Little lad’s dark past

It took 50 years to uncover the truth

Dressed in my Sunday best – mainly clothing from the charity shop – I joined the line-up outside my care home. Trembling, eyes to the floor. I was one of dozens of children waiting for inspection by potential foster parents. I’d got used to the routine. If picked, we’d be taken away forever.

But I never wanted to leave my home in the countryside. It was all I knew. Only, one summer day in 1959, aged 5, I was picked.

A couple named Rose and Leonard wanted to be my parents.

Before I knew it, I was in the back of their car, watching my home disappear.

I’d never been in a car before, and I felt sick rise in my throat.

Terror overwhelmed me and I threw up.

‘You stupid child!’ Leonard screamed, braking quickly, making me retch again.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whimpered.

But he got out of the car, slamming the door.

He yanked me out my seat and on to the ground.

And just minutes after we’d met, my new foster dad rained down punches on my little body. ‘Stop,’ Rose pleaded. But Leonard beat me black and blue.

Terrified and in shock, I crawled back into the car and we drove off.

That was the beginning of a decade of physical and verbal abuse at his evil hands.

‘I hate you, you’re a bastard child,’ Leonard would bark. He gave me daily thrashings. ‘Please don’t,’ Rose begged. But she couldn’t stop him. As I got older, I realised I needed to escape.

So at 15, I left school and got a job in a department store.

A year later, I packed my few belongings, filled my pockets with cash and fled.

Lying about my age, I rented a bedsit at the top of an old house. I struggled with cooking and slept with the light on. But nothing was as terrifying as the prospect of returning home to Leonard. Life went on. I never married or had kids. Maybe a consequence of my childhood hell.

Yet I ran my own furniture business and friends became family.

I knew nothing of my birth parents.

But in my imagination, my mother was a kind woman forced to give me up because of money troubles.

‘Why don’t you try to find out?’ a friend asked one day.

‘How?’ I laughed.

I was 50. It had all happened half a century ago.

Then another friend suggested I contact the charity Birmingham After Adoption. I had nothing to lose. Only, when they found out who I was, they advised me to have counselling before I opened my files.

Still, I never thought it would be that bad.

At my first meeting, a woman from the charity sat me down.

‘There’s no easy way of telling you this,’ she said, sliding an old newspaper cutting from 1955 towards me. Baby left on canal bank, read the headline.

The article said a newborn child had been left on a freezing November night by the side of a waterway. A woman called Lucy Cunningham had pleaded guilty to abandoning a child.

I looked up at the woman helping me.

‘I’m confused,’ I told her.

‘That baby was you,’ she said.

Tears

My new foster dad rained down punches on me

started streaming down my face as I read on.

This Lucy – my mother – had left me by a canal to die.

It was only by sheer luck that a passing postman had heard my cries and found me wrapped in a thin blanket.

I’d been taken to hospital, suffering from exposure, then ended up in care.

Whatever I’d imagined my mum to be, it wasn’t this.

I felt deceived, angry, rejected and very alone. Devastated. I was told Lucy had married a William Cunningham and had three children, William, Brian and Patricia. But she walked out on them in 1949 and started a relationship with Harold Wren. A married man with five kids. Lucy had become infatuated with him, even moving in just a few doors away from his family.

In September 1953, Lucy had a little girl, Veronica, and soon after, I was conceived.

Terrified Harold wouldn’t be happy about the pregnancy – and, afraid she’d be evicted, Lucy hid her bump.

The day after I was born, she’d gone back to work, not telling a soul about me. Or what she’d done. ‘She was arrested a week later,’ I told friends.

Lucy Cunningham served two years on probation.

Records showed that she died in 1984, aged 66.

I never got to confront her or ask why she did what she did.

Six of her grown-up children attended her funeral, not knowing a seventh was missing.

I learnt my father, Harold, had died in 1991.

Over the next seven years, I compiled archives and cuttings and wrote a memoir.

Then, in March 2017, I was interviewed on ITV News.

Afterwards, Lucy and William’s daughter Patricia, 69, contacted me. I was nervous, but happy to finally be reunited with a family member.

The first time we met, a few months later, I knew she was my sister. We had so much in common. Turned out she’d ended up in care too, after Lucy walked out.

We shared a similar sense of humour, even certain physical characteristics.

She’s bubbly and devoted, and has four of her own children.

Now I am thrilled to call her my big sister.

Despite my cruel start and dark past, I’ve become loyal, compassionate and loving.

Everything my foster father and birth mother weren’t.

And now I finally have someone I can call family.