by Veronica Dewan
Content warning: references abortion, miscarriage and racist, sexual, physical, psychological and emotional abuse.
File on 4 Investigates recently produced an episode: ‘Adoption: The Blame Game’ on what has caused over 1,000 adoptions to break down in the UK over the past five years.
The journalists had undertaken in-depth interviews with fifty adoptive parents who had tried unsuccessfully to get support for their adoptive family. Their experiences included being arrested and threatened with criminal proceedings for child neglect and abandonment. A solicitor in Bradford spoke of being inundated with desperate calls from adoptive parents who were being blamed but whose experience was one of neglect and abandonment by adoption services. One adopter had succeeded in taking legal action against their local authority for lack of post-adoption support and did receive an apology.
The report touched on the complexities of the relationships and emphasised the trauma experienced by adopters. With the exception of one vulnerable young adoptee, who spoke eloquently about the trauma of being returned to care, the voices of other adoptees were missing. I wondered if other adoptees were interviewed and their experiences recorded. Or if perhaps their voices were edited out. Being erased and excluded feels too familiar.
So many of us have had disruption, and some of us were taken back into care. Questions of credibility arise when I speak about my own experience of adoption breakdown. It happened to me a very long time ago but it still feels raw. To be listened to and to be believed means everything. This is my story.
~~~
I was 14 when my adoption officially broke down. Now in my late 60s I continue to grapple with the roles that those in authority played. With the right support, might there have been a different outcome?
I was a convent schoolgirl who at 13 stopped going to school. My adoptive mother couldn’t stand the sight of me so I looked for love elsewhere. I was expelled for non-attendance and for being a bad influence on other pupils. In the following months, police, social workers, psychiatrists and the drug squad became involved in my life.
The psychiatrist and social worker recognised that my relationship with my adoptive mother had irretrievably broken down. It was another few months before my social worker found me a funded place at a boarding school. On my first day at the new school, I had morning sickness. I was pregnant and I ran away.
My adoptive mother threw up her hands:
‘Thanks to you I’m going to have to bring up another fecking bastard.’
The GP advised a termination so I could return to my studies. But he didn’t know that the school was about to expel me. My adoptive mother, a devout Catholic, briefly joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
In hospital I had an induced miscarriage. The social worker said I had let her down. She had worked so hard to find the right school for me. She had run out of options. Only one place would accept me. My adoptive parents signed a form and I went back into care.
It was a locked institution—a Home Office Approved School—managed by a mental health charity for up to twenty ‘emotionally disturbed’ girls. I would live there for nearly two years.
~~~
Why did my parents decide to adopt? It wasn’t something they had considered. They were in their late 30s and still hoping to conceive.
Mum sent off a coupon she’d cut out of a Catholic newspaper, about fostering for which she could earn an income. She forgot to mention any of this to Dad.
The Southwark Catholic Rescue Society received the coupon and pounced. Someone turned up unannounced to their cottage in Sussex. A follow-up letter expressed the difficulty of placing a baby whose father was Indian and mother, Irish. The baby was in a mother and baby home and would end up in an orphanage unless it was adopted.
I was six weeks old when they brought me home from London. At the time Mum’s mother was visiting from Dublin. My new ‘Granny’ took one look at me and said:
‘You take that back to where you got it from. There’ll be no darkies in my family’.
My adoptive parents had been told by the social worker to nip in the bud any curiosity I might have about my birth parents by telling me they had died in a car crash. To their credit they didn’t follow the ‘professional’ advice and I grew up knowing that somewhere out there I was connected to my ‘real’ parents: my Indian birth father and Irish birth mother I would finally meet in 1985.
Where we lived was in a beautiful area of Sussex, close to Chanctonbury Ring and surrounded by the rose fields where Dad worked. It was after our next-door neighbour hit me over the head with a hammer and sexually abused me that we had to move. I was four.
It took a while for Dad to find another job with tied accommodation. I remember the new next-door neighbour saying to Mum:
‘She’s a typical Indian, small forehead—will never amount to anything’.
Dad would be in the fields from early morning to late evening. Mum cleaned houses for ‘the local ladies’ while slipping deeper and deeper into depression.
One condition was imposed on them by the adoption society: that I must be raised in the Roman Catholic faith. Mum was distraught that the only school in the village was a Church of England one.
The children bewildered me and I would come home crying. I would babble about being told to go back to where I came from, that I was called the P word and the N word and smelt of curry. I had no idea what any of it meant but I knew I wasn’t welcome.
Dad decided it was time to give me ‘a good talking to’.
‘You say to them I’m your dad now and I’m English. You’re my daughter so that makes you English too.’
When that didn’t work, he sat me down again:
‘You have to stop making up stories. It’s all in your head. You’re just looking for attention.’
He said he despaired of me and I must stop upsetting Mum because ‘she’d had a dreadful childhood – your granny was very cruel to her’.
Meanwhile, Mum would overhear the locals saying ‘here comes the IRA’ when she went into the village shops. They speculated that Mum must have had sex with an Indian man, the ‘half-breed’ was hers really and her husband was a saint for not kicking her out. She was mocked by a woman who called her a fool for adopting me. ‘You could have been paid to be a foster parent.’ That of course had been her original plan—until she was coerced by the adoption society.
Mum stopped going out, and kept me home from school. She’d tell the GP I was sick. He concluded after a couple of home visits that there was nothing wrong with me. He threatened to report her to the authorities so I went back to school.
I was six when she held out her hand and pulled me towards her. In her other hand was the knife she held to my neck, ‘I’ll kill you first, then kill myself.’
I became so scared that my legs would shake when I came downstairs in the mornings.
We had a big garden full of fruit trees, shrubs, roses and birds that nested in the hedge. Also, I had a cat I adored and who slept on my bed. Apparently, I had rescued her when I was three.
I was seven years old when a teacher told me to stand up in front of the whole class. Immediately I thought it was a good thing. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She had marked my arithmetic test and told my classmates that I was incapable of getting a top mark. She said:
‘Indians are devious, cunning, not to be trusted. Beware of the cheat, she’ll try to copy your work.’
My reaction was to think of all the ways I could kill myself.
The same teacher complained to my parents that I was sullen and uncooperative, so Mum picked flowers for her from our garden. When I refused to take the bunch of flowers to school, Mum took the flowers to the teacher herself – and apologised for my behaviour!
To witness this teacher being rewarded by my mum for humiliating me made me so angry. I feel that my anger saved me. And I began to create a fantasy world.
In the nearby woods, I made a pretend hotel from moss, twigs, branches and fallen leaves. Living beneath the flightpath to Heathrow, I imagined my Indian father in a plane passing overhead. He would see me waving. On landing at Heathrow, he would jump into a taxi and come to my hotel where I would greet him and show him to his bedroom.
I was focused on self-preservation. Books were essential. I became an avid reader. Mum banned me from the library—I was fined for overdue returns. The local newsagents had a children’s book section and I would sit on the floor with a paperback until they kicked me out.
I remember one time walking with Mum into the village. She was stopped by someone she didn’t know who asked who I belonged to. By this time she had worked out a response:
‘I’m just looking after the girl until her mother comes back.’
Mum went through a very difficult time, leading up to a hysterectomy. She stayed in hospital for three weeks and then went to a convalescent home. It was peaceful at home.
By the time she came home her hatred of me had reached new heights:
‘You’re the child of a whore and you’ll be a whore too. I’ve never loved you. I never wanted to adopt. They made me do it. I only ever wanted a child of my own, my flesh and blood.’
Some of it was true. The arguments between my parents about putting me back into care were incessant:
‘We’re sending her back to social services. My mammy was right all along.’
Somehow Dad was winning the arguments to keep me. Her next tactic was to accuse me of being responsible for the red electricity bills:
‘Because of you we can’t pay the bills. My husband will go to prison and it will be your fault.’
I’d wake up early to get the post and hide the letters from them. After school, I was lucky to have a bike to ride round and round the country lanes on and avoid going home.
When I sit my 11-plus I don’t even know I’m taking it, that’s how confused I am. I have no idea how I passed.
What happens next is Dad says it is up to me to choose which grammar school to go to. I have the opportunity to go to a catholic school and am naïve enough to believe it will resolve the rift between Mum and me.
Except, the cost of the new uniform means now she can’t even afford to have a holiday. And she hates the nuns who drive past while she waits at the bus stop in the rain, who never think to stop and offer her a lift.
Mum’s attempts so far to get rid of me have failed so she leaves, gets a job at a Pontin’s holiday camp for the season. Once again, it’s peaceful at home.
When she gets back I’ve started my periods and she has something to say about it:
‘I’ve washed my hands of you, don’t expect me to be paying for your towels!’
I steal from her purse to buy sanitary pads; a kind stranger gives me a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste.
The new school is where I make friends. They invite me home. They live in big old houses or smaller new houses. Their families have phones, fridges, cars, some of them have ponies. And they have clean school uniforms.
I am happiest in English and P.E. classes. As I develop my world of fantasy, my English teacher gives me loads of encouragement. But it is the P.E. teacher who is the most encouraging, the kindest person I’ve ever met. For eighteen months I am dedicated to athletics and devoted to her. She gives me one-to-one coaching after school, tells me I need a pair of running spikes and must join an athletics club. Dad says they can’t afford to send me to a club. He does agree to buy me the running spikes—as long as I hide them under the bed and keep it secret from Mum.
I am excited to learn that my best friend eats curry. She tells me how to cook it. One day after school I take home a tin of Sharwoods curry powder. Mum explodes:
‘Get that disgusting, filthy stuff out of my house or I’m leaving.’
I stand my ground. She storms out. When Dad gets home, we cook the first curry I’ve ever had. He says he used to eat it in the army. It’s a bit burnt but I don’t care! I hide the tin of Sharwoods under the bed too. When Mum comes back late that night and erupts, I’m still smiling.
Mum’s final trick was to stop leaving me the doorkey. I could always find it under a brick in the bike shed and let myself into the house. I couldn’t do that any more.
At assembly one morning my P.E. teacher announced she was pregnant and would be leaving at the end of term. I was inconsolable.
Nearly 13, I wander the streets after school, hang out with hippies, get stoned and find myself alone. Need a place to crash. In bed with a stranger.
Trying to sleep in a car park I was arrested for vagrancy. A social worker was appointed. In a gym lesson I took an overdose. Was referred to a child psychiatrist. Going to boarding school was meant to be a fresh start…
~~~
Although my adoptive parents were not officially assessed, I would later discover that someone at the adoption society knew ‘this lovely couple who lived in a delightful cottage and took in lodgers’. One lodger was a Catholic man from London who was recuperating after a hip operation. He was the father of a senior social worker.
And it was this senior social worker who was allocated to my case at the Catholic Children’s Society when I asked to see my adoption file. He was the person who counselled me.
He began by saying how lucky I was, said he knew my parents, remembered their beautiful home in Sussex. Were they still living there? he asked, this charming, kind couple with whom his father had stayed.
All the years I had waited to find out my identity and here I was being told that I must have had a great adoption. I gave him an update.
~~~
If someone had spent some time with my Mum, they would have found out that she was paralysed by grief. The one story she repeated to me over and over again has formed my earliest memories. I am sitting on her lap and she is weeping as she shows me the photos of her beloved father. He came home from work and died. Mum was fourteen and the eldest of five children. Immediately she was forced to leave school and sent to work in a tobacco factory to provide the family’s only income.
Her world had fallen apart while mine seemed to be thriving: that was why she couldn’t bear to see me studying, reading, or doing my homework, and would do anything to disrupt my concentration. She hadn’t had the chance to continue her education so why should I have that privilege?
A year before adopting me Mum had been in hospital for an extended time. During an operation to remove fibroids she nearly died and was given the Last Rites. All her grief for the child she never conceived. And I became pregnant at thirteen.
~~~
My adoption breakdown filled me with shame. I was a teenage delinquent. I was locked up for becoming pregnant. The shock increased when my social worker visited me. She said she had reassured my adoptive parents that they were not to blame; my teen pregnancy was all down to me being an Indian girl and therefore sexually mature for my age:
‘It’s well known that Indian girls get married at 12 and some will have three children by the time they are 14.’
But Mum had told me I would become a whore like my Irish birth mother! When I met my Indian grandmother for the first time in 1986, I discovered she was a gynaecologist and had written a book on family planning. Her book was published in India in the year that I was conceived. If only her son had bothered to read it!
Adoptees who endure horrendous cruelty in so-called ‘forever families’ are too often blamed for the disruption and breakdown. And when we are told it is due to our defective genes, we are vulnerable to believing and internalising these myths for life.
One definition of delinquency includes the neglect of duty. If the State adoption system is delinquent, when will it be rehabilitated? When will it honour the children?
Veronica Dewan’s writing has appeared in various anthologies including:
1996 – Speaking our Minds: An anthology of Personal Experiences of Mental Distress and its Consequences, edited by Jim Read and Jill Reynolds, published by Macmillan/Open University.
2003 – Adoption: Changing Families, Changing Times, edited by Anthony Douglas and Terry Philpot, published by Routledge.
2006 – In search of belonging: Reflections by transracially adopted people, edited by Perlita Harris, published by BAAF.
2009 – Mental Health Still Matters, editors J. Reynolds, R. Muston, T. Heller, J. Leach, M. McCormick, J. Wallcraft, M. Walsh, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
2021 – 30 Monologues and Dialogues for South Asian Actors – Celebrating 30 Years of Kali Theatre’s South Asian Women Playwrights, published by Methuen Drama/Kali Theatre.