North East Post Adoption Service - Adoption Narratives - Bob

I would like you to tell me about yourself and your life experiences and the best way I feel you could do this would be to start with you birth and a little bit about the little child that you once were and to the present day and tell me all the things that happened one after another till the present day you can take your time in doing this and you know delve as deeply as you would like to what you feel most comfortable with because you know every thing you say is going to be relevant is going to be important erm and any information you don't wish to share don't and I won't pass any information on without your consent Okay Over to you

Right my birth well I cant really remember a huge amount about the exact moment in time but I was dead young but it was actually a place er near Carlisle erm some sort of hall some old school for naughty girls you know for single mothers at the time pause and this was in 1962 erm so I think in those days there was obviously a lot more scandal for single mothers and so they tended to sort of send them outside the towns to these places and erm I only found this out when I started delving into the pause adoption thing with the help of the likes of Steve and neebus and stuff like that erm so there I was I was born there erm pause but obviously my earliest recollections of childhood are actually with my adopted family pause who live in the area erm and they adopted me I think at about 3 months erm again I can't remember laughs its so long ago erm they sort of brought me back from Carlisle which was quite a long trip in those days pause and erm I lived in North Shields until about maybes pause im not sure exactly 4 5 6 and then my parents moved to a modern estate and erm initially I suppose I had a childhood like anybody else with went to school had friends and started at the infant school and erm I wasn't aware I was adopted until I was about pause erm not exactly sure probably 8 or 9 10 erm and my parents told me but of course it didn't really make much sense you know you don't know what to make of it at that age really you just say alright okay so I was adopted okay pause it was only when you get older think that you sort of think about it erm pause and pause like I say from then on I didn't really think much of it but from time to time I would think about it erm and as I got older this thought process got deeper I suppose you know what I want out of it pause and pause I think it was probably by the time I was pause I think when you're in adolescence and you sometimes get problems like you do with parents and you think you know where do your certain characteristics come from you know because obviously biologically its not your adoptive parents but equally some people say that nurture is as much a part of nature and so obviously the environment you're brought up in has a fair bit to do with the person you are I think as well but not everything as the old saying bloods thicker than water pause erm there is something in that though maybe not as much as people make out because erm there was maybe as ever from that age sort of adolescence I went to college for a little while then I started engineering erm an apprenticeship at a big engineering company in Newcastle which I absolutely hated from the word go I just wasn't cut out to be an engineer I don't think er and I was always very creative er in as much as I think I've obviously got quite a sensitive nature and I tend to play a lot of music I've always been sort of musical pause and interested in theatre and acting and stuff like that and I always wondered where I came from as part of the nature part of the nurture side so questions start to form in your mind and I think it was probably into my 20's when it really sort of bit and I felt I had to do something about it because for most of the time I think adoptive people go though life and you don't think about it but when you do think about it you really think about it if that makes any sense It does