North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Maureen

On the twenty, let me see twenty-fifth of March, that morning, early in the morning we heard she had died.  So that, I only seen her twice ye know, and er then we met Aunt Joyce.  We were over here nearly a year and, but she is the type of lady ye sort of have to make an appointment to see, ye know.  She’d been a matron in a hospital, ye know and she doesn’t keep in good health either so you had to sort of phone up to say if it alright to come and see her.  So we did and Jeannette, Willy and meself went over in a taxi to see her and er, oh very forthright lady.  ‘Oh I didn’t like your mother ye know’.  I says, ‘well that’s alright, I didn’t ask to come and see you that you liked her.’  I just, ye know, and then, didn’t really get much information out of her either because erm, she said, ‘I didn’t do what your mother did’.  Cause ye see she at that time, she had a daughter, ye see, and I don’t know whether it was her mum and dad that was asking to ye know to get adopted but she said, ‘I’ll tell you what I did.  I bundled my daughter up into a pram, took my coupons at that time’ and she says, ‘just walked out, never looked back, never went near them again’.  So she was an independent ye know, forthright lady and she started in a hospital and worked her way up to matron, ye know.  And er she only has the one daughter and she, ye know, she never married, so erm it’s not a person I’d like to be on the wrong side of put it that way.  [laugh]  But I think, I would think my mother could’ve have been ye know, sort of, ye know, a strong woman too or yet I don’t know.  Joyce’s because Ididn’t happen to be a son that’s why ye know, think that’s whenever.   See my father when he was on leave and because my mother was expecting, he went back to sea again and then of course Alex was born and they hadn’t heard any word from John so it was her father, Alex’s Grandfather, that says, ‘he’ll be Adams, just name him Adams for the family and he’ll be named after me’ and he took Richard for his uncles name as well and he was born ’43 ye see but then whenever John come back and they got married in ’45 ye see but then I was born in ’47 so there must have been a split or something there ye know what I mean?  Or times was hard, I’m not too sure just because I wasn’t the right sex I would say, that’s all.  I say whenever you get to a certain age you’d have to go out to work and a man’s wages is like, ye know, better than the girls.  Well Joyce maintains I was the wrong sex anyway that’s why she hightailed off with her daughter.  So [sigh] is there anything else I’ve left out?

I don’t think so.  Quite an emotional journey isn’t it?

Well my Aunt May is dead, Richard he was dead tool and Richard actually married an er a girl from Belfast and her name was Maureen see and when our Jeannette was on the phone to Alex and says, ‘I’m your niece, er my mam’s names Maureen’ and she was trying to explain and he goes, ‘no hold on your not me niece, you’ll be me cousin because Richard married a girl from Belfast called Maureen’, ‘oh, no, no, no’ Jeannette says,  ‘you’re wrong’.  He says, ‘hold on a minute’, he says, ‘that’s not Mary Amanda?’ and she says, ‘yes’  So that’s how, but he thought it was Maureen’s daughter phoning him and it wasn’t, it was my daughter.

I just thought, I made a note here, you know when you contacted the man in Blyth, who managed to get your birth certificate, did you always know your birth name?

Yes, no, no, I didn’t know until

How did he get

No, I’ll tell you how I got my things.   I didn’t know anything about my birth name until before I was getting married in Birmingham and I asked them to come down to the wedding and I got a letter with er, my adoption thing in it and also the little piece of paper that was er my registration number, ye know registration form and said that they weren’t coming down to any hole-in-the-wall, corner wedding and that was the first time I got to know my original name off my adoption order.  So.  Yeap.