I have always known that my father, Paul, was adopted and possibly of Irish descent. I just wasn’t that interested. Neither of us were. When I was growing up in the 1980s, he was a fantastically busy man, a QC (senior lawyer) who was, he says now, “pretty obstinately determined just to get on with life, to look forward”.
Then, on June 24th, 2016, we woke up to the EU referendum result. Now in his 60s, my father was working and living in The Hague, teaching law at the University of Applied Sciences. “At first, I just felt total disbelief,” he says. “Then really sad. By the end of the day, I was furious. I felt my identity was European, not British. But then a colleague said to me: ‘I’m OK, my mother’s Irish, I’ve got an Irish passport.’” Suddenly, my father thought: “This could be my chance. I have to find out.”
The number of British citizens applying for Irish passports increased by 22 per cent last year. Almost 100,000 applications were received, as people dug up neglected Irish roots in the hope of retaining EU citizenship. About 10 per cent of the UK's population, excluding Northern Ireland, qualify for an Irish passport. But what happens when you trace your family history in the hope of discovering this right, and find something else instead?
In early 2017, my father contacted an agency that specialises in investigating adoptions, and the hunt for our Irish heritage began.
Here’s what we knew.
One estimate places the number of babies born to unmarried Irish women during the 50s at about 1,900 a year. Many such women and girls fled to England by boat to have their babies adopted. Countless numbers arrived in Liverpool, the city in which Pa and his twin brother were adopted in October 1952, by Dorothy and Arthur Garlick, a childless couple from Up Holland, near Wigan.
During the war, Arthur had served as a medic on troop carriers. Once, he was sunk and spent days floating in a lifeboat in the Atlantic before being rescued. Back in Merseyside, he went to night school, got a job as an accounts clerk in a factory, and worked his way up to become its financial director. When the twins arrived, and an adopted sister followed in 1955, they were a picture postcard of 50s upper-middle-class values.
“A detached house, two cars in the garage,” says Pa. “Our parents had been conditioned by the war, I suppose, so they were reserved. There was very little physical show of love, but we were secure and happy enough. We knew we were adopted, but it didn’t trouble me.”
It turned out that digging up identities so deeply buried is no easy thing.
It certainly did not hold him back. Through the 70s and into the 80s, he went on to invent a whole new identity, in a way that only those without deep roots can. He grew up and moved to London, carving out a successful career in law, and a cosmopolitan life. When eventually he had me, his only child, we saw nearly nothing of his adoptive family. Even his voice had changed. “I’m amazed at how plummy it sounds,” he laughingly admits.
Thus it remained, until Brexit tipped the balance. “For the first time, I felt compelled to find out where I was from,” he says.
It turned out that digging up identities so deeply buried is no easy thing. The agency spent a year picking through documents, making applications to local councils and county courts, in the hope of uncovering a lost Irish woman.
Meanwhile we waited. Or I did. Pa would be the first to admit that patience is not his greatest virtue. So while the investigators attempted to find a way for the two of us to stay in the EU, he decided to join a rather more ambitious campaign. To keep the whole country in.
He became a member of the Centre for European Policy Studies' taskforce, examining the implications Brexit would have on criminal justice. He campaigned for the citizens' group British in Europe. He signed up to the Labour party, met leading politicians and, in June 2018, joined 100,000 others in London on his first protest march.
I had never seen him so energised. In more facetious moments I laughed that it was like watching a teenager discover a new band, putting every single poster up on his walls. “I’d found a tribe and a cause I could identify with,” he says.
Shortly after, he called me, excited. The agency had found his birth certificate. On it he read his birth-mother’s name for the first time - Irene - along with the all-important initials RI, Republic of Ireland. We were thrilled. It spelt Irish passports for us both. But it seemed to proffer a deeper sense of belonging, too.
“Just before the referendum, I’d done a big case in the supreme court in Dublin, going back and forth for 18 months. I’d fallen in love with it, really. I felt comfortable there - it resonated with me. I started to think how romantic it would be to be Irish. I nearly jumped on my bicycle there and then, and pedalled to the Irish embassy,” Pa says.
Only, we weren’t. Twenty-four hours later, I got another call, this time in a less enthused voice. In his excitement, he had misread the document. RD, not RI. Standing for “Rural District”, not “Republic of Ireland”.
We still had hope, however. Irene’s surname was a common Irish one and, the idea of our Irishness having taken hold, we nurtured it over the next six months as the agency carried on digging.
Then, in December, an email arrived. I opened its attachment and reams of looped handwriting blossomed on to the screen. It was a letter, dated March 28th, 1952.
“Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to enquire if you can help me. I am expecting a baby in August, and as I am unable to marry I shall have to continue work after my confinement. I have no parents nor family to help me look after the baby, and in the difficult circumstances wonder if it is possible for you to help me in arranging for adoption. I should be very grateful for your assistance. Yours faithfully.”
There it was. My grandmother’s story, crystallising out of the ether after 66 years.
In 1952, Irene had no options other than adoption, and no idea she was carrying twins.
She had not been an Irish teenager who had braved the crossing to England. She had been Irene, a 31-year-old shorthand typist from Cheshire. My grandfather was not a sailor from exotic lands. He was her boss, Fred. They went out together briefly. When Irene told him she was pregnant, he revealed that he was already married.
In 1952, Irene had no options other than adoption, and no idea she was carrying twins.
A second letter, retrieved by the agency and dating from shortly after Pa’s birth, is sadder still:
“They are both healthy and lovely children. Whilst I must let you form your own opinion of me from the interview that I gave you, I hope that you understand that the babies are not from an indifferent home... and the circumstances leading to the adoption have been very unfortunate.”
Our hunt had always been for a piece of paper. We had imagined a typewritten document granting us a European identity. Instead we got letters in which an everyday, suburban tragedy unfolded in painstaking handwritten script.
“It’s led me to think about who I am, and what I care about,” Pa says. “I spent over half a century certain that my adoption didn’t affect me, or matter to me in any way. But when I read those letters, I felt so very sad for her. I thought, for the first time, about what it must really have been like to give up two tiny babies.
“I feel a little regretful that I didn’t seek her out earlier, when she might have been alive. I’d like to have given her the opportunity of knowing that we turned out OK, we did well,” Pa says. “Back then, she was powerless - she had what mattered to her most in the world taken away from her.” It has made him think differently about nationality: “For the first time in my life, I know for certain that I am British, and yet I feel less British than ever before.”
His and his birth mother’s lives are poles apart, he says, and yet knowing who she was has given him a new sense of determination. “It makes me even more convinced that, while I have some power, I have a responsibility to try and fight for the things that matter to me.” – Guardian
