Social Affairs: The abandoned baby has been one of the staples of print journalism for as long as newspapers have been in existence.
Someone deposits a small boy or girl, say at a bus-stop or outside a church, the police appeal for the mother to come forward while promising she will be treated sympathetically, and we readers wonder what sort of circumstances led to this distressing turn of events.
Kate Adie, in her third book, wonders about this too, but goes on to investigate what happens to these foundlings in their later lives.
As an adoptee herself, the veteran BBC journalist is well-placed to delve into the tangled and mysterious world of those who abandon, and those who are abandoned.
Nobody's Child weaves together slivers of Adie's own life, the personal accounts of foundlings and adoptees and a potted history of the phenomenon. It's an uncomfortable and not altogether successful mix: scanty when more historical detail is called for, and unrevealing when the author talks about her own origins.
Some of those she interviews, such as Fatima Whitbread or Bruce Oldfield, have familiar names. Whitbread spent her early years in a children's home after being abandoned by her mother. At 11, she was reunited with her mother, only to be raped by this woman's partner. Rejected again, she was eventually adopted by her PE mistress, who put her on the path that led to Olympic medals in the javelin.
In the early 1950s, Oldfield's mother handed over her child, the product of a inter-racial liaison with a Jamaican boxer, to a Barnardo's home because she was unable to cope with the double stigma of having given birth to a black child out of wedlock. He was adopted by a spinster dressmaker in the north of England who taught Oldfield the skills that helped make him a leading fashion designer.
Most of the people, however, are as ordinary and unknown as they were when they were found; Siobhan Lewis, for example, born and adopted in Dublin in 1961, now living in London and searching in vain for information about her origins. Or David McBride, who was found as a newborn abandoned in the front seat of a car in Dunmurray near Belfast in January 1962, and whose inquiries about his origins have met with a wall of silence from both communities in the North.
Adie takes us on a tour of the ways societies have dealt with unwanted children at various times in history. From the 14th century, many church buildings in Europe were equipped with a revolving wheel, used to deliver an unwanted child from outside to the care of the monks or nuns within. Nineteenth century America dealt with its problem children through "baby farms" and "orphan trains", which were used to move thousands of abandoned youngsters to the care of families further west.
The churches loom large in all this social engineering, nowhere more so than in Ireland. Adie records that Dublin had its own version of the "turning wheel", installed at the entrance to the foundling hospital at the behest of a Protestant bishop.
"There was a revolving cradle with a bell attached to it built into the gate, and the porter who turned the wheel could not see who left the child," she writes.
By the 20th century, the wheel was gone but the religious influence was still strong. The Catholic church's desire to hang on to illegitimate children while removing them from sight led to a flourishing trade in the illegal export of children, chiefly to the US. It took a welter of negative publicity surrounding attempts by Hollywood actress Jane Russell to adopt an Irish child to curtail the trade, but even then it continued into the 1960s.
Most of the foundlings who feature in this book have failed to discover much about their origins - understandably given the circumstances - and Adie herself reveals little about her own background.
"All through my childhood the subject of adoption was not of great significance, and never a problem," she writes, and later declares a lack of curiosity about the subject.
Which makes one ask: why bother? As an adoptee myself, I read this book with a hope that the author might impart something of her own experience. She not only fails to do this, she doesn't even try.
Adie's reputed reticence about her private life had already survived her autobiography and now it has come through this volume unscathed.
No amount of secondary research and ageing reminiscences of a war correspondent can compensate for this lacuna.
Paul Cullen is an Irish Times journalist
Nobody's Child: Who Are You When You Don't Know Your Past? By Kate Adie. Hodder & Stoughton, 324pp. £10
