‘THE LIFE-CHANGING JOURNEY TO FIND MY long lost family’
Adopted at birth, it was only when writer Anstey Harris found the courage to build a relationship with her late mother’s family that she discovered a sense of belonging and connection
When you’ve always known you’re adopted, it’s just a part of you, like your height or the colour of your eyes. I was sceptical about people who traced their natural families: how could it change who you are? I wasn’t sure it was something that would make a big difference to my life. I had learnt, without realising it, to be an island. But then I saw someone who had my face and that’s when everything changed.
In the 1960s, 16,000 babies a year were put up for adoption in the UK. I was one of these children. My mother, Christine Harris, had been living in Scotland. She had left her family in Cheshire to go there to protest against the building of the Faslane Nuclear Submarine Base, near Glasgow. She met my natural father at the protests and they had a relationship lasting a few months. By the time she came home, she was four months pregnant with me. She was 20 years old.
Like many others at the time, Christine
went to an unmarried mothers’ home (ours was in Liverpool) where she stayed until I was born. It was a story that played out in families across the country: it had no regard for class, religion or education – abortion was illegal and contraception was difficult to access. Adoption was seen as the option that was ‘best for baby’ – the reason given on my adoption form – without consideration for the long-term effects on mother or child.
When my adopted parents met me, I was 10 weeks old and in a foster home, lined up in a row with all the other babies. The babies had bottles with the teats cut off so that rusks could be mixed with the milk to keep us from crying. My adopted parents had planned to have a large family but my mother had life-threatening pre-eclampsia in her first pregnancy. My older brother – their natural child – was 15 months old when I arrived. By the time I was eight, the marriage was in trouble; it ended in divorce a few years later. Occasionally, I wondered what my natural family might be like – but not in any real or concrete sense.
Throughout my life, friends who weren’t adopted were always more fascinated by these unknown people in my life, this ‘other’ family, than I was. It was something I had no experience of; something I simply couldn’t understand.
In my early 30s, I finally applied to Social Services for my adoption file. It had been lost in a fire at the hospital where I was born. All that was left was a half-filled-out form. Crucially, that form had my grandparents’ address on it. Although the Harrises had moved from Cheshire to Kent, I tracked down a family friend who put me in touch with Mary, my grandmother, and also told me that my mother Christine had taken her own life in 1970, five years after my adoption.
When I talked to my grandmother, it was the first time in over 30 years that she had spoken about me. Christine had gone away before her pregnancy showed, and
Finding a history has changed my future and the way I look at the world
when she came back without the baby, I was never spoken of again. Mary did not tell Christine’s younger brother and sisters about me. No one in the family knew.
My grandmother was paralysed by the situation. At what point do you tell your surviving children – particularly when you have an exceptionally loving relationship with them – that there is a family secret? Mary had just begun treatment for cancer when we spoke and we decided to leave contact until she was better: a time that sadly didn’t come. It was impossible for her – on top of her cancer treatment – to form a relationship with me without hurting her family. Mary sent me photographs of Christine. We looked very alike and the comfort of seeing the photos was astonishing.
The most important thing Mary told me was the name of her son: Anthony. Although I didn’t stay in touch with Mary, I looked for Anthony online and found a brief biography that said he lived in London and gave the name of his company.
My own children tried to persuade me to make contact – they were fascinated by the whole story. My adopted mother was dead, and my adopted father had married again and had a second family. There were no emotional ties left that would mean people got hurt. Every so often, I’d check on Tony’s Twitter profile to make sure he was still there, but I still hadn’t worked up the courage to contact him: so much could go wrong. By now, almost two decades had passed since my conversation with my grandmother.
Then one day, a couple of years ago, Tony posted a selfie that changed everything. The picture bore an uncanny resemblance to me: the hooded eyelids, rosy cheeks and snaggle tooth. Just like that, I really wanted to know. I had no other way of contacting Tony except to send him a tweet and, in 2017, I did. ‘Could you follow me back so that I can send you a direct message?’ The next morning, he had.
I checked he was the Tony Harris I was looking for, the one who’d had three sisters and had lived in Macclesfield. He replied – immediately – that he was. There was nothing for it but just to tell him that I was his late sister’s child, his niece, who he knew nothing about. Tony’s response was the only one I had never considered: ‘Welcome to the family.’
My youngest aunt, Judith, was the first to meet me a week later in London. We hit it off over a long lunch, followed a few weeks later by a second longer lunch with Tony. Even as a writer, I can’t find the words to describe how I felt after I’d met my birth family. During my life, I had often explained to people how you can’t miss what you don’t have – so I wasn’t devastated at my natural mother’s suicide or that my grandparents couldn’t speak to me, as many people thought I should be. What it means to be part of a ‘family’: to feel a sense of connection and belonging, had been a total mystery to me, but finding a heritage, a tribe, has been life-changing. I had been aware of Tony for almost 20 years and now, there he was, sitting opposite me, and it was like looking in a mirror.
Judith, Tony and I sat in a London park and ran through all the things we share: colour blindness, the snaggly tooth, asthma and sturdy thighs. We also have a love of partying and an easy access to our emotions. They were just 11 and seven when my mother took her life; too young to be told any details. The reasons will always be a mystery, but I do know that Christine was married and living in London at the time.
In the last two years, my family and I have spent Christmas at Judith’s, we’ve been camping with Tony’s family, and Judith has joined my family on a holiday to Madrid. Judith and I text almost every day and we meet for meals – or even a dog walk – whenever we can.
Would things have been different if we’d met earlier? Maybe. But they might not have been better. Tony and I had wildly disparate politics in our younger years and he’s convinced I would have hated him (I’m sure he’d have found me annoying, too). And what effect would knowing about Christine’s suicide have had on my attention-seeking teenage self? As a child, I was lively, fiercely intelligent and utterly incongruous with my adopted family who were, on the whole, not easy with emotion or loud noises. Christine, I now know, was quirky, bold and political. These qualities run through me – and my children – like a watermark and are qualities that I can now own and be proud of. I no longer worry or apologise for who I am.
I know my grandmother parented well, despite the tragic outcome for Christine. My uncle and aunts are welcoming and loving. They in turn have raised buoyant, tolerant children who accept their middle-aged cousin, her children and granddaughter, without batting an eyelid.
Occasionally, I feel overwhelmed by this sudden belonging, but I wouldn’t change it for anything, and I’m so glad I made contact. Even at the age of 52, finding a history has changed my future and the way I look at the world. My new family and I have made our peace with the things we cannot change and embraced the positives we will take forward with us from here. We are united in these decisions because, as it says on the framed vinyl that Judith bought me last birthday, We Are Family. ◆ The Truths And Triumphs Of Grace Atherton by Anstey Harris (Simon & Schuster) is out on 10 January.