Foundling, orphan, abandoned infant… These are terms with such emotive resonance. They evoke foundational myths: Moses, Oedipus, Romulus and Remus. Also cherished literary characters: Oliver Twist, Tom Jones, Mowgli and Eppie, the golden-haired girl who saves Silas Marner at his most forsaken.
These stories still move us. Recently I was stopped short by an episode of Life Changing with Dr Sian Williams on Radio 4 in which a woman from Glasgow, Karine Burns, described the emotional turmoil of trying to trace her birth parents. Adopted within days of her birth by a couple unable to have children, Karine had a loving, happy childhood. She and her nonbiological sister, also adopted, were brought up to believe they had been “a gift”. They were not alone: strangely, on their cul-de-sac of 40 homes there were seven households with adopted children.
But after she experienced the birth of her first child, George, Karine could not imagine “having this little person and giving them away”. She wanted to know, “Who first held me?” She knew from her adoption papers that her birth mother had been an 18-year-old from Dublin who had “fallen pregnant” and been sent away by ashamed middle-class parents to give birth in England. Karine set about trying to make contact.
This became a 25-year quest. Indeed, Karine is still on it, because although she soon tracked down her birth mother and discovered that she was living in New Zealand with a husband and four children (half-siblings to Karine), word came back via the adoption agency that her mother did not want contact.
At that point Karine felt she had exhausted all options. The papers gave scant details about her paternity. Then, three years ago, a cousin, obsessed with genealogy, suggested DNA testing and Ancestry.co.uk. Regular listeners to another excellent Radio 4 series, The Gift, returning for a third series on May 5, will know what a Pandora’s box these searches can unleash. “Very, very quickly” after uploading her data Karine had clues that led her to relatives of her biological father. But also the news that he may not have long to live.
I am not going to give the whole, moving story away here, but you hope there may be a postscript — clearly, in part, Karine’s motivation in contacting the show.
There are echoes of Karine’s experience in Foundling, a six-part podcast from The Observer/Tortoise Investigates. But here the stakes are even higher, the potential true backstory more troublingly nuanced. The documentary series starts with a memory from the presenter Lucy Greenwell’s Suffolk childhood. One October afternoon, her nanny picked her up from school with the breathtaking news that, that morning, her friend had found a newborn, left in a Sainsbury’s bag, on the grassy verge of a country lane.
Deftly told, this is a raw, gripping tale of secrets, longing and lies. But it also stirs questions: about people’s actions in the past and their reactions in the present. You fret about the implications for Jess — and others — of her sharing her story. In the real world there are no novelistic tidy endings.