Killing Karoline. Sara-Jayne King
go to the war and could stay away from the battlefield, instead growing vegetables in his nursery. Grandpa teaches us and our friends how to gamble using coloured counters, and we are masters at Black Jack before we are in middle school. He loves us too, but in a less tactile way than Granny. I remember hugging him only once in my life, before bed one night, and it felt strange – for both of us, I think – and I never did it again.
One of my lasting memories of Grandpa is of him in hospital a few months before he died. The hospital was close to my school and I had been told to walk there and meet my mum instead of catching the school bus home.
When I walk into his private ward, weighed down by my school satchel, Grandpa is having his blood pressure taken. A nurse I’ve never seen before turns to look at me, as I plop down into the plastic orange NHS chair by the bed. ‘This is my adopted granddaughter,’ Grandpa tells the nurse. He says it very matter-of-factly. The nurse keeps staring and then half laughs, awkwardly. I feel alien and confused sitting on that too-high chair, because even though I am adopted, I have never considered myself to be the ‘adopted granddaughter’. I don’t think of John and Madge as my ‘adopted grandparents’; they’re just Granny and Grandpa. But suddenly I am ‘other’. Other than what I’ve believed myself to be. Different. Separate. Not ‘real’. Real granddaughters, like my uncle’s children, are obviously better. They don’t need explaining.
I find it further destabilising when people ask if Adam is my real brother. I know what they’re asking, but it feels like they’re implying he may not be genuine. That he’s an imposter. That a real brother is out there somewhere and Adam’s just filling in. To me he’s as real as can be. When he punches me, it hurts and when he wins a race on sports day, I cheer the loudest.
People talk about my adopted mum and dad, or worse, refer to them as my foster parents. When they do, it’s like they’re saying my role as ‘daughter’ is temporary, uncertain, non-permanent. I know all about foster parents. They let you go. They have no obligations. I know this because Mum is a social worker and sometimes has to take unwanted children to their new foster homes in our car. One little boy, Connor (who is black like us) I meet a few times over the years as he moves from family to family, each time carrying his belongings in a black bin liner. I often wonder what is wrong with Connor. Why does no one want him? What is it that he does wrong at all these foster homes? One thing I know is that I’m certainly not a bin-bag child. I have a chest of drawers for my clothes and my own hand-me-down travel case with a tarnished bronze lock that doesn’t close properly.
Of all the things that grate me, the worst is when Kris is referred to as my ‘real’ or ‘natural’ mother. I am always puzzled how a woman who relinquishes her child in the manner in which mine did can be bestowed such a title. The various terms used by the well meaning and the ignorant disturb me greatly and, as a child, it is troubling to learn that there are such things as ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ family members. For a long time, though, I steel myself and fall in line with the language other people feel comfortable with or feel entitled to use when discussing my curious family. My voice is still too quiet to be heard over the din of other people’s needs.
My father, Malcolm, a few months younger than my mum, was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, in 1940, the son of Arthur Kirk, a coal miner, and Maggie (Margaret) – or Yorkshire Granny, as we called her – a housekeeper. They met when Maggie went to work for Arthur. A widow with an infant child (my father’s half-brother Albert), Maggie went onto marry Arthur and, in doing so, inherited thirteen stepchildren, several of whom were older than she was. When she was forty and Arthur sixty, my father was born. I never once heard my dad speak about his father. I have no memories of my paternal grandmother and only one of ever going to Sheffield, where my father had grown up. It was for Albert’s funeral, and I was about eight or nine. The three-and-a-half hour journey up the M1 was interminable, and the stench of home-made egg sandwiches (my parents were frugal enough not to believe in over-priced road-side café fare) made my car sickness worse than usual. We stayed with an old friend of my father who had a tiny house in a tiny village on the outskirts of the town. We all had to share a bedroom and, despite being covered in a thick, rough blanket and being crammed into a small put-you-up bed between my mum and my brother, I shivered through the night.
The funeral – the first I’d ever been to – was well attended and we got to ride in a special long black car, with seats that faced the front and the back. We were crammed in with my uncle Albert’s widow and son (my never-mentioned cousin) who talked incessantly. Their accents were so broad that I didn’t understand a word, and I remember praying they wouldn’t speak to me, lest I had to keep saying ‘Pardon? Pardon?’ There was a wake following the burial, held at another tiny house in another tiny village. It smelt like chips and egg. The people, too, smelt like chips and egg and they were utterly miserable. I got a sense that their misery wasn’t confined purely to the nature of the occasion. My lasting memory of the whole experience was that in Yorkshire you were always crammed in, people called you ‘duck’ and it smelt like chips and egg. It was grim up North.
Unwilling to follow in his father’s footsteps down the mines, when he was old enough Dad travelled to the South of England where his prospects were considerably brighter. He was determined to escape the bleak reality of mining life as the only future for a young man in Sheffield at the time. Of above average intelligence and having excelled at school, at the age of seventeen he secured an apprenticeship with an international electronics firm and moved to London. By the time he came to be my dad, nearly fifteen years later, the only clue that he wasn’t from the South was when he would lie on the landing outside my and Adam’s shared bedroom and sing, in his round, quite tuneful tenor, the anthem of the Yorkshireman ‘On Ilkley Moor Ba’Tat’. His own broad Yorkshire accent had also, by then, all but disappeared, after years living among plum-mouthed Southerners, save for those occasions when he became angry and his vowels sharpened instantly as if he’d never left t’moors. It was partly because of my father’s Northern roots that Kris chose him and Mum to be my parents. She too was from ‘up North’ and felt some sort of affinity with Dad as a Yorkshireman.
Despite their vastly different backgrounds and just six months after meeting at a coffee evening hosted by mutual friends, Angela and Malcolm marry at a registry office. Both are equally keen to start a family and agree they want four children. But two years into their marriage and now thirty-three, my mother still hasn’t fallen pregnant. After years seeing five different GPs for a referral to a specialist clinic, they eventually follow a friend’s recommendation to see a consultant at Chelsea Women’s Hospital in South-West London. My mother once told me about that first appointment:
The consultant was an elderly man in a dark suit and with a carnation in his buttonhole – very much the old school. He was optimistic that with hormone injections I would get pregnant. These were very painful and I used to hobble round to Harrod’s for a snack afterwards to cheer myself up. There were also lots of other tests I had done, but the doctors still couldn’t make out why I wasn’t getting pregnant; although I seemed to once, but then they said I wasn’t. Dad’s sperm test was fine. I also had had a miscarriage on another occasion. I stuck this out for three years and then this lovely old consultant suggested we consider adoption.
Mum is always wistful and sad when she talks about her not being able to have children. Understandably so, but I’ve always felt that her sadness was greater than her desire to reassure us, Adam and I, that we were enough. Not just enough, but that our becoming her kids was actually sufficient to eradicate, or at least usurp her own disappointment at not being able to have her own biological children. For a long time, I silently resented her for that. When I was young I would fret about what would happen if by some medical turnaround my mum fell pregnant. What would happen to us? Would we be sent back? Or passed on to yet another family who needed a child to make them feel complete?
The problem was that, although I know I was loved by my parents, there was always the feeling that I was the consolation prize. I was not their first choice. If they had been able to have children, Adam and I would have simply been taken in by some other barren couple who needed to fill an emotional void. We would never have been Adam and Sarah Jane. That troubled me.
Never once in thirty-something years have I ever heard an adoptive parent speak