Some of tone used in correspondence shortly after was cutting. I was very overweight and had a ‘quivering lower jaw’ and a fontanelle that was ‘not right’. In the late May concerns began to be expressed about my health.
#ADOPTION NCH FULL#
‘our available accommodation is very full at the moment, and we should not wish to keep Ian indefinitely if adoption is not going to be possible’ (NCH doc ). The problem with my admission was that, seemingly straight forward at first with the permission of both parents, this soon soured as within two weeks my paternal father, again, in fairness still a teenager, was ‘talking of opposing an adoption’. It was confirmed to me that it was indeed an issue. When in correspondence with Action for Children last year I cited the plight of non Anglo-Saxon kids at that time as a sad concern. A number of the children were black or mixed race. We lived in, I think, two family units with various carers being responsible for our welfare. I was eventually admitted to National Children’s Home, at five and a half weeks, in Mannings Heath, West Sussex, on 25th April- and so the baby football began.įorest House is/was a large multi room house in the Sussex countryside. I was moved to Aldershot for four weeks- although nothing is known of the carer excepting a name and address. Piecing the scripts together it would appear that I never saw either of my birth parents’ abodes. ‘threatened abortion or toxaemia of pregnancy ? Yes at 26/52’ (NCH doc 1969) A single line in one of the documents also supports this. It could have all ended before it started around Christmas 1968. I was conceived in June 1968 and, according to record, my young parents, only teenagers at the time, had broken up two months later. Unwanted babies, or babies who for whatever reason could not be kept, were nothing new for the late 60s although my ‘legitimacy’, a horrible archaic term, was less preferable to me having been a bastard child. Later, however, the quick advance in weight was put down to being ‘grossly overfed’. It was suggested, due to clerical error, that I was born heavier. The general consensus was that I was a large baby of nearly 10lb. Accounts vary, even official, as to my birth weight. I was born at ten to midnight, as has been told, and spent the next ten days at the hospital itself. It all begins on the 15th March 1969, in a cottage hospital in Frimley (not the village of Frimley Green as I previously thought- and not Camberley as handed down, although, until 1974, the two were held as one). That said, anything that is not from documents that offers insight has come from those involved themselves and what was said to me in the 1990s. Firstly, I hold no grudges and secondly, although the account is drawn from actual correspondence and first-hand witness, there is no opportunity to correct the record for them. Names have not been included of anyone involved in the process or indeed the identities of family members on my biological side. I’ve tried, where possible and with an over-riding intention, not to appear to be critical of the authorities at the time. The aim of this entry is to give background, and a small insight into the problems that the care services had in the late 60s.
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