A Child in the Middle

By Catherine Chanter

'Need. Crave. Fear. Lovely monosyllabic verbs which perch like hungry gulls on top of the iceberg floating in a cold sea.'

Adoption is a complex, challenging business. For those who are adopted, its emotional ramifications run deep, half-hidden or buried, a source of insecurity because questions remain unanswered and family photos are miss

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linen Press
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781919624891

Catherine Chanter

Catherine Chanter is a teacher, poet, and short story writer. She is the winner of the Yeovil Poetry Prize and the Lucy Cavendish Prize awarded by Cambridge University. She grew up in the West Country before attending Oxford. The Well is her first novel.

Book preview

2020

Last June, for the first time, there were foxgloves in our garden flowering at the border where the shade of the six oaks meets the light. When they were over, I gathered some seeds and sprinkled them on compost, seeds so tiny they were almost invisible to the naked eye and, like the proverbial stars or grains of sand, to count them would have been an impossibility. Equally incomprehensible was the fact that each simple seed cradled in the palm of my hand contained an embryo and that each embryo had the potential to become one of those extraordinarily complex plants holding court at the edge of our wood: sepal, ovary, style, filament, anther, stigma.

All winter I have tended them, visiting them in the greenhouse, where I fought my instincts to rescue everything and plucked the weakest seedlings from the soil the better to let the others flourish. I chose the twelve strongest and gave them pots of their own.

Today, although it is early in the year, there is a hint of warmth in the sunshine for the first time, so I put my seedlings outside in the garden for a few hours in the same way that I pushed my son in the pram down the canal in Antwerp on the first day of spring, or in the same way I placed my daughter carefully on a rug under the Catalpa tree so that she could wave at passing branches.

In the afternoon, the seedlings catch some rain from the hefty showers which are pounding in from the southwest and then, like British sunbathers on a bank holiday beach, they soak up the last of the sunshine before dusk. Tonight, they are back in their glass orphanage, protected from slugs and rabbits and frost and diseases of unknown origin which start far away and, nameless but numbered, creep silently towards us.

All the foxgloves have to do now is feed and grow and wait for their forever home.

We are all behind glass, waiting.

The waiting reminds me of the searching and of how much of the searching was spent waiting.

We live in the middle of nowhere, but remote has taken on a new meaning. During the day, my work has moved online, trying to organise virtual therapy for children whose suffering is all too real. Wrapped around those hours there seems to be an extraordinary sense that place and time are suspended, and I realise I may never have a better opportunity than this. There are two ways for me to write my way into understanding my story. I can look back and put everything in order. But I can also look around at this wild, wind-blown world of mine, from the distant moors to the smallest seedling, to try to work out what it all means.

Two texts in search of one understanding.

Chapter One

It is the beginning of March 2009, six months after my fiftieth birthday. The grey sludge left over from the worst snowfall in living memory has melted away and the news has finally turned its attention elsewhere. A footballer has been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. A protestor has covered the Business Secretary in green custard. President Obama has received an injection against swine flu. And are we worried about a pandemic? No. Not yet. Life, it seems, continues as normal.

Then I receive a recall for a breast scan.

This intimation of mortality drops through the letterbox tucked between an ironically marketed ‘once in a lifetime’ offer from a new pizza delivery service and a well-timed request for financial support from a cancer charity.

It changes everything and nothing. My mouth is dry and my mind races. It hits me with full force that there may be little sand left in the egg timer; I may have left it too late to look for my mother.

I know, in my professional capacity, that there are predictable times when adoptees are more likely to search for their birth parents and that there are some typical factors that stop people searching. Until now, I have been a walking, talking demonstration of the truth of this. I never wanted to upset my adoptive parents and I never wanted to appear ungrateful. My response to the question asked endlessly by the curious, will you ever try to find your birth mother? has always been the same, not while my parents are alive. It has been a convenient script. It silences things. It provides a timescale over which I have no control and therefore no ownership and therefore no responsibility. Like a lot of scripts we write for ourselves, the more I say it, the more it seems valid. If I remain true to the bell-shaped curve, I will only start looking for my birth parents when my adoptive parents are dead.

There is one obvious defect in this logic. If they are dead, then my birth mother may also be dead, or very old, or very ill. Maybe, until now, that’s been half the point. By leaving it late, I was less likely to succeed. It may sound strange, but for all sorts of reasons, at some subconscious level, failing to find my birth mother is very appealing. Think about it this way. If you are already used to spooning up with your loss every night, it will make for something much more uncomfortable and frightening to be tucked up by the newly resurrected faceless fingers of your past. Not to mention the fact that a failure to find your birth family means all your fantasies about them can remain intact.

Then there’s the not insignificant matter of my own mortality. The breast scan recall brings home the reality that while I am waiting for my adoptive parents to die, I myself could go the way of all flesh, or, to use my father-in-law’s favourite euphemism, be run over by the Number 54. Or die of breast cancer. Because by now, in my mind, the Pro-forma letter has become my will and the bus route to the hospital is the journey my coffin will travel. A decade ago, the statistics for surviving breast cancer were a lot less encouraging than they are now. Catastrophic thinking is one of my strengths. After all, what’s the worst that can happen if you’re a baby? Losing your mother, I guess.

There is one other thing, something which may seem strange to others – and I have no idea whether this is a commonly shared experience amongst adopted people – but I have always found the idea of being utterly devoid of parents of any sort extremely seductive, like a kite tugging and worrying at its string, sensing that an extraordinary moment of freedom is only a slip away, when the hand at the other end lets go and the catch of the wind is your dance and your music. Let them all be dead, I used to think, and let me fly in an empty sky.

There is a bookmark on the corkboard in my study. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. It is a text from the Bible which I turn to when I think that time and place, and circumstances have conspired to make the right thing happen at the right time. I have been blessed with a good and happy life, which may beg the question as to why I’m thinking of looking for my birth parents, but, standing in the hall with the NHS letter in my hand, I know the moment has arrived.

Recall

The letter said there are things

which require further investigation.

I had told myself that I would be patient,

give you the space to die intact,

to pay my debt of gratitude.

I owe you that.

But this is a reminder of things overdue.

To die and never to have known why.

To die and never to have known who.

I am getting older. The risk is greater.

So I have issued a recall notice of my own.

Before it is too late, I will know and be known.

2020

Every time I walk down the track to the cottage, my eye is drawn to the poplars. When spring really arrives, they will be all about the silver, like street traders flashing the cash. By October, they will have become millionaires, plucking gold from the air with the help of their blousy, blustery assistant, the west wind. At this time of year they deceive us. They look naked from a distance, but up close I can see they are dressed in catkins, and I can run my hands down their slender trunks, embossed with diamond studs, and sense the wealth of healing power contained in the bark.

This evening the sun throws a long shadow, and the rooks are gathering in the branches of the poplars. They remind me of people assembling before a service, maybe a funeral, clustering in small groups outside the crematorium in the drizzle, black umbrellas flapping in the wind, relatives grouping and regrouping until some unseen signal summons them to worship, and they become one congregation.

So the rooks have become a murmuration and, for perhaps one of the last times this winter, in black ink italics, they write an invitation to the night across the sky.

In this disordered world, there is pattern.

Chapter Two

Adoptees in England gained the right to ask for their birth certificates in 1976. Although that was the year I legally became an adult, the legislation did not figure largely in my life, probably because then I was slowly meandering my way along the hippy trail from London to Kathmandu, and the news never made it into the Kabul Times. In an entirely different way, I was, of course, looking for myself, thinking that the real me might appear in a puff of smoke at the end of a joint, or emerge from my reflection in the death-clouded waters at Varanasi, or indeed be sung out loud in the chanting at a monastery in Ladakh. Buddhism will come to play its part in my story, but not then, not yet.

Aged 18, I was still on the road. One night at a cheap motel somewhere between Isfahan and the border, Joel, a Scottish guy I travelled with for a time, told me he left home and hit the road upon finding out that the man he worshipped all his life as his father was, in fact, no blood relation at all. His sense of identity collapsed overnight. It was cold at that time of year in Iran, piecemeal snow swirled around us in the dark, but that didn’t stop Joel from taking off his army-surplus jacket and using his cigarette lighter to illuminate the tattoo on his arm. Best Dad in the World. What I learned on that trip was that you take yourself with you wherever you go.

In 1983, the new legislation finally caught up with me. In preparation for moving to the United States, I was in Somerset House in London requesting a copy of my birth certificate. The official at the enquiry desk asked me a question, quite casually, as if it was milk in your coffee or not, single or return. Did I want my original birth certificate or my adoptive one? The timing was not auspicious: I was slap-bang in the process of leaving my job in London and selling the flat. In two months’ time, I was getting married. The day after that, I was flying to Lexington, Kentucky to start a new life in the land of the Bluegrass. Not to mention the fact that although I was working as a political lobbyist at the time and it was the early 1980s, I was not of the pay grade to take three hours for lunch and down a couple of bottles of Bordeaux. In ten minutes, my boss would be viewing my empty desk and the clock with equal irritation. Looking over my shoulder, I could see the queue performing that sort of synchronised dance in which people step to one side and then the other to see what the delay is, before returning to the line. I ticked a box: Adoptive. The fleeting opportunity to open the door to my birth history was closed behind me, with no regrets.

I was saved by myself in more ways than one. Somewhere along the line between 1976 and 2002, it occurred to the powers that be that there is the potential for a lot of chaos when you suddenly allow adopted adults to roam the country in search of their birth parents, both parties often sharing at least three things in common – they are likely to be vulnerable, unprepared and unsupported. The Adoption and Children’s Act 2002 (enacted 2005) brought in a requirement that anyone adopted before 1975 who did not know their birth name should attend counselling before being given their records. It was an enlightened move and one from which I am about to benefit.

The date of the recall breast scan is approaching. Hastily conducted research tells me there are a variety of Adoption Agencies who have nominated social workers who legally provide this compulsory counselling service. Since qualifying as a teacher over a decade ago, I have mainly been supporting excluded children, those in care and those with significant mental health problems and have therefore liaised with local authority social workers on an almost daily basis. They have been both professional and kind. I have no hesitation in choosing one as my companion on this journey.

The form is downloaded from the internet. This time the box is ticked indicating yes, I definitely do want a copy of my original birth certificate, which is all that is initially on offer. A first-class stamp is miraculously found in the drawer which contains keys to bikes long since stolen and batteries for devices long since defunct. None of the neighbours I chat to on the short walk to the post box have any idea of the weight of the small brown envelope in my hand. All this is accomplished in the space of a morning, with something which might have looked like efficiency to a fly hanging around on the wall with nothing better to do, but which I recognise as close to mania.

The second breast scan is clear. The kindly nurse couldn’t really see who re-referred me and why. Her name is fate, I want to say, buttoning up my shirt. I do love a bit of melodrama.

I wait. What I don’t appreciate at this point is that I am at the very beginning of a long, long waiting game. I tell myself that all I am going to get is a name and a place and that can be the end of it. Apparently, this self-deception is not unusual. We who search, at some point, often profess to be clear about several things:

we want to know about, not know

we are curious, not desperate

we would like to observe, but not to meet

and we probably don’t want to be known.

On my commute in and out of London, I often write poetry as a way of processing what is going on in my life. It’s cheaper than therapy. Over the following years, the poems and notes scribbled illegibly on the Metropolitan Line will also form a sort of adoption search diary. They have become part of this book. The poetry is not necessarily either what or how I would write now, but as an adopted person I should know authenticity is everything. A lot of the poetry concerns mothers and children, and my writing is undoubtedly also my way of coping with the significant challenges and complexities of the day job. The unit where I am working supports children, many of whom are no longer living with their birth families either. These 4–13-year-olds have been referred to this specialist provision because of their exceptionally high levels of distress and damage. The boys (because they are all boys at the moment) cower under tables cradling their sadness. They kick us and bite us and spit at us to reassure themselves that they are still alive and that they are powerful. Sometimes they climb the wall of the little garden at the back of the unit and run away from who they were, who they are, who they might become. Over the months they spend with us, with great tenderness and anxiety, we watch them grow as a gardener might watch his seedlings, knowing the beauty which is possible if all goes well. Each child has intensive psychotherapy and is cared for by a team including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and teachers. That is where I come in, coaxing the terrified children to the place where it is possible for them to be brave, curious and adventurous once again, based on the understanding that learning is therapeutic in itself. It is not all English and Maths. Adhering to the psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott’s theory, we also believe that playing itself can be a therapy, although it took weeks to coax Stephen down from his hiding place at the top of the cupboard whenever we went into the nurture room to unpack the toy box.

Sleeping Lions

Why don’t you wake me up all over again?

Kissing his knees, that’s what he’s whispering.

Then he slips his thumb in his mouth and closes

his eyes. He cries. We don’t know where he goes,

but here and there, he waits for the waking.

Could his mother wake him, if we found her?

Light the blanket from his solemn head

and lull him full with her breasts, her clean

finger in his unfurled fist? Paint the bars

of the rough rusting cot, white again?

Right again? He should know the face

that wakes him, the smell of the arms

that take him, the tip of the lips, the taste.

If we could wake him up all over again,

unmake nine years of unchildlike beds,

unpick the thread that hems his dreams

and knot and pull and bind and weave

a new tapestry for him; if we could open

his book of bedtime stories and read,

by the nightlight, from the very beginning –

we would. As it is the bell has gone,

and the lion lies sleeping.

Later, on the 17.32 train home, my fellow passengers take on the look of mothers and fathers. It could be you, lady in the corner, in what my other mother would call a plum-coloured raincoat. You have a pen and notebook, just like me. Or you, grey man in a torn anorak, with a mole between your avoidant eyes, because there will be imperfections. What about that elderly couple over there? Has she ever told her husband about the little secret that she bundled up and gave away fifty years ago? These are ordinary people, mistakes in the past behind their papers, hope in handbags on their knees. The train reflects my world. There are posters warning of risk, to mind the gap, alarm systems for stopping in case of emergency, seats specially designated for those expecting babies. There is a risk of death if you fall between two carriages.

Many of us who set out on the journey to search often fluctuate between the agony and the ecstasy when it comes to fantasies about our birth parents. There are times when we envisage fairy tales of exotic love in castles in the clouds, but these are counterbalanced by ugly faces and bitterness and drizzle and absence, presumably the easier to prepare for reality. At home, my mother has a framed Victorian sampler hung on the wall in the sitting room. The cloth has the stretched, grey pallor of indoor faces and I used to imagine the sad Victorian child embroidering pessimism, stitch by stitch, under a poor light.

Let not our expectations from the years that are to come rise too high, and your disappointments will be fewer and more easily supported.

Was this their default position when they brought me home? It is certainly mine now.

I am restless. It might be months before I get an appointment with the counselling service, and then months after that before I get my file. But I have one source of information immediately available. In two weeks, I will visit my parents.

2020

Sunday. I should be visiting my father today. These daffodils which I have chosen from the hundreds splashing yellow and white across our greening garden would have been handed over to the nurse. She would have found a vase – a little too big – and the heads would have hung over the edge like dogs over a wire fence. In a week’s time, they will be over, dried to thin and papery petals, as translucent as his skin. As I have been writing and remembering, I have been wondering whether dementia might have released him from the pain of conscious recollection and whether anecdote and conversation might now be possible. But he is locked away from me more completely than he ever was.

Like so many other people with loved ones incarcerated in care homes at the moment, I am consumed by an urgent need to connect. Spring flowers come and go. Memento vivere, memento mori. In the vegetable garden, I dig the heavy clay. I dig and dig as if I might find something buried there other than words and memories.

Chapter Three

Everything regresses when I go home to stay with my mother and father as if we all step into some time warp machine in which I never grow up and they never grow old: the dysfunctional adolescent versus the harassed parents. Neither role is particularly helpful for what I am about to do.

This is unchartered territory. Adoption has not been mentioned for a very long time. That is not to say either the word or the topic is avoided, or that there is an embarrassed silence if it comes up inadvertently – an article on the news about proposed legislation, for example, or a headline in the paper about some celebrity reunited with her long-lost son. No, it is as if it is of no relevance to our little family. It is in the same category as losing a coffin on the way to the cemetery or finding a fifty-pound note in a second-hand book. It happens to other people, mainly in the Bristol Evening Post. Part of me is optimistic. Surely it must be better to get the secrets out of the cupboard and dust them down now rather than go to the grave clutching them tightly in our skeletal fingers, the mud and the damp seeping through the gaps in the story, only the worms left to digest the truth.

Later I will realise my parents are not the only ones who believe you can keep secrets in the afterlife.

Food has always been big in our house. My friends used to come home after school for tea and there were always homemade flapjacks or gingerbread or, in my mother’s most extravagant moments, millionaire’s shortbread. Guests were fed relentlessly, an apologetic refusal for seconds or thirds felt around the table as a rejection of a different sort. I wonder now what all this feeding was about, where the need to fill me up came from? What was the emptiness that drove it? One thing that the adoptive mother can never do is breastfeed her baby. One thing she must know is that another woman probably has.

My mother was a domestic science teacher for a while before I came along, although in the private domain of her kitchen, she always cooks with a flair and a disregard for rules which belie both her profession and her apparently conservative outlook on life. In the public arena, however, she is a strict observer of form and routine. Tea has been served by her at the altar of my 9–5 father, religiously, every day when he got back from the office, for as long as I can remember. It is wheeled in on a little gold trolley with teapot, cups and saucers and sugar in a glass bowl in the shape of a flower on the top shelf, and on the bottom, a small selection of homemade cakes and sandwiches (crusts removed). Today is no different, even though my father retired some years ago and my mother is not well. The trolley is doubling up as her walking frame. It does not seem appropriate to drop the word adoption in amongst the chocolate crispy cakes with added sultanas.

The next service is at eight o’clock. The table is laid for supper. The custard is homemade. Everything is prepared and served with such care, such love. Everything always has been. Afterwards, the washing up is an assembly line of carrying out to the kitchen, drying up and putting away because the dishwasher is still only used for special occasions. The dishwasher doesn’t know what I’m planning, neither do my parents, otherwise one or all of them might have considered this night special enough. The relentless durability of this well-oiled routine is disabling for me because it drags me onto the conveyor belt and processes me as a familiar product, recognisable component parts, labelled, ready for the end of the evening, destination bed in the spare room with a kiss on both cheeks and the offer of a glass of water. Everything left unsaid.

There is what might be called a window of opportunity between the finishing of the crossword and the ten o’clock news.

I’ve been wondering about finding out about my birth mother.

My father’s head rises above the horizon of the Daily Telegraph. My mother pauses her knitting. Both appear mildly puzzled as if I’ve mentioned a brief trip to Outer Mongolia and why would anyone want to go there when it’s so nice in Budleigh Salterton this time of year?

I only mean a bit of research. I wouldn’t want to meet her or anything like that. Just to know a little more about her.

The newspaper is down to knee level, the knitting needles tucked back into the ball of bright red wool, leaving one leg of the knitted toy bear for orphaned children footless, but not fancy-free.

Apparently I can go through some government process, I explain, fill out a form, but I thought it would be nicer to ask you first, just in case you know anything. We’ve never really talked about it, have we?

The remote control is very tempting, offering as it does the promise of alternative entertainment. I was not expecting such loud silence. However good I have become in my professional capacity at sitting with a refusal to talk, no In-Service Training could prepare me for this concrete dam, hundreds of metres high and behind it, a reservoir fifty-five years deep.

It’s just curiosity really. It’s not that important. I won’t do it if it will upset you.

That was true, once.

My mother is looking at my father, my father’s gaze drops to the paper. The lines of the triangle join up and regardless of where our eyes are focusing, this is, in fact, all about him. My mother is worried about his reaction, and when she eventually speaks, her tone is not unlike mine, pacifying and evasive. She thinks there might be something in the attic. Isn’t there a little box tied up with yellow ribbon which has some bits and pieces in it? Now, what on earth did they do with that?

My father has