin Limobikes – a motorbike taxi service I use.
As I ran out of Paddington Station the big bike was revved up. I jumped on the back and roared and veered through the London traffic, and although I am no pussycat, I had to close my eyes.
Eight minutes later I was on the platform with three minutes to go, and there was Susie – all five foot two of her – in her suede cowboy boots and beads, short skirt, rumpled hair and a Calvin Klein golden coat, looking kind-faced and gorgeous, but jamming her body in the doorway, and part-bossing part-flirting with the bemused guard, because she wasn’t going to let the train leave till I was on it.
I fell through the door. The whistle blew.
We were on our way to the General Register Office with my passport and my two creased and crossed-out bits of paper – the court order and the Baby MOT. I had weighed 6 pounds 9 ounces.
Susie and I are sitting in a functional office of the kind recognisable anywhere in the world; fibreboard and veneer desk with metal legs, a low coffee table set round with ugly chairs semi-upholstered in Martian green and psychotic orange. Carpet tiles on the floor. A filing cabinet and a noticeboard. Big radiator. Bare window.
Susie is among the most skilled psychoanalysts in the world. She is smiling at me as the meeting begins, saying nothing, holding me in her mind. I could feel that very clearly.
The social worker I have come to see is a warm and spontaneous woman called Ria Hayward.
She talks for a while about data protection, and about the various UK Adoption Acts, and about the usual routes of contact. If I wanted to go further there were formalities. There always are.
She looks at my pieces of paper – the court order and the Baby MOT – and she notices that my mother had breastfed me.
‘That was the one thing she could give you. She gave you what she could. She didn’t have to do that and it would have been a lot easier for her if she hadn’t. It is such a bond – breastfeeding. When she gave you up at six weeks old you were still part of her body.’
I do not want to cry. I am crying.
Then Ria passes me her own piece of paper with a sticker over it.
‘This is the name of your birth mother, and this is your original name. I never look at it because I think the adopted person should see this first.’
I am standing up. I can’t breathe.
‘Is this it then?’
Susie and Ria are both smiling at me, as I take the paper over to the window. I read the names. Tears then.
I don’t know why. Why do we cry? The names read like runes.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights.
Ria: ‘I have counselled so many mothers over the years who are giving up their babies for adoption, and I tell you, Jeanette, they never want to do it. You were wanted – do you understand that?’
No. I have never felt wanted. I am the wrong crib.
‘Do you understand that, Jeanette?’
No. And all my life I have repeated patterns of rejection. My success with my books felt like gatecrashing. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn’t believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated, but I did know that I wasn’t wanted.
And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and steady way – the triangles of marriages and complex affiliations. I have failed to love well where I might have done, and I have stayed in relationships too long because I did not want to be a quitter who di
d not know how to love.
But I did not know how to love. If I could have faced that simple fact about myself, and the likelihood that someone with my story (my stories, both real and invented) would have big problems with love, then, then, what?
Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.
Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.
We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.
In my work I found a way to talk about love – and that was real. I had not found a way to love. That was changing.
I am sitting in the room with Susie. She loves me. I want to accept it. I want to love well. I am thinking about the last two years and how I am trying my best to dissolve the calcifications around my heart.
Ria smiles and her voice comes from a long way off. All of this seems too present, because it is so uncomfortable, and too far away, because I can’t focus. Ria smiles.
‘You were wanted, Jeanette.’
*
On the train home Susie and I open half a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon. ‘Affect regulation,’ she says, and, as always with Susie, ‘How are you feeling?’
In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.
Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.
Feeling is frightening.
Well, I find it so.
The train was quiet in the exhausted way of late-home commuters. Susie was sitting opposite me, reading, her feet wrapped round my feet under the table. I keep running a Thomas Hardy poem through my head.
Never to bid good-bye
Or lip me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word, while I
Saw morning harden upon the wall,
Unmoved, unknowing
That your great going
Had place that moment, and altered all.
It was a poem I learned after Deborah left me, but the ‘great going’ had already happened at six weeks old.
The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.
*
Ria had given me the name of the court that might still hold my adoption records. Life was local in 1960, and while I had thought that I might be looking at somewhere in Manchester, it turned out that my records were in Accrington. I had walked past them every day of my life until I had left home.
I wrote a simple letter asking if the file had been kept.
A couple of weeks later I received a reply; yes, the file had been located, and now my request to see it would be placed before the judge.
I didn’t like this; Ria had told me that it was my right to see the records, although no one could know what might or might not be there. Sometimes there is a lot of material, sometimes very little. Whatever else, I might find the name of the adoption society who had placed me with the Wintersons – the name that had been so violently torn off the top of the yellowing and faded Baby MOT.
I wanted to see those records. Who was this judge, this unknown male in authority? I was angry, but I knew enough to know that I was reaching into a very old radioactive anger.
Susie had gone to NewYork City and been marooned by the ash cloud that grounded all the aeroplanes across Europe and the Atlantic.
I was alone when another letter came from the court. The judge had spoken. ‘Applicant should fill in the usual form and refer back.’
Get a solicitor, advised the letter.
I sat on the back step looking at it over and over again like someone who can’t read. My body was slight-shaking all over in the way that you do if you get caught in an electric fence.
I went into the kitchen, picked up a plate, and threw it at the wall . . . ‘Applicant . . . usual form . . . refer back . . .’ It’s not a fucking credit-card referral, you asshole.
And what happened next makes me ashamed but I will force myself to write it: I wet myself.
I don’t know why or how. I know that I lost bladder control and that I sat down on the step soiled and wet and I couldn’t get up to clean myself and I cried in the way that you do when there is nothing but crying.
There was nothing to hold on to. I wasn’t Jeanette Winterson in her own home with books on the shelves and money in the bank; I was a baby and I was cold and wet and a judge had taken my mummy away.
Later, I’m dry and in clean clothes. I’ve had a drink. I ring Ria. She says, ‘There is no usual form. You don’t need a solicitor. This is mad. Leave it to me, Jeanette. I will help you.’
That night I lay on the bed thinking about what had happened.
This family court judge who was so experienced, did he have no idea of what it is like to stand on the rim of your life and look down into the crater?
How hard was it to send me the ‘usual’ form or to tell me where to download it, or have a court official talk me through the legalese?
I started shaking again.
*
‘Lost loss’ is unpredictable and not civilised. I was thrown back into a place of helplessness, powerlessness and despair. My body responded before my head. Normally, a pompous obfuscating letter from the legal world would make me laugh and I would just deal with it. I am not scared of lawyers and I know that the law is grandiose and designed to intimidate, even when there is no reason for it to do so. It is designed to make ordinary people feel inadequate. I do not feel inadequate – but I did not expect to be six weeks old again either.
Ria began to make enquiries and found that after the helpful simplicity of the opening meeting with her, the subsequent reality of dealing with the courts often proved too much. People gave up.
We decided that whatever else came of my search, we would try and formulate some guidelines for the courts and a road map for the clients, to make the process less awful.
An officer at the General Register Office who wanted to help me wrote directly to the court saying that I had already been identified by the Home Office, that she could verify me and my case, and that she would personally receive the file from the court.
No, said the judge. Not procedure.
I wondered what would have been expected of me if I had lived abroad? Would I have had to buy an air ticket and come and do this in a foreign place, unsupported, unless I bought two air tickets? What about all the post-war children who went to Australia?
People’s lives are less important than procedure . . .
*
Susie and I made an appointment at Accrington court.
In the waiting room were a row of miserable young men in badly fitting suits hoping to get off drink—driving offences. The girls were in full make—up looking defiant and scared over some shoplifting offence or public nuisance.
We were called into an interview room where lawyers can talk to their clients, and after a while, the court manager arrived, looking harassed and unhappy. I felt sorry for him.
He had an old file in one hand and a big fat book of procedure in the other. He knew I was going to be trouble.
In fact, I was so distressed at seeing the papers across the desk — the papers with all the details of my beginnings — that I could hardly speak at all. One of the saliencies of this retro adoption experience, these alienating legalities, is that I stumble on my words, hesitate, slow down and finally fall silent. The lost loss I experience as physical pain is pre—language hat loss happened before I could speak, and I return to that place, speechless.
Susie was charming, determined, relentless. The poor man was not sure what he could tell us and what he couldn't. There was so mu
ch I wanted to know — but the judge had not yet authorised the ‘redacted’ version. I was supposed to sign a few forms in person, go away, and wait for the papers to be sent on later.
But the file was on the table . . . not later ... let it be now.
The court manager agreed that he could tell me the name of the adoption society. That was a very useful piece of information. He wrote it on a piece of paper and he photocopied the original in the clerk's handwriting — oh it looks so old. The forms he is holding are yellow and handwritten.
Is my mother's date of birth there? That would help me to find her. He shakes his head. He can't tell me that.
All right then, listen, my adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson, always said my birth mother was seventeen. If I knew her age I could start using the ancestry site to find her — but her name is common enough, and although I have narrowed it down to two likely possibilities, I don't know which one to follow. And both could be wrong. This is the forking path. This is where the universe divides. Help me.
He is sweating. He is looking in the procedure book. Susie tells me to leave the room.
I bang out through the swing doors onto the pavement with remnants of the youth, some of whom are looking cocky and relieved, some are in despair, they are all smoking and talking at once.
I wish I wasn't here. I wish I hadn't started this. Why did I start it?
And I am back to the locked box with the Royal Albert in it, and the papers hidden beneath, and further back the wrong birth certificate, and who was the woman who came to the door and frightened Mrs Winterson into tears and rage?
When I go back in Susie has extracted a promise from the court manager that he will go and ask the judge in session just what he can or can't tell me from the file. We have to come back in forty—five minutes.
So we walk away and sit outside a caff that serves big mugs of tea and I realise that this place doing burgers and chips used to be the Palatine, beloved of Mrs W and the beans on toast and the fugged—up windows of my future on the mission fields.