A Child Called Hope: The true story of a foster mother’s love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

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Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Dad walked through the door and handed me an orange chopper bike. In the early Seventies, choppers, with their extended front forks and small wheels, were the only bike any child wanted, and now I was the first child on my street to get one.

My dark, handsome dad loved to be generous when he could and he knew that the only thing I really wanted was a chopper. So when he handed it over I was so happy I began screaming and shouting and running round our flat in Bermondsey in southeast London. Mum’s face was a picture – not of happiness but of fury. She began screaming and shouting at Dad because we didn’t have any money and he had just spent what he’d won on the horses on a bike, not the rent. As the row heated up, I waited for them to start throwing pots and pans at each other, but Dad walked out in a huff and we didn’t see him for three days.

Dad was born during the Second World War in Italy in a breathtakingly beautiful little village called Altomonte. It was mainly populated then by peasant farmers (living off the land rather than making a living from it) and is in the region of Calabria. Most people know Calabria, which is tucked away in southern Italy in the toe of the boot, because of the ’Ndrangheta – the Calabrian Mafia – who became notorious for smuggling and kidnapping wealthy northerners, hiding them in the mountains and holding them for ransom.

Actually, when they were all dressed up, Dad’s family did look quite like mafiosi, with their short, sturdy figures, black clothes and their weather-beaten faces framed by immaculately backcombed or brilliantined hair. But they were honest, simple people, toughened up by hard work. There was a real sense of community where they lived and if someone got sick, the village would rally round and deliver them a little extra food.

Altomonte is such a beautiful, hilly place and the only area in the world that can grow large quantities of bergamot flowers – their essential oil is used in perfumes and Earl Grey tea, and you never forget their musky scent. The plants, with their pale blue flowers, are everywhere, and just like a good strong cuppa they make me feel incredibly calm and peaceful whenever I see them.

In spite of the ’Ndrangheta, Altomonte is also very spiritual, almost a place of pilgrimage. It sits on a hilltop, dominated by a breathtakingly beautiful fourteenth-century white church, or basilica, which shines out across the hillside like a holy beacon.

Just being in the village can give you goose bumps, which has something to do that church. It’s called Santa Maria della Consolazione and it doesn’t matter where you are in the village – having a glass of wine in the piazza in the evening or drinking a morning coffee in one of the little cafés close by – you can hear hymns being sung by the nuns and monks, and the gentle sound is carried across the village on the breeze. It’s a place where you think, nothing bad can happen here. But something terrible did happen, and it happened to my grandmother.

My family’s story begins in a battered old farmhouse in Altomonte where my great-grandmother and great-grandfather raised ten children and one grandchild – my father. Dad was happy in that farmhouse, but his childhood was cut short when he was just eleven, the day he found out the truth about his birth. His story went swiftly from one about a contented country boy who had a future working the land to one of secrets, rejection and survival.

He discovered that his mother, Rita – my grandmother – was ripped from the heart of her family after a scandal that could not be healed.

It’s hard to describe how very close Rita was to her brothers and sister, but as the second eldest, she had a special bond with them. They’d grown up in the same farmhouse, in the same small community, in a family that had lived there for generations.

They were extremely poor, but Dad said they always had a dinner on the table, because the land fed them. When the crops failed or they ran out of food, they would go out foraging, picking figs or apples off trees in the surrounding hills, or asking the other farmers if they had any extra. Neighbours obliged when they could, because they knew that when they were struggling, my father’s family would happily help them out in return. They had all looked out for each other and shared each other’s secrets, but despite that, my grandmother was forced by her family to leave home when she was just twenty-three, and told never to come back. She never, ever got over it, and she lived until she was eighty-three.

My pretty, raven-haired grandmother, Rita Marconi, had committed the worst sin any Catholic girl could commit. Unmarried, she had slept with a man and got pregnant. I don’t know about their relationship, whether it was a quick fling in a field or whether they’d been seeing each other for a while, but the story goes that to try to get him to marry her, her eight brothers beat him up. He still would not put a ring on her finger and a single mother in those days brought shame on her family. Overnight, Rita went from being a much-loved daughter to a problem they had to deal with.

It was 1942, halfway through the Second World War and the Mediterranean surrounding Calabria had already been the scene of a pitched battle between the Italian, British and Australian navies. Life was uncertain, but one thing was sure: there was no way an unmarried mother would be accepted by the religious community, and no way she could live peacefully at home. There were no second chances if you made a slip up like that, and for Rita the consequences were harsh. After her son Benito (my father) was born, she was taken to the convent and forced to have a hysterectomy, which was performed by the nuns, so that there could never be a chance of her slipping up again. Her only sister told me years later that she had kicked and screamed and fought to escape but was overpowered when they sedated her with chloroform. When she was in her forties, she was told by the doctors here that she had been butchered.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, she was banished from Altomonte, without her son – her mother brought him up as her own – and sent to live with family friends in the port of Reggio Calabria.

Reggio Calabria is the main town in Calabria, and the main launching point for ferries sailing to Sicily. Although it is in the same province as Altomonte, the two places are 150 miles apart, and in the days when public transport was scarce, none of her siblings would be sneaking away to visit her, so for the first time in her life, Rita knew what it felt like to be alone.

By the time she arrived in Reggio Calabria, the port town was full of soldiers and marines looking for a good time. At the local piazza, where all the young people congregated, she met a British soldier called Harry Burns. He was a man with a reputation who dabbled in the black market, the man you went to if you needed a pair of stockings or a pack of cigarettes. He had made a name for himself and he had money to throw around. Whether or not Rita really fell in love with him I am not certain – maybe she just wanted to escape – but she married him and they moved to a tiny flat in Brixton, south London.

She probably thought she would never see her son Benito again, but by the time he was eleven both Rita’s parents had died and none of her siblings could, or would, look after him. Up until then, Benito had thought that his grandparents were his parents. You can only imagine the shock he felt when they broke the news to him that he was illegitimate and that his real mother was living in England. He was not the youngest in the family any more, because his grandmother had had their tenth child and Benito thought he had a younger brother, although really he was his uncle.

As his family turned their backs on him, the pattern of banishment began again; he was now following in his mother’s footsteps. He must have been so frightened having to leave everything he had ever known, being sent to a country he had probably only ever heard mentioned a few times, to live with a woman he had never met, even if he had been told she was his mother. You would have thought that Rita would have been delighted to be reunited with him, but she didn’t want him with her and didn’t hide the fact. Consequently, she was always very cold and distant with him.

According to my mum, she did really love him but had no idea how to show it. I never saw her give him a kiss or a cuddle, and she was never affectionate towards us, her grandchildren. It was confusing, though, because when we all went back to Italy together she would change. In England she always seemed depressed, but in Altomonte she seemed to come alive. Nothing would stop her kissing and cuddling her brothers’ and sister’s children; she made a proper fuss of them. That must have destroyed my dad. It really upset me, because I could never understand why she would not kiss and cuddle me, her own granddaughter.

If we were at a big family gathering in Italy, and Rita suddenly became sociable and happy, Dad and I would catch each other’s eye, and that look said that we both felt really sad. Dad longed for his mother to love him and I longed for my grandmother to love me, but she never softened, not once in all those years. I still cannot understand why, but there was never the tiniest chink in her armour.

It might have been different if Dad’s own father had ever acknowledged him; then at least he would have had one parent to love. He did try to get to know him – when he was twenty-three he felt strong enough to go and find his father. Dad flew to Italy and spoke to his uncles, who knew exactly where to find the man who had refused to marry their sister all those years ago. He still lived in the same village and they saw him often.

Initially, they were not sure it was a good idea when Dad asked, but reluctantly they agreed to introduce him. It took all his courage and strength, but one afternoon he set off with an uncle to meet his father. In a strange coincidence, they met him walking along the street, and Dad could not believe how alike they looked. They were virtually identical, he said, and could have been brothers. Sheepishly, he walked over to him and said in Italian: ‘Excuse me, I am your son.’ Dad’s life could have changed in that minute if his father had given him a great big bear hug, but instead he spat right into his face. That despicable act could not have caused more pain if he had fired both barrels of a shotgun at him at point-blank range.

When Dad told me that story I could not understand the coldness of his father. I simply could not comprehend how someone could harbour so much hatred for their own flesh and blood. It was a savage rejection that I will never unravel, no matter how hard I try.

I made a real effort to accept my nan, Rita. I knew she had loved village life and had been forced to leave it all behind. She had loved her brothers and sister and had been forced to leave them too, so every time she looked at my dad, all she saw was the reason she wasn’t living the life she wanted. I always felt like she actually really hated him when he was around her. That was probably worse than the rejection by his father, because he had to deal with her coldness towards him on a daily basis. There was no escape for Dad. Where most of us have our lives shaped by love, Dad’s was shaped by constant rejection.

So by the time he met my mum, Rose, he was pretty angry, and it was a recipe for disaster. I think he was looking to be mothered, but Mum couldn’t fill in those missing years. Dad was very needy, but so was she; she had her own insecurities.

Chapter Two

Mum’s parents were from Ireland and they ended up in Catford, south-east London. Where they lived was badly bombed during the Blitz, so their home was surrounded by shattered buildings, but they knew they were the lucky ones. They still had a home.

It might have looked ugly, but the children loved clambering over the piles of rubble, looking for little bits of shrapnel. What they were desperate to find was a real bomb – that was the prize – but thankfully, they never did.

Mum’s father was soft and gentle and genuine, but drink did not agree with him. If he’d spent the night in the pub he could turn violent, and on those occasions my grandmother, like so many women, would be on the receiving end of his frustrations.

Nan became adept at hiding the bruises and honestly gave as good as she got, using a big heavy frying pan to defend herself. Sometimes they could both be seen with black eyes, their hats pulled down over their faces in an effort to disguise their battle scars, but the neighbours knew what was happening. It was happening to some of them too.

Friday night was always dangerous, because the minute Granddad received his pay packet, he would head for his local, The Black Swan, or ‘The Mucky Duck’ as they nicknamed it. He would stay there, laughing with his pals and drinking brown ale, until he got hungry and wanted his tea. When he opened the front door, Mum would be on red alert. As soon as she detected the tell-tale smell of brown ale on his breath, she knew that it would all kick off and there would be a fight. That was her cue to run upstairs, wake her younger brother Patrick, get him up and walk him round the streets until she thought it was safe to go back home. Sometimes close neighbours (whom they called Auntie and Uncle, although they were not related) would invite them in. As many of them knew the situation, if they saw Mum and Patrick walking round late at night, hand in hand, they would let them sit by the fire until things calmed down. Mum said that there was many a time when she and Patrick fell asleep in someone else’s house.

Despite the fact that he drank and became violent, Mum idolised her dad, and he never hit his kids. He wasn’t always drunk and he loved my mum and Patrick. She remembers sitting on his knee and feeling the rough stubble on his chin. She also remembers how he would sometimes bring home little bits of shrapnel for their collection and, very occasionally, produce a bag of sweets from deep in his jacket pocket.

My granddad was an ambulance driver during the war, so he must have seen some terrible things after the bombing raids. People with their arms and legs blown off; bodies unrecognisable because they had been blown to smithereens; dead children and babies. No wonder he drank; there was no counselling in those days to help him deal with the horrors, just brown ale.

All that horror wasn’t the reason he committed suicide, though. It was a year before the end of the war and the rumour was that my nan was having an affair, and someone who was out to make trouble sent Granddad a poison-pen letter telling him so. Not long after that, he took his own life. He was depressed, he’d had enough, and he put his head in the gas oven. A lot of people said it was a cry for help and that he had not really meant to kill himself, but he did.

Mum remembers the day he died as though it were yesterday. She was seven and Patrick would have been six at the time. They walked in from school, hand in hand as usual – they always held hands – and opened the door to find the house eerily quiet. Not only was it quiet, but also the smell of gas was so strong it was choking. She opened the door to their tiny kitchen, looking around for a welcoming, familiar face, only to see her father slumped on the floor, lying absolutely still next to the cooker and clutching the letter in his left hand. The oven door was open and the gas was turned on full. Mum knew enough to turn off the gas and open a window, then she touched him, but his hands were as cold as ice. She called his name, but he didn’t answer. He was dead. Panicking, she froze, pulled Patrick to her and fell to the floor next to her dad, not knowing what to do. Occasionally she whispered, ‘Dad, Dad,’ and shook him but got no response. She has no idea how long she sat there, but she stayed where she was, rocking Patrick, in shock, until her grown-up sisters came home from work and gently lifted her off the floor.

After that, my nan, Hetty, suffered a nervous breakdown. You can only imagine the torment she must have suffered. No one ever knew whether she was having an affair, but in those days, as far as everyone else was concerned, there was no smoke without fire. My granddad knew that; he felt shamed and he took his own life.

Nan blamed herself for his death and the guilt would have been terrible, particularly as she was a Catholic. Suicide is a sin for Catholics. Their belief is that my granddad would have gone straight to Hell, and Nan would have felt responsible for his eternal damnation, no matter how often she went to church and confessed to the priest, and no matter how many times she said the rosary. And though the family tried hard, they never found out who sent that poison-pen letter.

So it’s not surprising that Nan fell apart after Granddad’s death. And from then on, she could not look after Mum and Patrick. They were the youngest of five, and there were ten years between them and their older siblings, but it still meant that my grandmother had five mouths to feed on her own, and even though the older ones helped, it was hard work.

The family decided it would be best if Mum and Patrick were evacuated, so they were sent away to live with foster carers in Wales until things calmed down. It was 1944, the war was still raging and there was always the threat of a direct hit from German bombs. Nan welcomed that for herself – she thought she deserved it – but she could not bear the thought that if her children stayed, God could punish her by taking them too.

Wales was a million miles away from London in those days and my mum and Patrick arrived at the railway station with their gas masks round their necks and brown luggage labels tied to their coats with their names and dates of birth written on them. They were bewildered and bereaved, and every comfort they had ever known was back among the bombsites of Catford.

If luck, or God, had been on their side, their temporary family would have been welcoming and kind. They dreamed they would be placed with a baker and his wife who served sticky buns for tea on a Sunday, but the couple they ended up with were cruel and uncaring. Their favourite punishment was to lock them in the garden shed for minor misdemeanours. Mum said it was dark, damp and full of spiders, with shadows everywhere, and she was terrified in there. Her main concern was protecting her younger brother, who was just as scared as she was. To pass the time, she made up stories for him, happy tales about ice cream and lollipops, of unexploded bombs and sunny days in Catford. She very quickly learned not to cry – they both did, because if they cried they would be made to stay in the shed until they stopped.

Both children were totally dazed. It was as if they, too, were being punished for their dad’s death. That whole episode in Mum’s life was a massive trauma, one she never forgot, and it ultimately shaped the person she became.

Chapter Three

Mum and Dad had both had difficult childhoods, and they were also incredibly young to start a family; Dad was only seventeen when he married Mum, who was only sixteen herself. When my sister Rosa was born, Dad was eighteen, and only nineteen by the time I was born. He was the ripe old age of twenty-two when my brother Joe arrived, and twenty-three when Mum gave birth to Bianca.

Mum’s two older sisters, Lily and Daisy, were very successful in their own fields: Daisy in fashion, and Lily, the stunning beauty of the family, was a secretary for a big furniture company. They had got out of poverty, married quite wealthy men and had good careers. Mum was the poor one in the family and her sisters kept her financially while my nan, Hetty, helped her look after us.

Nan thought Dad was not good enough for my mum, so she continually told her, in front of my dad: ‘You are never going to have anything, because you’ve married a foreigner.’ Dad struggled to fit in as it was. He got called ‘English’ in Italy and in London they called him ‘Spaghetti’ or ‘Wop’. Wop was a derogatory term used for Italian immigrants. It was short for ‘Without Papers’, as many had come over without identity papers, and was common slang in the Sixties and Seventies. Not surprisingly, it upset Dad a lot.

It just brought home to Dad that he wasn’t really Italian and he wasn’t really English. Nan knew my dad never felt as though he fitted in and that the word ‘foreigner’ would really hurt him. It cut deep and she knew it. That’s why she said it.

Dad could never do anything right and all Mum’s family used to argue with him. If he spoke back, Nan would get up and roll up her sleeves. ‘Get outside!’ she would shout at him, and she would honestly have taken him on if he had gone with her. Instead, Dad would do the sensible thing and storm off until it all settled down. I dread to think what would have happened if they had come to blows.

Nan was a tiny grey-haired woman. She may have survived the war, but she was still deeply affected by her husband’s suicide, although she would never show it or talk about it. Since his death she had done nothing but work hard and care for her family, and every bit of softness and compassion in her had been trampled on. There was no doubt she could be a cow. If Mum brought a friend home, Nan would say: ‘Come on, clear off, she’s got things to do.’

There was only one way that Hetty showed her love and that was through control. She had to be in charge and no one messed with her – they didn’t dare. Hetty ruled the family with an iron rod and no one had better step out of line.

Although she could be terrifying at times, she was always there looking after us while Mum was at work, and I idolised her, simply because she was my nan and she was there for us.

My mum is a petite redhead with a lovely figure and a good sense of humour – if they had started making EastEnders in the 1950s, her family would have been mistaken for the cast.

You can imagine how volatile an Irish-Italian household could be, and Mum and Dad would often throw things at each other. They’d be having dinner and one of them would say something, and then, suddenly, there would be plates flying across the kitchen or saucepans being thrown at people’s heads.

Mum threw as many saucepans as my dad, but neither of them ended up in hospital. Arguments and fights became so regular in our house, we thought it was normal. We thought everyone’s parents fought all the time and threw things at each other.

It always seemed to me that my mum started the fights, but I suspect she was reacting out of frustration with my dad. Although they fought like heavyweight champions, they never gave up on each other, which is so easy to do now. I like to think that they loved and needed one another and fought to keep the family together, rather than ripping it apart. I don’t like to think that the fights had no purpose.

It is true that Dad was very violent and aggressive – not towards me, but towards my mum. As a child, I didn’t really understand why Dad was so needy, but it was because Mum could never give him as much love as he needed. I actually don’t think anyone could have, he was so damaged, so they would end up pushing each other around and me and Rosa would get in between them and try to calm them down, while Joe and Bianca sat on the sofa looking sad.