North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Alex

We lived together and Amanda just sought of disappeared in to the backness.  So mam didn’t push it very much because she had me as being the first born she wouldn’t part with me and the grandparents wouldn’t let her get me adopted which is one god blessing I did have and we went on all through school, right through me life I’ve had disabilities with me legs.  I was born with ………….talipes, and used to wear irons and specially made boots but that didn’t stop me from getting around and playing with the kids; going to see the grandparents.  Me mam got married in 1951 again because Maureen’s dad and my dad, we just didn’t know where he was.  We heard he had been sank in the North Atlantic but there was no information coming forward so mam just left it and left it and we never heard anything and she got divorced.  In ’51 she married my step-father, we lived together with er, unfortunately, his mother who was about eighty five when she died and she was a real old fashioned lady, everything was so.  I went to schools, lived me life and finished me schooling at Northumberland Road Secondary School.  And from there I joined the butchers, learned a trade as a butchers and mam started really pushing for me to try and find me sister.  I tried from 12 year old with the help of some of the teachers at the school and different people but every lead I got we’d go there and it stopped.  Nobody knew where Maureen was or anything.  So mam just kept saying, ‘we’ll try and find her, we’ll try and find her’ and I says, ‘yes we’ll try and find her mam, definitely’.  Through my life I’ve been in the Royal Air Force which I was in a nurse but unfortunately with the disability I had they discharged me disabled.  I’ve drove taxis, I’ve drove wagons, I’ve drove buses, I’ve been a butcher erm and I just lived my life and kept going to the library and going to the courts but I had no leads or anything to follow everything had gone really cold.  So we live there with me mam and when I was nineteen I got married.  I’ve got four children to my first wife and er, we parted but I still lived near me mam.  I always looked after me mam no matter.  If she had a partner or not I was there for mam.  And then mam started really getting anxious to try and find Amanda but we just had no luck what so ever.  I mean I had lots of connections with being on the taxis and travelling up and down the country I could go to different places and try and to find where she was but unfortunately no luck and as time went by I grew older and got a little bit more wiser er, mam had had a hard life but there was one thing she said, ‘there are two things I would love to do before I die son.  I would love to go abroad, I’d love to fly and ……….sorry [crying]

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