Registered Under Another Name

By Gabi Plumm

At the age of 34, Gabi discovered she wasn't who she thought she was. Her parents had never told her that she had been adopted at 10 days old. During her efforts to find a birth certificate she had never seen, she was told by a terrified registrar that she had been registered under another name. She was stunned, shocked that her parents had been lying to her for 34 years and she never would have found out if she hadn't been planning to emmigrate to Australia.

Her subsequent search took her to places and people she never thought she would meet and her eventual tracking down of her birth mother became the greatest gift she had ever received.

Told in the first person, this is a tale of search and rescue and enormous change in this young mother's life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gabi Plumm
• Release date: Oct 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393105985

Book preview

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photocopying, or by any electronic means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book is a work of non-fiction.

The author asserts her moral rights.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: GABI Plumm was born in the UK in 1952 and registered under a totally different name. Finding out at the age of 34 that she had been adopted was the biggest shock of her life.

After spending several years in Europe and then immigrating to Australia, Gabi’s search for answers led her through many metaphysical and psychological pathways.

This is Gabi’s first book and it had been an obsession since she found out the truth.

Prologue

The grey-haired registrar leaned across the desk and to my surprise, took my hand in his and began to stoke it — slowly at first, soothingly. My alarm must have showed in my face, because his stokes quickened.

He gulped. Mrs Evans, had it ever occurred to you that you might have been registered under another name?

What! – Well, I said, pretending a calm I didn’t really feel, I think every child at some time in their life wonders if they might’ve been adopted but no, not really. Why?

The stroking got heavier and quicker, and he clung to my hand as if I might fall off my chair.

Well, Mrs. Evans, we did a search for you at Somerset House. They couldn’t find you in the normal children’s register — but they did find you in the Adopted Children’s Register.

I nearly fell off my chair.

The stroking and moral support ended abruptly. Now, if you’d like to just go and sit in the waiting room we’ll bring you the necessary forms so you can get your...er... birth certificate.

He ushered me out of his office to wait in bewilderment, while different forms were found for me to complete now that I was no longer normal.

Already I was picturing the conversation that night with his wife.

Have a nice day dear?

Oh yes, same same except that today I dropped a bombshell on some poor woman’s head by telling her she was adopted. Other than that, same, same.

1.

A day like any other.

DON’T YOU JUST HATE those days? Nothing is where it’s supposed to be and everything else seems to look at you and say, Well, I’m here, what more could you ask for?

On this particular day, I was turning out every personal document file I had ever created and it just was not there.

I didn’t give my birth certificate to you to look after, darling, did I? I yelled, from the other end of the house, at my husband Huw. He was watching a taped rugby match but decided to pause it as I yelled.

Isn’t it in the personal document folder with all our other certificates?

No! I yelled back. As if I wouldn’t have looked there already and gone through it with a fine toothcomb. Frustration was setting in. It had to be somewhere.

This particular Sunday was an important day. It was the day we were completing the forms for Huw and I, and our two children Alex, then aged 6 and Robbie aged 4, to immigrate to Australia. The only thing missing was my Birth Certificate.

Can you remember if I ever had one? Didn’t I need it for the Spanish working visa thingy? I asked over the Rugby commentator’s screams of: ‘Try, Try, It’s a TRY!’

I wracked my brain to remember when I’d last seen it. We’d lived and worked in other countries for eight years, and I knew I must have had a working visa in those days.

You must have had one at some time because you’ve got a passport, Huw wisely concluded at half time in his match, poking his head round the study door.

Of course, he was right. Although I had no recollection of ever seeing one, I would have needed one to get a British passport and the visas for Europe.

Maybe it got lost in one of our moves. I’ll nip into the Registry office in Guildford tomorrow and get a copy, I mumbled, more to myself. Don’t ever think you can have a sensible conversation with a man watching his rugby team lose again, even when he already knew what the score was.

For the first time in years, we were living in England — deep in the Sussex countryside, where our well-loved garden beamed through its many colours, and its heady fragrance wooed us throughout the summer. In the winter, with a beauty of a different kind, it dripped with earthy woodiness. Ah! those English winters, with snow that was brilliant white and fun for about five minutes before car tyres and trudging boots turned it into a grey slushy mess. Unless of course it froze and became lethal. That, if nothing else, was enough to send us to Australia.

Huw and I had spent eight years travelling through Europe working on boats and other crazy things. I had worked as a dental nurse for a while, for a Greek called Ajax Menekratis who had the most enormous hands. It always looked like he was climbing into people’s mouths to examine their teeth. We used to do gengivectomies (gum cutting) in those days, and one of the girls who worked with me — a seasoned and experience dental nurse — crashed in  a dead faint onto the floor in the surgery room because the smell of infected gums reacted with her breakfast. I took over discovering that I had an unexpectedly strong stomach —something I was sure would come in useful one day. We had been lucky; it had been a glorious life full of fun and spontaneity with no responsibilities at all.

Many years later we were back in the UK with our two small boys, and were living only thirty miles or so from where I was born: Mt. Alvernia Hospital, Guildford, Surrey. Mt. Alvernia was a Catholic nursing hospital considered ‘the best for the birthing of babies’ back in 1952. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a stroke of luck that we lived so close to that hospital; given the events that were to follow.

The next day after Huw had left for work, I prepared to take the boys to their schools and bundled them up in layers of warmth against the chilly early spring morning. The daffodils and the bluebells love the dripping cool but little boys and pre-Australian climate Mummies needed wrapping up! The garden was lush and colorful after recent rain, but the sky looked like it hadn’t quite finished so raincoats and umbrellas joined us in the car as we headed for the village where Alex attended the little Primary School. Robbie sometimes went to the playgroup on the Village Green but not on a Monday, so on this day he was coming with me to the ‘big city’ to get a copy of my birth certificate. What could have been easier?

It was a day like any other day. I dropped Alex off with hugs and kisses aplenty — which was fine when he was six and not yet old enough to be embarrassed by Mummy’s cuddles — then jumping back in the car and heading off for Guildford Registry Office. I had no idea how my life would change that day.

I’D LIKE A COPY OF my Birth Certificate please.

The Registry office, a typically featureless red brick two-storey council building was quiet that morning so I was sure this simple request wouldn’t take long to fulfill. Maybe then we could go into Guildford town and look at the big bell on the High Street that makes Guildford such a landmark, followed by a special slap-up lunch in Debenhams. Special chicken nuggets and chips for Robbie, no ketchup!

Fill this in, I was ordered by a po-faced middle-aged lady as she shoved a form and pen in my direction. By her tone, it was obviously just another Monday morning and just another request from some careless person who had lost their Birth Certificate.

I completed the form and handed it back: Susan Georgina Curzon-Smith, Born: 5.9.1952, Mt. Alvernia Hospital, Guildford, Surrey.

Ms Po-face took the form with a peremptory, ‘shouldn’t be long’ and disappeared into the back room behind the reception desk.

The waiting rooms of those post-war council buildings presented the same scene the country over: mottled squares of linoleum with special spot-hiding features, and a green wall paint that passes all understanding — a job lot after the last do-over of British Navy interiors.

I played I spy with an already-bored Robbie. The major problem was that everything was green so the answer was always ‘a green table’ or ‘a green chair. Good for his color recognition but not very stimulating. I suppose most people never spent more than ten minutes or so in that room, so the council didn’t think it mattered.

We, however, were the exception. Half an hour passed and another two careless people came and went with their replacement documents. There was still nothing for us. Ms Po-Face was noticeable by her absence. Robbie, by this time had started to run amok, racing under the green chairs, and then over the tops of them. At four years old, the attention span for ‘I spy’ wanes very fast.

Then we were interrupted by the strident tones of the reappeared Ms Po-face. Mrs. Evans! — I could tell I was in trouble by her tone of voice — Are you sure you filled these details in correctly?

Er yes! Pretty sure. Let me check. Why? As far as I could see all was correct on the form. After all, I’d only written my name, date and place of birth. There wasn’t a lot of room for error in those few lines; even on a Monday morning.

We’re having some difficulty finding you. Just thought you might have written something down wrong, she said, annoyed yet baffled at the same time. In hindsight it was a new one for her too.

Even so, I checked again. Yes, that’s right. That’s what’s on my passport except of course my surname is now Evans, I said, trying to be helpful and friendly. She wasn’t receptive, and I was beginning to wonder what was going on. She disappeared again, puzzlement creasing her face; a reflection of mine.

Ten minutes and a dash to the toilet for Robbie later, then she was back and requesting my presence. 

I think you’d better come in the back Mrs. Evans. Something’s not right here and you can give us a hand. Yes, bring the little boy too, what’s his name? Robbie? How sweet, isn’t he a good boy? What lovely eyes!

With these words, I knew something was wrong. Ms Po-face had gone from total disinterest to thoughtful small talk in just ten minutes. Her Monday morning was getting more interesting by the minute.

The backroom was a stereotypical council back office, four wooden desks covered in green baize and paperwork, four uncomfortable looking wooden chairs, and rows and rows of filing cabinets. Not a computer in sight. This was 1986 and the world was at least four years away from the days of the paperless office!

For Robbie though it was a new playground. One of the girls took him under her wing and introduced him to the delights of rubber stamps while I started on the filing cabinets. By this time, I was getting concerned. They just couldn’t find me. I didn’t appear to exist.

I asked to borrow a phone and I called my father. My mother had died four years before from heart failure, something she had battled all her life. Rheumatic fever as a child had left her with a very dicey heart; a pack of cigarettes a day hadn’t helped. Whiskey had kept her arteries reasonably