‘I’ll never stop searching for my daughter’
As an unmarried 19-year old mum in 1965, Celia Steer was made to give her baby up for adoption. Here she tells her story
Celia Steer has no photographs or sweet little mementoes of Angela Tracy, the beautiful little girl she first held in her arms on April 30, 1965. In fact, there are almost no traces of the child Celia had to give up for adoption at six weeks old, but the powerful memories of her first-born daughter revisit Celia every single day. “I was 19 when I found out I was pregnant,” says Celia, now 70. “I’d got drunk on Babycham with my boyfriend and to be quite honest, I was so innocent in those days, I didn’t really realise what was going on. “But it was my mother who said ‘you’re pregnant aren’t you?’ and then all hell broke loose. “My parents, who ran a garage with a flat above, stopped me coming downstairs to see anybody and if I wanted to visit my grandmother, I had to go incognito so I wouldn’t be recognised. They were so ashamed of me.” Adamant that no one should know about the baby, unmarried mothers often being a taboo in Sixties’ Britain, Celia’s parents arranged for her to stay with her brother to have the baby. But as her brother’s new wife wanted nothing to do with it, Celia eventually went to
a mother and baby home to give birth. While Celia knew her parents’ thoughts on giving up the baby – “I can hear my father’s voice saying ‘if you keep this child we’re not going to look after it’” – going into labour she still didn’t fully realise that the child would be taken from her. “I perhaps naively thought I might be keeping her. I had a very easy, quick birth and then had this adorable little girl I dressed in all these lovely things. But then about a week later, they started talking about adoption and I remember a social worker saying to me ‘you have no choice’”. Although Celia’s boyfriend didn’t want to know the child, his parents came to visit and brought clothes for the baby. They even offered to adopt Angela, so Celia could live with the child with them, but heartbreakingly, her own parents refused. As Celia was under 21 and still considered a minor, she was completely powerless. And so when the day arrived for Celia to go home, she had to unbearably leave her daughter behind, ready to be adopted. “The most awful thing was that I had no photos or baby toys to take with me as my parents said that was it, we went and left her and forgot about it all,” she says, becoming tearful. “Standing on the platform at Eastbourne station with my mother straight after, she wouldn’t say a word about it. And when I got home, my father sat there as if nothing had happened. A year later when I turned 20 my dad bought and did up a Morris Minor for me. I think it was his way of saying sorry. “Angela was never mentioned again in our family until many years later when I told everyone at a party and my mother went mad.” Celia also made a point of telling her next boyfriend, Ray – who later became her husband of 40-odd years – all about Angela. “When I got married and had my children, the first thing I told them was that they had a big sister out there. My mum was horrified that I’d told them. I just said, ‘But I’m not ashamed of having her’.” After her parents passed away, Celia heard from a friend that she may be able to track down the documents that might one day lead her to her daughter, Angela. “I managed to get hold of her real birth certificate which told me the name of the road where the mother and baby home was and a few other details I’d never known. It seems Angela Tracy would have known she was adopted but I don’t know for certain if she kept the name I gave her. “Now I want to try to find the adoption file which should give me more clues to what happened. I was nearly there a few months ago but then my husband became poorly and sadly died, so it got put on a backburner. But I won’t give up looking for Angela.” And if that fateful day arrives when she one day meets her long-lost daughter, who will now be 51, what would she like to say to her? “I just want to explain that I didn’t give her up because I didn’t love her, it was the circumstances at the time and my parents’ snobbishness. I had no choice. I just hope she’s had a happy, healthy life and I want her to know I loved her to pieces and I will always love her.”
‘I just want to explain to my daughter that I didn’t give her up because I didn’t love her’