I Wasn’t Born …

A freckle-faced boy with big eyes looked out from under his fringe on the front page of the Weekly News . The paper was anything but news, a predictable menu of human-interest stories, recipes and doctor’s advice, which had a regular Thursday delivery to my home and countless others across Scotland . There it was on the settee as usual so, as usual, I picked it up and read it. I was about ten, as was the boy in the photo. The headline must have read something like ‘We Chose Our Child’ or ‘The Child We Chose’ and told the story of a couple’s search for a child to adopt. I read it, like I read the whole paper, because it was there and I always read any paper or magazine lying about; I discarded it and was about to move off the settee when my mother came and sat beside me.

She asked if I’d read it. Yes, I said, wondering if there was something I’d missed. The Weekly News was like the Sunday Post was like the Ayrshire Post , just one of those background things that was new every week but was still exactly the same.

‘Did you read that bit?’, she asked, indicating the big-eyed freckled boy. Yes, I said, wondering why.

‘You know that Gavin is adopted?’ No, I said, surprised. Gavin was the son of my Uncle John and Aunt Nan, not relatives but one of four couples who met every Sunday night for dinner and socialised much of the rest of the time. Gavin had appeared from nowhere, it seemed to me, one Sunday night, a tiny baby in his white woollen shawl, oohed and cooed over by everyone. If I had known more about life I would have been able to question how Gavin appeared with no sign of pregNan but I knew nothing. If I had ever seen a pregnant woman I hadn’t registered the condition and would have had no idea what it meant. Now it made sense. Gavin was adopted. He was someone else’s baby that Uncle John and Aunt Nan were raising as their own. I became alert – it seemed that Mum had something more to say.

‘And did you know Jessica is adopted?’ Now this was a shock. Jessica was the nearest I had to a big sister. I was an only child, as was she, but her parents were my Uncle David and Aunt Dawn, another of the four couples called ‘The Gang’ – inspired by the Crazy Gang of comedy films rather than any reference to the Glasgow gangs that featured in the newspapers of the time. Dawn and David were the most glamorous, to my mind, of the Gang, the youngest-dressing and most modern. Jessica and I had spent every Sunday evening and most summer Sunday afternoons together for as long as I could remember. Adoption – that lent her a new aura of interest. Wow, I thought.

I knew what adoption was. Most of the heroes of the comics I read seemed to be adopted, or at least orphaned or, of course, both – usually after the tragic death of their parents in some violent accident or act of war. ‘Danny on a Dolphin’ was one I followed avidly, as he fought the Japanese from his Pacific adopted home, a plucky 12 year-old with a knife strapped to his lower leg and an affinity with dolphins. I constantly drew dolphins and had a plastic knife sheathed in my sock; I happily told kids at school my name was really Danny and I was American. In boys’ games of the Scots versus the English (set in some vague approximation of the times of Wallace and Bruce) I was never content to be a footsoldier – I was always an American helping the Scottish side. I daresay in some of those imagined lifetimes I was adopted.

Mum’s face now looked serious, in a way I’d rarely seen before and struggled to understand. Were her eyes really filling with water? But that was what kids did, not Mum.

‘You know, a long time ago, your Dad and I really wanted to have children but we couldn’t. And the doctor said he could help us and that there were lots of children with no Mummy or Daddy who needed a family. So we went to find out about it and, in the end . we chose you.’

Her eyes filled and spilled. My face and hands, my whole body tingled. The image that filled my mind was of a cage – not a zoo cage, but a low wooden pen like that in a nursery . It was filled with toddlers, and my Mum and Dad were leaning over, pointing at me and saying ‘that one’.

Having opened up the world completely, she was now anxious to close any wound and apply bandages of reassurance.

‘Now it doesn’t really mean anything, we’re still your Mum and Dad, just like we always have been. We’re just telling you now in case you ever find out from someone else and it upset you – maybe at school or if you’re getting some official papers or something.’ I don’t remember her exact words but that was the suggestion – that some nameless person might, at some point, tell me my parents weren’t really my parents, so she was telling me the truth now so that I knew.

But what she was telling me really was two things: I was special, not like everyone else, and she didn’t want to talk about it again. It would be over thirty years before we did.

I don’t remember asking her any questions about it. Who was my ‘real’ mother? Why did she give me up? Jessica? Gavin? Me? Why three out of four of the Gang? I expect I must have asked about Elizabeth, the child of Uncle Rich and Aunt Ellen, the remaining couple, and the oldest of the children, a teenager who liked Elvis and had a boyfriend. She wasn’t adopted and, for the first time, I registered that she looked like her mother. But the big questions, for some reason I didn’t ask. I’d never seen Mum tearful and felt it wasn’t on to probe any further. What I do remember was helping her with the housework all that morning, taking the opposite end of the tablecloth, Richowing it out and laying it on the table, as she smiled and her eyes dried. I rarely if ever helped with housework before or, it must be said, after.

I may not have said anything but my mind was exploding with it. The implications that raced around that childish heart were not thoughts of being rejected, of being deceived, of being in the wrong place or even of coming into my inheritance as the secret prince of Bohemia . None of this – just the thought that I was special, at last I had something in common with the heroes of the adventure comics. I was a skinny, awkward, ugly child, lonely and unable to join in with other boys. Now, in my own mind, I was somehow rugged and heroic. If my mother had worried that she’d distress me with this news, she couldn’t have been further from the mark.

When I was a knowing teenager, anxious to glamorise myself in any way I could, I would say ‘I wasn’t born, I was adopted.’ But that was later. It would be equally dramatic but far more true to say that on that day when the Weekly News was strategically left out for me, and anxious and eyes waited for me to idle by and pick it up, I was born for the second time.