The Rabbit with Silver Plated Eyes

 

My mother’s talk on the phone is all about moving; she to an Abbey Field home, where she tells me they have no guest rooms, me out of London. When I visit her in this new place, I won’t be able to stay, unless I share her room. There will be no more holidays in what I still call my home, with leisurely walks around the village. That’s going. But I will have all the memories  attached to inheriting her precious objects. It will be like the Hare With Amber Eyes for the suburbs of Wolverhampton; The Spode Rabbit with silver plated paws. Each object does mean something so it cannot be easily discarded.

I have been ploughing through my own stuff too of course, mounds of it, photographs from the 1970s which seem to have faded into weird synthetic jelly colours, black and white photos from when I lived in communist Poland, pictures taken at parties in my first privately owned flat, in the 1980s; beautiful black dresses, lots of décolletage and expensive hairstyles. Also photos from before that, taken when I was first born, before I was adopted. In those days families giving a child up for adoption used to have it photographed in a smart layette, as if it was dead. There are also larger photos of my birth mother posing fetchingly in Capri pants, tight blouse and sunglasses.

From what she told me, my infant clothes were probably damp from her mother’s tears. Apparently she used to visit them (us) at the Church Army home for fallen women, in Wimbledon, but wouldn’t look at or touch me, and cried all the time. Years later, when I heard my grandmother was dying in a hospice in east London, I phoned her. As I said I was her granddaughter a nurse put me straight through. We had a nice, gentle conversation. I had met her once and she seemed amiable and kind. She told me, ‘Your birth was the worst thing that ever happened to our family.’

A bit tactless perhaps, but it was probably the only thing that ever happened, and that is how they liked it.  I understood exactly what she meant. She was trying to explain to me why they’d behaved as they had. All the photos they took of me before I was despatched to a new owner are stamped, ‘Proof.’ No one went back to buy the finished originals.

On one of the three occasions that I met her, my mother told me that my father was an Australian dentist, working at Guy’s Hospital. She said he’d wanted to marry her, but she’d refused. Rather brave considering he was a well paid professional and the stigma she faced at the time. It’s unsettling and exciting to think that if she’d just said yes to him, we would have sailed to Australia together, as a family, and my whole life would have unimaginably different. They were ten years younger than the people who adopted me, only children during the war, not defined by it. He belonged to a different culture, she was remarkably malleable, classless, a real 60s wild child - both free from the  austere old morality of my background.

I grew up not really knowing who I was, lacking a deeply rooted identity. When I fell in love I’d try to merge myself into the other person, take on their identity, or try out an identity as their partner without knowing who I was. Sometimes I turned into my adoptive mother, which was truly scary. Later, later after I’d met her when I was twenty one, I felt as if I was her shadow, a pale imitation. Looking in the mirror I saw her. As  she was not interested in forming any lasting bond with me that was uncomfortable. I longed to be part of something, to belong. Trying to merge yourself into your partner is acceptable after ten years of marriage, perhaps, but not after ten minutes in a bar.

If we’d taken that journey to Australia together I would have grown up as part of my father’s family, who are just a blank to me, somewhere in the sunshine far away. I’m not saying that it would have been good, or that she would have been a loving, attentive mother, but I think she too would have been a better person if she’d kept me, living without the embittering, destabilising trauma of relinquishing what turned out to be her only baby. As a mother with her child, rather than not knowing where it was, she would have had a more certain identity too.