On the Cusp

Copyright © 2017 by Margaret Gosley.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017917771

ISBN:   Hardcover     978-1-5434-8804-3

               Softcover      978-1-5434-8803-6

               eBook            978-1-5434-8802-9

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Rev. date: 12/06/2017

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Contents

Prologue

1.    The Beginning

2.    Growing Up

3.    School

4.    Looking for myself

5.    The Acting Lark

6.    Coming of Age

7.    The Personal Becomes Political

8.    Things Fall Apart

9.    Walking on the Wild Side

10.    Back and Forth to Nottinghamshire

11.    Ancestor Hunting

12.    Sisters and also a Brother

13.    Breaking and Making

14.    Getting it all together

To Shoshannah, Robin and Natty

With all my love

PROLOGUE

I came into this world at a time of great uncertainty; conceived in the early months of 1939, I was born in the November of that year just two months after the outbreak of World War II. So I am of the generation that stands astride two very different times. I was formed and brought up to the values of the rigidly conforming fifties. But I became an adult throughout the creative and liberating years of the sixties. I also came to have two sets of parents, one genetic and one adopted and for an adopted child both sets of parents are important. Even if you never know the first set, maybe never even care to know them, never give them a second thought, they live within you. They are stitched into the fabric of your being.

My genetic father does not loom large in this story. I met him only once and he seemed a domineering presence although there must have been more to him than that. In a photograph that I have of him he looks arrogant and I am told he was a clever man. But then fathers can so often be difficult. I battled with my adopted father throughout my life but it was him who allowed me to talk, to dissect my life and my politics. We frequently fell out over values and ideas but he was always there to love me and provide for me.

My adopted mother took me in because she loved me. She loved and nurtured me however difficult I was and she is responsible for all the best bits in me. Through her and her love I learnt to withhold judgement, accept people for what they are and expect the good in them. I have always felt that my later socialist values lay with her upbringing. She was so careful for me to know that I was as equally loved as her two natural daughters and went to great lengths to demonstrate it. She once told me, with the best and most loving of intentions, that when she was giving her medical history to a new doctor, she told him she’d had three pregnancies. She quite forgot that she had not actually given birth to me, her middle daughter whom she’d adopted as a tiny baby. She would have been heartbroken to have known that instead of reassuring me it raised troubling questions for me. If it was so easy to forget whether or not one had given birth, I asked myself, what meaning or value did the blood tie have, and how important were all those myths of birthing and bonding? What value was there in those early hours of parenthood if there could be such an easy confusion over remembering and forgetting? My mother’s story was well meant but turned my world into a shifting place with everything depending upon a forgotten moment. Of course she did not mean to have this result with the telling of this story. For her it was proof positive of how much she loved her middle daughter but for me it raised yet another uncertainty. She told me the story because she wanted me to have proof that I was loved the same as my sisters. It was her gift to me but the very telling of it set me apart. Why did I have to be given proof of my parents love when my sisters didn’t? Not for one minute do I doubt my Mother’s love for me and mine for her. But through no fault of hers there was always this shadow of uncertainty within me and always this feeling of being set apart. I hope I have done my Mother’s love justice and grown up as her example. But the doubts are there and as I come to know a little more about my genes I find that nature is in there along with nurture.

My nurturing parents described my genetic mother to me as small with dark hair and pretty. They did not tell me I looked like her but said I had eyes like hers. Through my personal search for my origins and the paper evidence of birth and marriage certificates I learnt more about the bare facts of her life. I met her twice, once when I was a young woman and once in my middle age. The meetings were brief and yes, I did look like her. I also discovered she had a creative side to her nature and most importantly, just like me, she had kept written notebooks throughout her life. The second time I met her I was in my fifties and she an old lady. We sat side by side on her sofa in her bungalow and she showed me a shoebox full of what she called her ‘scribblings’. Over and over again she had written out her pain, her feelings of shame and loneliness on scraps of paper and in cheap notebooks. To this day I wonder if this is something you can inherit since writing things down is also how I deal with things. Not in any order or a journal, just notebooks written under the pressure of need. I see now that they are the way in which I constructed a narrative that would legitimise me and provide me with a history.

At the age of ninety and at my request my birth mother sent me her ‘scribblings’. The narrative of her brief life with me came through the post in a large brown envelope. As I gently drew them out of the envelope a smell hit the back of my nose, a blow that pushed me back and forced me to sit down. To say the smell was familiar is not sufficient or even true because I could not match it to anything I consciously remembered. But it was not unfamiliar in the sense that it felt like me and it made me cry. Sitting, crying, with these ‘scribblings’ on my lap I could not read them until many days later but I was haunted by the smell of them. When I finally read them, my birth mother and her pain became very real for me. She had been able to have and to hold me for at least the first six weeks of my life. Did she breathe in my baby smell before she gave me away? And did the smell of her linger in my nose before it travelled to that part of the brain that records and locks away our memories until something sets them free. My birth mother’s ‘scribblings’ had a profound effect upon me and I am lucky to have them. It is through them that I am able to honour her side of the story.

If you are an adopted child, however smooth and happy that process may have been; however loved you were within your family, you learn to perform with a fine precision and develop a heightened sense of what is required in order to be accepted as a proper person. I also suspect that the parents of the adopted child must always have that sliver of fear; a fear of the part of you they do not know and cannot guess at as they seek to bring you up in the best and most loving way. Your genetic heritage is there, lurking in the wings and despite all their best love and parenting efforts may yet strike and take them by surprise.

The adopted child is someone from outside the mould and lives as an exile in a foreign land. It has affected my life with questions such as Who am I? Where do I belong? How should I behave? As far as knowing who I truly was, I always felt I stood on the edge of a black hole that contained my past, my inherited self. As to how I should behave, I had my parents there for guidance but did not know how that unknown past might inform the future. All that was in the dark hole behind me so it was up to me to constantly invent myself.

As a child I wanted to fit the mould but I was never too sure what it was nor, since I was desperately unsure as to who I was, whether the mould fitted me. I frequently failed and failure made me resent the mould, made me angry with it. To protect myself from my own failure I constantly challenged it and at the same time removed myself to the edge of things where I felt safe and at home. Later in life this became a kind of modus operandi yet it was never entirely self-conscious. I admit that I have used this sense of being an outsider as an excuse for failure. If I had tried a bit harder I might have succeeded in being a more regular and successful person. I don’t want to sound sorry for myself because I am not. I just want to show how the circumstances of our beginnings can inform and underpin the rest of our lives

1

The Beginning

M y genetic mother’s name was Mildred and she gave birth to me on the bedroom floor of a small terraced house that was her grandparents’ home in North Yorkshire. She has since told me that she ‘can never forget that blue lino’. She herself was born in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, where she and her sister lived in rented rooms with their mother, who was always ill and father, who was a journeyman miner. They were very poor and eventually her mother died of pernicious anaemia for which at that time there was no cure. When her Father remarried, his daughters, as in a proper fairy story, were not welcome and he left them with their grandparents in Helmsley, Yorks. They were taken in grudgingly and it was made clear to Mildred that she would have to contribute to her living. She left school at the age of fourteen to work in a local hairdressers until she went into service as a live-in nanny with various families. She describes how she met my father Hal at a dancing class when she was only eighteen:

Mildred’s scribblings

We were two naive innocents, two people searching for someone to care as it transpired that Hal was not living at home having fallen out with his parents and gone to live in lodgings. We were more companions than lovers for many months but we began to feel deeply for each other although the word ‘love’ was never mentioned. We were totally naive but knew that if we were to take our love any further we had to take precautions.

What a fiasco! which ended with the accident happening. The very thing we knew we must avoid.

To say that the next few weeks were worrying is an understatement. But strangely enough the very fact that for the first time in my life I had someone to care for me gave me the feeling that come what may we would be able to cope somehow.

But they were not able to cope, circumstances were going to make sure of that. And they had nothing in the way of support. Hal’s mother was a strict Irish catholic who banished him and refused to recognise the pregnancy. The War was imminent and Hal had to either join the army or, as he was an industrial chemist, go South to work on the armaments at the Woolwich Arsena; unsurprisingly he chose to go South. Since the pregnancy was illegitimate Mildred’s grandparent’s declared her to be evil and sent her to a home for ‘fallen women’ which was run by the Church Army in Harrogate. However the grandparents or possibly it was Hal’s parents, were adamant that she and Hal had to be married although quite why we shall never know and they never gave them any further support in the future. So in the September of 1939 the two of them met to be married at York Registry office:

The ultimation had been issued. Hal and I were to be married whether we wanted to or not. Neither of us had been involved in any of the discussions, arguments, threats and the subsequent bad feelings between the two families. They never spoke to each other again.

A wedding day was arranged for us in a registry office in York. What a day! I honestly would not have blamed Hal if he had run a mile such was the atmosphere of hate through all this. I think that had we been able to contact each other we might both have run away.

I was collected from the ‘Home for Fallen Women’ in the morning. Previously my own grandmother had, with thought and understanding sent me a small amount of money to buy something decent to wear for the occasion. As the Church Army Officials opened all the letters sent to the Home this was confiscated. I do not know what became of the money. I was just told that as I had sinned it was a part of my punishment and they would give it to a good cause.

I was the first to arrive in this grim little room at the Registry Office. Nearby stood my grandparents who stood in stoney silence. Hal’s parents did not attend as they had disowned him and when he arrived we dare not look at each other. If only we had been able to comfort and support each other just then! We just solemnly made our wedding vows. We were not even allowed to say good-bye to each other. I was bundled into the car back to Harrogate and Hal went back to London where he now worked. We were not to see each other again until the birth of our child, Margaret in November and then only for one afternoon. It was then that we both somehow knew that come what may we would find a way of being together again. And we did but even fifty years later we have never been able to talk about this terrible time in our lives.

For Mildred there was worse to come. War had been declared and the Church Army Officials were required to close down the Home in Harrogate as the staff and the premises were needed for the war effort. The ‘fallen women’ were given two weeks to make other arrangements and Mildred according to her notes, had nowhere else to go but back to her grandparents:

Now began a most difficult time in my life. Grandfather pretended I did not exist and totally ignored me. My Grandma, a kindly, simple lady, did her best under difficult circumstances to make life easier. On a few occasions I heard her taking him to task for treating me, in her own words, ‘worse than a pig’.

I knew absolutely nothing of what to expect about having a baby. It was a taboo subject. Indeed all the time I was at my grandparents I was never able to go outside unless after dark because of the shame I had brought to the family. Oh how I wished I had a loving, understanding mum who would put an arm around my shoulder. But I had learnt by this time never to cry whatever happened.

Although they describe a really dreadful time and I find it very hard to read Mildred’s scribblings, at this point I also feel very privileged to have her words for she was after all the truest witness to the first and one of the very few experiences we shared:

The day Margaret was born, this child of shame, I had no medical help of any kind and such was the agony that I vowed never again! In the early hours of the morning I lit a candle and found shoes and coat to go to the toilet or ‘lav’ as it was usually called. A wet cold, windy walk in the dark up the cinder path in the garden. There was no fancy flush toilet here. But for the fact that there was no running water it looked quite palatial. The wooden top being made of what must have been a very nice carved oak bedstead with the appropriate hole cut into it. The rain drumming on the tin roof and the wind making the candle flicker made it all seem very surreal.

I, in my total ignorance knew absolutely nothing about what to expect but dimly realised that I