North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Maureen
So [laughs], he often says he had distant relations but they are not distant now we’re only about 50 yards away from each other. Ye know, er and that’s the wee house, this here is the wee, could have been buying anything. I says as long has it has got four walls and a roof I don’t care ye know. And er so we’ve been over here now just two years past in May ye know and so we are actually getting the wee place in to shape and my husband has been in and out of hospital. But er as I say, really, really enjoyed it, feel as if, ye know, back in a full circle. I come from here and ye know come back over again, just home again. And as I say when it’s a loneliness I think, I mean ye know, fear of rejections really lots of times and I hear stories where, somebody’s went knocking on the door and they don’t want to know. Cause I could not have lived with that, I couldn’t have, I couldn’t have stood it, definitely not. That’s why I said to Jeannette, ‘please don’t tell me it’s him if he didn’t want me.’ So huhhh [big sigh]. So that’s it really for the moment. Is that alright?
Yeah, yes. That’s fine. You know earlier on you were mentioning your parents adopting another child.
Michael
Michael, have you
He died. Erm, Will and I went erm we went on holiday whenever er, Liam was six, Michael was five and Anna was four, so that would be erm, nineteen seventy-three. We came over for a few days, 1973, we got the youngsters looked after by Will’s sister Ann and we come over for a few days cause my friend Jean, she was coming in to Scotland. That’s where she was from and she was actually coming over for a few days. So we come down and may be come down to the B & B to go and see the adopted people and see how things was doing. So whatever, we knocked on the door, Will he was feared, he was hiding like this and a lady come out and, ‘yes!’ ye know. I said, ‘hello’ and she didn’t recognise me. And I says, er, ‘hello’. ‘Oh it’s you, yeah.’ I says, ‘I’ve just come to see you’. She seen the suitcases, ‘well our Michael’s in hospital’. She says, ‘and only if he’d have been at home you couldn’t have stayed’. That was the type of woman she was. So we come in anyway. As I say, Michael was in hospital but he had been in a motorbike and he had broken his leg. So we went and visited him in the hospital and I hadn’t seen him for years. He didn’t really know me at all and the best of it is none of his friend knew he had a sister and my name wasn’t ever mentioned in the house. All my stuff had been threw out. There was no sign of me at all. It doesn’t matter anyway. It got to be there just a few days and says, ‘cheerio, will you come over?’ ‘Oh yes, we’ll come over and we’ll do this and we’ll do that’. We were prepared, getting prepared for them to come over, and just, ‘no, not coming near you at all’. Just a letter. I couldn’t believe it and that was it, so I says, ‘alright, that’s up to them. They have been welcomed to come over and they don’t want to come and that’s fine’. So, as I say, we heard no more, my old man he can’t read or write. It was my adoptive mother, she did all the writing, I think he’d have been the one who wore the trousers in the house too and er I got an occasional letter and er, but then er, there was no mention of Michael in the letters at all, she never even said to me that he had died. He’d got leukaemia and died. She’d never made mention of it at all. Then eventually the letters stopped and I didn’t know anything at all until the one day, here, out of the blue this letter come and I knew it was from Newcastle upon Tyne but I didn’t recognise the writing. And er, it was er a Mr and Mrs Booth had wrote from the Post Office in the West Allotments because they had moved from Shiremoor to the West Allotments, saying that er that my mother had passed away and my father was actually wanting to know how I was doing. And, I didn’t even know
