AT 5 years old, Linda, a
little girl with serious eyes and dark brown
curls, didn’t feel she was any different
to the other girls on the street. Her mother
was a housewife and father a painter and
decorator. They had an average terrace house
and Linda was a quiet, content child.
At least, that was the
case until one June morning when her mother
dropped a bombshell that would change
Linda’s life forever.
Linda can remember it as
if it were yesterday and the memory of it
haunts her to this day.
Linda says that she was
knelling on the floor, tidying her toy
cupboard, when her mother stooped down and
said, "I’ve got something to tell
you. We’re not your real parents. We
adopted you"
Linda had no idea what
made her say it then; she had done nothing
bad.
She was stunned into
silence and just kept putting her toys away.
This was a revelation
that set Linda on a lifelong search for the
truth about her past, which has now come
close to finality as a result of a landmark
legal ruling in the Royal Courts of Justice
in London, in June 2001. In the Courts, the
adoption society which handled Linda’s
case was instructed to ‘reconsider’
allowing her access to her own adoption file,
which had previously been denied by them.
Through her own
detective work, Linda managed to trace her
birth mother and able to enjoy a 13-year
relationship with the woman who gave birth to
her.
So why does Linda need
access to her adoption file?
Well, it’s because
she wants to know why she was given up for
adoption and who took her to the orphanage
– Was it her mother, her grandmother or
a social worker?
There are so many
questions that an adopted child needs to ask
about their birth, which they won’t, or
can’t, ask their birth parents.
Linda’s birth mother was so traumatised
and upset about giving her away, that she was
never able to answer any of those questions
when Linda finally tracked her down. Her eyes
would just fill up and she would look away if
questioned.
When Linda talks of her
childhood, she says there was the one she was
told and the one she is still piecing
together.
Until she was 5, she
believed she was Linda Rogan, the only
daughter of Kathleen and Thomas Rogan. In
fact, as she was to learn much later, Linda
was the result of a passionate and
ill-considered affair between a dashing
Italian-American serviceman, Mid Russo, who
was stationed in the UK during World War 2
and Elizabeth Gunn, a pretty Catholic girl
from Liverpool. Her adoptive parents
collected her from an orphanage to bring her
up in the Liverpool suburb of Bootle.
After the shock of being
told she was adopted, it took Linda another 2
years to finally work up the courage to ask
her mother more. Linda says that she
wasn’t terribly close to her mother, who
was strict with her and perhaps she was a
little afraid of her mother.
Linda adored her
adoptive father and waited for the right
moment to tackle her mother, as she
didn’t want to upset him by talking
about another ‘real dad’. However,
she felt different about her mother, as it
was she who had started it all in the first
place by telling her. Once Linda knew they
were alone, she asked, "What does
adoption mean?"
Her mother replied
"It means we’re not your real
parents. It means your real mother gave you
away – like a 2lb bag of flour".
The phrase still brings
tears to Linda’s eyes, but she went on
and asked who her father was, to which the
reply came "Your mother would have had
you by anybody".
Of course, at 7 years
old, Linda didn’t fully understand what
she was being told, just remembering that her
mother’s voice was harsh and cold and
that being compared to a bag of flour made
her feel very small and unwanted.
For the following three
years, her adoptive mother refused to answer
any further questions, but when Linda was 10
years old, she told her that her real name
was Julia Gunn. Linda was shattered as
suddenly she felt like 2 people – Linda
Rogan and Julia Gunn.
Linda didn’t make
any further enquiries until after her
adoptive father died in 1969, by which time
her relationship with her adoptive mother had
seriously deteriorated. She was advised by
the City Library to begin with the Nugent
Care Society – the largest Catholic
adoption agency for the area – since
that was the religion she had been brought up
in. To her joy, she found she was on their
files. A meeting was arranged and Linda
arrived full of trepidation. She explained to
the elderly priest that she wanted to know
more about her past, why she had been given
up and whether her natural mother ever wonder
where Linda was now. She could see the file
on his desk and thought the priest would just
hand it over to her. Instead, he said there
was ‘nothing much’ in it. He went
on to say "The best thing for you is to
get on with your life and stop living in the
past".
At the time, adoption
law dictated that an adoptee’s access to
files was at the agency’s discretion.
The priest advised that as the Society had
promised her mother that her identity would
be protected, she wasn’t allowed to see
the file. Linda went back to the Society
repeatedly for two years, begging to be shown
the file. Then in 1975, a change in the law
brought Linda some hope, when adopted
children were given the right to see their
birth certificates. Linda went straight into
Liverpool Town Hall and there it was:
‘Born Julia Gunn, June 24, 1946. Mother:
Elizabeth Gunn. Father: not present for
birth’.
Linda now had her birth
mother’s name and home address at the
time she was born.
After sending a couple
of letters, which were unanswered, Linda
decided to go to her mother’s house in
Mossley Hill, Liverpool. She thought her
heart was going to burst when she knocked on
the door. Suddenly, it opened and there stood
her mother. Linda said: "It’s me
– your daughter, Julia". The door
was slammed in Linda’s face, who then
ran from the house, tears streaming down her
face. It took another six months for Linda to
build up enough courage to try again. This
time, she was greeted with the words:
"Do come in", as if it was the most
natural thing in the world. Inside, her
mother asked her why it had taken Linda so
long to find her, as she was sure that her
adoptive parents would have told her where
she was!
She had thought that
Linda hadn’t wanted to see her for all
those years, so she hadn’t tried to find
her. Linda stayed for 2 hours and found that
she didn’t have any siblings. Her mother
wanted to know whether she had been treated
well, but didn’t want to discuss
Linda’s birth father. Linda knew that
her mother still loved him as her face lit up
when his name was mentioned, but when asked
where he was, she shook her head and changed
the subject. This was to be the first of many
visits and as they grew closer, the
relationship with her adoptive mother grew
worse. Things became so frosty and unpleasant
that Linda didn’t dare tell her that she
had found her real mother. In the end it was
Linda’s eldest daughter, then 10, who
broke the news to her adoptive grandmother.
Over the next ten years,
Linda and Elizabeth became friends and
Elizabeth even spent one Christmas with her,
although in all that time she would never
talk about Linda’s father, as though it
was too painful for her. She had told him
that she would never pursue him and had kept
her word. Elizabeth told her daughter that if
she found him then that was up to her, but
she could not bear to contact him herself
– she still loved him.
Linda went back to
Nugent Care and asked again for her file,
saying her birth mother had no objection to
the access. The Society still refused telling
Linda that if they changed the rule for her
they would have to change it for everyone.
Linda started sending
hundreds of letters to associations which
helped trace servicemen. In June 1987, 12
years after first discovering the name on the
birth certificate that she finally received a
reply from the Veteran’s Administration
in Arizona. It said that Mid Russo had died
on February 10, that year, whilst in the VA
Medical Center in Phoenix. Linda collapsed in
the hallway, in floods of tears. She had
taken all these years to find him, only to
miss him by 5 months.
Linda informed her birth
mother that Mid had died, but she still
wouldn’t talk about him.
She stayed in touch with
Elizabeth until her death. With both her
birth parents now gone, Linda felt it was
even more important to gain access to her
adoption file, particularly as she still had
so many unanswered questions about the 18
months in care, prior to her adoption.
Incredibly, she was still refused access.
Linda started writing
more letters, this time to her local MP, the
Prime Minister, other adoption societies, the
Pope and anyone she could think of asking for
help. One of these organisations was Liberty,
the human rights group. Liberty believed she
had a case against Nugent Care. By law,
adoption societies were required to use their
discretion when deciding whether to give an
adoptee access to records. By making a
blanket policy of no access, Nugent were not
doing its job.
It took 18 months, but
Liberty’s lawyers helped Linda win her
day in court and on July 20, she won. The
case paves the way for thousands more
adoptees to get access to their records.
Linda hopes to see her papers within the next
few months. Because this is a landmark
ruling, no one can say exactly when this will
be, as the agency needs to reconsider her
right to each page in the file, document by
document.
Linda isn’t afraid
of what she might find, as she has spent 25
years trying to find out who she is and where
she came from. She says she will deal with
the truth – whether her father wanted
her or not, whether her mother was forced to
hand her over or did it gladly. Whatever the
facts, it’s not knowing who you are
that’s the most frightening!