Searching for Mum
The TV quiz that led to a discovery
Most game show contestants have modest plans for the prize money: a holiday, perhaps, or a new car. Theresa Godly had bigger dreams. Godly appeared on daytime quiz The Chase three years ago, and was asked how she would spend her winnings. “I was born in Calcutta and given up for adoption to Mother Teresa’s orphanage,” she replied. “I would like to use any money we win to try to trace my birth mother.”
It was an answer to make viewers sit up and take notice. And, incredibly, one couple watching the episode held the key to Godly’s search. Philomena and Vijay Srivastava had worked as volunteers at the Shishu Bhagwan orphanage in the Seventies and fostered one of the babies, before helping to arrange her adoption at eight months old to a childless British couple named Godly. Now settled back in Britain, for years they had been living only a 15-minute drive from Theresa’s home in Surrey.
They made contact. “The minute they opened the door, Vijay said: ‘Hello, my girl.’ Philo cried and said: ‘Look at how you’ve grown.’ It was really lovely,” Godly recalls. It was also the beginning of a journey that would take her from hope to heartbreak.
Hundreds of children have been adopted by British families from orphanages in what is now called Kolkata, most of them originating from the city’s slums. Tracing their roots is fiendishly difficult. But, armed with vital information from the Srivastavas, and with the support of a documentary film crew and their team of fixers, Godly headed to India. The 43-year-old always thought she knew the story of her adoption. It was, after all, there in black and white on the affidavit issued by the orphanage: “This child is unclaimed. She was abandoned by her people.”
But Godly discovered from the Srivastavas that her mother, Yvonne Fernandez, had cared a great deal for her. It was a desperate story. Widowed, destitute and with three other children, she simply could not afford a fourth. Godly was nine weeks old when she was given to the home, and Fernandez visited several times to check on her progress.
“That broke my heart a little bit, because I felt guilty. I felt like I’d had her wrong my whole life,” Godly says.
When she visited the slums on her first day in Kolkata, the reality of her birth mother’s situation dawned. “Until you experience those slums, you cannot imagine what it’s like. I’m a single mother, but I live a British life. She had three children plus one on the way, her husband had just died, she was living in extreme poverty. The amazing thing about going to India was seeing all these children living in the slums and thinking that could easily have been me.”
Instead, Godly had a “blessed” life in London as the only child of Janey and Steve. She always knew that she was adopted. “My mum told me, ‘You were very loved and you were chosen,’ and that’s all you need to know when you’re a little child. But as you get older you want to know the ins and outs.”
It was only when she turned 40, with two children of her own and a career as an actress, that she decided to start searching. “All adoptees will relate to this: I liken it to giving up smoking,” Godly explains. “You can tell a smoker over and over to quit, and they know it’s bad for them, but they’ve got to want to stop. With adoptees, you will search for answers only when you feel ready. In my twenties, I didn’t feel ready. I thought, ‘she didn’t want me, so I don’t need her’.”
Godly’s journey was filmed for a BBC documentary series, Searching for Mum, which follows four women attempting to find their birth mothers in India and Sri Lanka. Anyone who has watched ITV’S Long Lost Family will be primed for an emotional reunion with the mother who never gave up hope her baby would come back to her. In Godly’s case, that was not to be.
A few hours into her trip, she encountered a couple who had known her family well. They told her that her birth mother was dead. The local records office laid out the details: Yvonne Fernandez had died in 2006, aged 68, in a home for the destitute.
In a lonely corner of Tollygunge Cemetery, a small wooden cross marks the spot where the city’s poorest lie buried. A tiny inscription was translated for Godly by a gravedigger: “Here lies nobody.” The discovery was devastating. “I did think, obviously, that it could be the case. But I flew out there with the greatest of hopes that I would find her,” she says.
It was made worse by the fact that, 15 years ago, Janey Godly had visited Kolkata in her own attempt to trace her daughter’s roots, and was supplied with a letter and a photograph purporting to be from Fernandez. “She wrote that she didn’t have long to live, and that every time she closed her eyes she wanted to see me.” But Godly dismissed her as a fake. “At the time I thought, that could be any woman pretending to be my mother and trying to get money.”
During her own journey, it was confirmed that she had been genuine. “So now I have to live with that for the rest of my life, that I didn’t go and help her. If I’d done that, I could have got her medical care, I could have flown her over to Britain. But I’ll never get that chance because I didn’t want to accept that was my mother. And that’s the hardest thing.”
Godly did trace her two sisters, Maureen and Anita – her brother had also died – and they supplied other pieces of the puzzle. “Maureen was 12 when I was born, so she remembers. She told me our father, Peter, was a very good man who loved our mother. And she said I was very sick as a baby, and that’s another reason why my mother gave me up, because at the mission they had access to medicines, which my mother didn’t.”
Unfortunately, the relationship with her sisters quickly turned acrimonious – they had already fallen out with each other, and Godly was caught in the middle. “I had this fantasy in my head – three sisters together – but that hasn’t happened,” she adds.
Her story, she believes, is more realistic than the seemingly happy endings supplied by Long Lost Family. “I’m glad I went to India because now I know for sure. But what I know for sure is very upsetting. I didn’t find out any good truths. But I hope the documentary inspires other people to be brave and to take that chance to find answers, because I just didn’t want to be on my deathbed and never know what happened to my mother.”
And she will be returning to Kolkata. “My sole mission is to go back to India to get my mother’s remains moved to a better resting place, and to pay for a proper headstone – somewhere I can go back to, somewhere my children can go back to,” she explains. “I want to give her some dignity. Because she’s not a nobody, she’s very much a somebody. And even though I never met her, I love her.”