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Andrew Pierce’s moving memoir is dedicated “to Betty and George, my real mum and dad”. That puts the story that follows in perspective. It’s about his search for his birth mother. But we know at the start that it has a happy ending, because Betty and George were there for the little boy, who grew up to be a distinguished journalist.
It’s about more than Finding Margaret. It’s about the career of a boy from Swindon who made a success of his education at local Catholic schools, who had a loving family with a father who worked at British Leyland and a mother who put the family first, and who became a name as a journalist through that now almost extinct route of local newspapers. There are lots of things that made Andrew and some of that social structure doesn’t exist any longer.
The Catholic Church is the backdrop to the story. His mother, Margaret, gave birth to him in a Catholic home for unmarried mothers and he was handed over to the sisters of Nazareth House where he remained — harshly treated, it seems — until George and Betty arrived and took him home. They brought him up the same way as their other children. He was happy.
This story had a happy ending
As for Margaret, after endless difficulties Andrew manages to track her down, a respectably married grandmother. They meet in the British Home Stores café in Birmingham …and she asks him nothing about himself. Nothing. It’s amiable, and when he asks if they can meet again, she says yes. But she never, ever turns up. It seems she didn’t want to compromise her respectable life, in which her illegitimate baby didn’t have a part.
The quest could be called Finding Patrick, his baptismal name; unlocking the trauma of the abandoned little boy. But it turns out, according to his priest-therapist, that “a consequence of social deprivation can be the need to compensate for the loss of love and affection early on in childhood by becoming an almost unbearable show-off.” It’s thus that top broadcasters are made. Like I said, this story had a happy ending.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for the London Standard