Tree of Strangers Page 14
Out the window, a sliver of sun came over the horizon and the land emerged from the darkness. The captain announced our arrival. I thought about being a first-generation New Zealander and how the land has embraced me.
Mavis and Max would be at the airport. I decided I would try harder to understand them. My girls would be there, too, happy to be up so early. I could already feel the pleasure of their bare arms around my neck. Their cheeks against mine, their excitement for the gifts I’d brought home.
Home. This land of bright light, of intense blue and deep green, of beach and bush and rain. Of humour and manners and customs I understood. This is my home. And, for the first time, I felt I belonged.
26
All reasons, preferably special ones
I returned to New Zealand, and my daughter Lilian was born. The marriage ended badly, as these things do. The next five years were a blur of toddler and teenagers. And then Tom arrived on a spring wind. He brought his daughter Amelia and his enduring love that has embraced us all.
I began to write — columns, op-eds and feature articles. As time went on Tom and I made three award-winning documentaries. We infused them with issues of social justice, blood ties and duty.
Two decades had passed since I’d first written to Jo Bonnier’s son. I wrote again. This time he replied and we began to correspond. He’d fractured his spine as a teen and had been in a wheelchair for twenty-five years. He told me stories of growing up with a famous father and then losing him when he was twelve. Later, when we met, we hit it off, both of us thrilled to be siblings. We considered making a documentary. Together, we would go looking for our lost father. We would interview Jo’s friends and F1 drivers from the golden age of motor racing. We held off testing our DNA. The reveal would make a perfect ending to the film. After many funding setbacks, we gave up on the idea and decided to take the test.
The results came in. He was not my brother. Jo Bonnier was not my father. I had not a drop of Swedish blood. We’d both desired the connection of lineage. The loss of that possibility sent us in opposite directions.
I was, as it turned out, 49.5 per cent Ashkenazi. A Jew. Tom, my husband, is Jewish. We joined a synagogue. The rabbi came to our home to marry us in front of Tom’s ailing parents. For years I’d been aware of a Jewish sensitivity. Tom’s Holocaust survivor parents moved in with us for the last years of their lives. I loved their world of books and art and music: the debates, the opinions, the importance of everything. Whenever Irene, Tom’s mother, contradicted herself, she would shrug and lift her hands. ‘Two Jews, three opinions,’ she’d say, and it always made me laugh.
But there were no further clues about my father. I thought about the information available to adopted people. The 1985 Adult Adoption Information Act, touted as the answer to our need to know, was little use. It provides no more than a copy of your ‘original’ birth certificate. My certificate showed my mother’s name and my first name. The area for my father was blank. But someone had added Mavis and Max’s full names, their address and occupations. They’d included my adopted name for good measure. So much for an original document.
While I’d found my mother and met my sisters by chance and luck, I knew there must be more information. I began to write to the Ministry for Children again. This time I didn’t beg. I called every week, demanding my files. And I recorded the conversations. A social worker said she could not verify my identity. My dates were wrong. Because I was six months older than my birth certificate, she was unable to release my files.
There are no new-baby photos of me, so it seemed plausible. I scoured the few images I had, comparing toddler sizes. I studied the moisture beading on a window and the shadow on a lawn, trying to link them with the expected time of year. After weeks of sleuthing, I realised the different birth date must be an anomaly. Or a fabrication.
Other social workers sent me off on tangents, knowing, it seemed to me, I would get nowhere. They passed me down to junior staffers. And on to departments within departments. At all times, I felt the staff were condescending, disrespectful and insensitive. They expected me to give up, slink away, swallow my anger and get over it.
In all, I had over seventy interactions with government departments. The result was always the same. Yes, they had my files. Yes, any staff member could read those files. But no, I had no right to them.
I run a company and am an award-winning filmmaker and writer. I am a wife, a mother and a grandmother. Still, I am not considered adult enough to read my own files. In the eyes of the law, I am an illegitimate child for all my life.
There were three further options. The Adoption Act says I can access my files if both my natural parents and adopters are dead. Or if I have reached the age of one hundred and twenty. Or I could get a court order.
To get that court order, I had to prove ‘special grounds’, a term created especially for adopted people. There is no definition in law. ‘Special grounds’ is whatever the judge of the day says it is.
Through a contact, I received a folder of legal decisions — forty years of adopted people pleading for information. The stories were heartbreaking, but the judges were adamant: adopted people are not party to their adoption contracts. Thus, they had no legal right to their files. In 1976 a magistrate denied an application by ‘B’ to inspect her adoption records. The magistrate said her desire to learn whether she had Jewish blood did not constitute a special ground. ‘Disclosing information would open a veritable “Pandora’s Box” of trouble and embarrassment.’ In an application by ‘P’, the judge was clear: ‘The psychological comfort of the adopted person was not considered grounds to open their files.’23 Neither is a hereditary medical condition. In every case, the decisions read as cruel and callous.
I went ahead and petitioned the court to open my files. The judge requested I provide ‘all reasons, preferably special ones’. He gave no hint about what he might consider a special reason. Would the anomalous birth date swing it? I argued that withholding my birth date was a breach of natural justice.
And then, a miracle. The judge decided in my favour. He released all files held on me by the Departments of Justice and Internal Affairs. I could come to the courthouse and pick up my documents.
Two of my daughters came with me. The court registry officer showed us into an empty interview room. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights. I stared at the file he held out.
‘Breathe,’ Rachel said.
A few days before I’d heard about a woman who had been given ten minutes to read over her file before they locked it away again. ‘Can I take this?’ I asked.
The officer smiled. ‘I’ll photocopy it for you.’
We were soon out in the Hawke’s Bay sunlight. I held the file to my chest. Of course, I was crying.
At home, I closed the bedroom door. I needed to be alone. I spread the documents on my bed and saw my name on multiple papers. I was Baby Sumner. Then Lilian Sumner. And then Barbara McG.
The desperate letters I’d written in 1982 were there. In one document I am called ‘illegitimate’. In another I am ‘the transaction’.
A report states my adopting parents belong to the Church of England. ‘They are regular attendees at church’ and an ‘attractive young couple’.
Three weeks before my birth, a social worker alludes to trying to gain my mother’s consent. Fifteen days before, Mavis notifies a social worker. She expects to receive her child that week. Another letter, ten days out, says, ‘this couple is promised a baby by Dr Gleeson. They have been advised this baby is due any day.’
And then a letter two weeks before I am born. A district child welfare officer says: ‘If this baby is placed for adoption, approval will be given.’
The words stop me. If this baby is placed for adoption. Two weeks to go and it was not a done deal. They’d promised away my mother’s unborn child and left her without support or options, but their coercion had not yet worked. Her three months of isolation in the doctor’s home had not entirely broken
her down.
But next, the adoption order. My mother’s signature below Mavis’s and Max’s. I imagine her in their lawyer’s office. She had no representation of her own. And I wonder if she signed without a fuss? All the fight gone out of her. Or whether they needed to steady her hand on the pen?
The documents left me empty. I gathered them up, climbed under the covers and fell asleep in the middle of the day.
A while later, I went back to the Ministry for Children. Even with a court order it took many more weeks to gain access to their records. When the file arrived, a staff member had redacted half the documents.
But I found the doctor’s address. The place where my mother had lived during the last stages of her pregnancy, where she’d cleaned and served and held her hands over her tummy. I stared at the address. It was a few doors down from where I live now. The place I’d insisted on buying four years ago.
But in all the information, one thing was missing — my father’s name.
On a whim, I moved my DNA from the American company to one based in the United Kingdom. When they load your DNA into their system, anyone with a match gets an email alert.
Within hours I received a message. I’d come in from planting a hedge of olive trees and I opened it at the kitchen table. My hands were still wet and there was dirt under my nails.
‘I’m your third cousin on your father’s side,’ Jeremy from London wrote. ‘It’s not an exact science. But it’s possible, one of my three great-uncles could be your father,’ he said. ‘May I call you?’
Jeremy had a deep understanding of the intricacies of familial connections and DNA. His explanation went over my head, but his accent calmed me. There was comfort in his conservative vowels, a resonance I could not explain. He asked questions. How did I end up in New Zealand? Did I know anything about my father?
As always, I was self-conscious about admitting I knew nothing. The shame that matches secrecy beat for beat caught at my throat. I used one nail to clean another. ‘The man I thought was my father was a Formula One driver.’ I was acutely aware of my rising inflexion.
There was a moment of silence. ‘One of my uncles was a racing driver,’ he said.
Alfred Lazarus Fingleston, better known as Les Leston, born in Nottinghamshire in 1920. That would make him forty when I was born — my mother just nineteen.
Jeremy offered to contact Les Leston’s son. He replied immediately and sent away for the DNA kit the next day.
While we waited for the results, I turned back to the distraction of research. I found my mother’s address from the passenger list for the Rangitata. The ship departed London on 25 September 1959 with my newly pregnant mother and her parents aboard. They had lived in Holly Cottage in Bletchley.
With the help of a friend who has an uncanny ability to find obscure documents, we put together a possible scenario.
The Brands Hatch racetrack was less than two hours from Holly Cottage. Graeme Hill and Bruce McLaren raced there regularly, as did Les Leston and Jo Bonnier. In early August 1959 and again, two weeks later, they’d shared the same racetrack. After the racing, there were friendly cricket matches. And parties. Motorsport magazine reported the swinging sixties started early for the racing world. There’s even a photograph of Stirling Moss in a bikini and heels with a stripper called Booby Galore.
A question continued to niggle at the back of my mind. I was born in late May 1960. Many of the documents seemed to indicate I had been expected weeks earlier, but my birth weight suggests I wasn’t particularly overdue.
Two race days, two party nights, two weeks apart. A summer month of racing, cricket and parties. What if there had been two candidates for fatherhood? And a simple mistake. The wrong candidate told in secret to a friend. And that secret passed on to me.
Oh, Mummy.
27
You are your DNA
The DNA took months to come through. ‘You’ve struck a busy time of year,’ the company apologised when I enquired.
Les’s son Skyped and showed me around his home. He described it as ‘our father’s house’. He’d inherited it and the businesses Les left behind. The house resembled a barn, with blackened timber beams. There was an indoor pool and a circular driveway with a Porsche on display. My possible brother said he did not need the DNA to know I was a Leston. When we finished the call, he sent me a photo of a young woman. ‘I’m so happy to have another sister,’ he said. ‘You look so like her.’
Another sister? Kimberley Leston was thirteen months older than me. She wrote for The Face, the Guardian, the Independent and other publications. She’d died in 1995. Her colleagues said they treasured her vivacity, candour, humour, generosity and optimism. They described her writing as deft, clever and fearlessly frank. When I learned she’d taken her own life, the sadness clutched at my chest. I grieved for her, my unknown sister, familiar now in every photo. If only.
But then the DNA came back. I felt the same seismic wave as when I’d compared my DNA with that of Jo Bonnier’s son. Jeremy called and tried to explain. We were all in shock. Les’s son was not my brother. My forebears came from Lithuania, the ancestral home of the Lestons. He was Scandinavian. Not Jewish.
We did another test with another Leston family member.
I was Les Leston’s daughter. Kimberley’s sister. But Les’s son was not his biological son. The news was not well received. In finding my story, I felt I had dismantled his. I wanted to ask if, for him, the truth was better than living with a lie. If somewhere he’d harboured a suspicion? If it changed his memories around his relationship with Les? But like many bearers of bad news, I was no longer welcome.
Les had died in a nursing home in 2012. He was ninety-one. I’d found my father five years too late.
Les Leston had been born Alfred Fingleston. His parents changed their name when he was a small child. He was also known as Daddio, the jazz drummer in a band called the Clay Pigeons. When he died, Wikipedia and classic racing magazines and websites ran obituaries. There was a lot to say. He served in World War Two as a mid-upper gunner. He was a racing driver with over fifty starts on the F1 and F3 circuits. After racing, he became the F1 pit reporter for the BBC. He drove a red Lotus Elite with the DAD10 number plate around London. He moved to Hong Kong to develop his car accessories business and hosted a jazz radio show there. He owned a large cabin cruiser for weekend forays out into the South China Sea and rode a BMW 1200cc motorbike. In the evenings he propped up the bar at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a bon vivant who talked a big story.
I often think about his number plate, driving around London. DAD10. Another small fact gave me the shivers. Two decades before, I had begun to write a historical novel, The Gallows Bird. It was set in London in the mid-1800s, and one of the characters was a silk merchant and tailor. He’d come to me in the early hours, his name and face clear in my dream: Mr Fingleston. I had described him as like an ivy bush of a man, small and messy, with a moustache drooping below his chin.
Jeremy and another cousin had created a family tree. And there was Mr Fingleston, a London silk merchant. There is one photograph of him — the real Mr Fingleston, not my character. He has a drooping moustache and messy hair — an ivy bush of a man. A platelet of knowledge slipped into my bloodstream.
Around then, Jeremy mentioned another sister. Lucy Leston, who’d changed her name to Teya. She was born in Hong Kong when Les was sixty-two. I found her on Facebook. We did the DNA to be sure. She’d grown up as an almost only child. My sister, the same age as my oldest daughter. She came to visit, awed by so many nieces and their children. The children made labels to help her remember all our names, and we folded her into our family.
I now had all the pieces, but instead of joy, the results plunged me, for a time, into depression. Ambiguous loss, my therapist said. Loss that occurs without closure or clear understanding, such as when your loved ones are missing through abduction or war or terrorism. At the bottom of the list of such losses is adoption. You cannot mourn in publ
ic because there is no defined death. As an adopted person, you also have no right to mourn for those you’ve never met.
Over time I let in the spirits of all those gone before. The sadness lifted, and I found myself at peace with them.
I am the terminus a quo — the starting point. I have begun a new dynasty in a new land, just as my ancestors did when they left Eastern Europe.
In this land, my children and grandchildren belong in every way. I tell the little ones stories about their history. How Mendel and Feiga Finkelstein, my great-great-grandparents, fled from Lithuania not long before the Odessa pogrom of 1871. They came to London and changed their name. I show them photos of my grandmother Kitty Fingleston. In one, she lounges in a deck chair, perhaps on a ship or beside a pool. She has short blonde hair and wears an off-the-shoulder top and a wide grin. ‘She looks so modern,’ my eldest granddaughter says.
I tell them about my father, a bon vivant, a man who flew in Lancasters in the war and raced cars for the fun of it. And I tell them how my mother’s bravery gives me courage. How she picked herself up after losing everything and made an exciting life for herself. These are now my stories to tell. They are my inheritance, the jewels I am handing down to future generations.
I am still grafted onto the tree of strangers. My official birth certificate remains a legal fiction. Adoption laws around the world continue to sever the past as if it does not exist. I do not appear in my parents’ documents or on their headstones. I have no right to their names or inheritance. But I am now placed within the sweep of history and I finally have a past. And that past lights my future.
I am the daughter of Pamela Sumner and Les Leston. I am the sister of Kimberley, Rebecca, Dana and Teya. I am the wife of Tom, the mother of Bonnie, Rachel, Ruth and Lilian, and stepmother to Amelia. And I am the grandmother of Margaux, Roman, Frankie, Zana, Dorothy and Fredrick.