Fact into Fiction - Patricia Crossley Hayes

From Fact into Fiction

There is no doubt about it, I was a mistake and I should never have happened. In 1938, my mother, just turned 16, had absolutely no idea how babies came to be! No one ever talked about such things, except sometimes, just before a girl’s wedding day. My 24 year old Father knew of course, because he was already married with two children, a fact he didn’t reveal to my Mother, until she discovered that I was on the way. She was devastated. She adored him and he had told her so often that he loved her, that when she discovered she was pregnant, she truly believed they would quickly be married and everything would be wonderful. It was soon clear, however, that that was not to be.

This photograph of my Mum (far right) with her parents and siblings was taken following her Church Confirmation Service, in the 1930’s.

Many thousands of young girls, often having barely left their own childhood behind, found themselves in my mother’s situation. For generations, right through Victorian times, and even into the late 1960’s, illegitimacy was shameful. Society shunned the unmarried mother, her family as often as not, rejected her and, certainly in the 1930’s, the state provided no support whatsoever.

Unless you have been there, it is difficult to imagine how it must feel, knowing that you are holding and cuddling your baby for the very last time, just moments before someone comes into the room and takes it away for ever.

My mother’s father told her she was not bringing her shame home, she was dismissed from her job in service, without references, and but for the kindness of her elder sister’s parents-in-law, would have been homeless.

She was left in no doubt from the start that there was no way she could keep her baby. One of her sisters had a friend whose sister having had one child was now unable to have more children. So the conversation would have gone something like this.

“My sister’s got herself pregnant and me Dad’s thrown her out, There’s no way she can keep it, so it will have to be adopted.”

“Ooh my sister can’t have any more children and she’d love another baby.

“Oh great, she can have this one.”

Knowing that there was no way she could support her beautiful little girl, my Mother had no option but to agree to the arrangement. She was made to breast feed me for ten days, as she was told this would give baby a good start in life. A close bonding between mother and baby was established in that short time. Then, suddenly, I was gone. It broke her heart.

My father, although regarded by her family as the ‘devil incarnate’, paid for an expensive nursing home, and when I was born visited her every day so she wouldn’t be branded an unmarried mother. He also drove me, accompanied by my Mother’s sister, to my new home in the Midlands.

This photograph of my father was taken soon after he joined the Royal Navy at the start of the Second World War, just a few months after I was born.

My birth parents continued to see each other for a little while and then war broke out. In fact I was baptised by my new parents on the very day that war was declared, Sunday 3^rd September 1939. My birth father joined the Royal Navy, my mother became a ‘clippy’ on the buses and they lost touch. I grew up having no idea that my birth parents even existed.

I grew up having no idea that my birth parents even existed.

That much is fact. It is the starting point for my first novel, but from then on the facts end. The characters, their personalities and the events in their lives, are fiction.