has come to light in national campaigns for unmarried mothers in England that in the 1960s coercion and subterfuge were used to get vulnerable women to sign the adoption papers. This is exemplified in the 2013 film Philomena.
My mother understood what adoption meant and would not sign. Her father – my grandfather – was dying in Ethiopia. She had little choice but to return to Ethiopia without me. With my name changed and the foster parents’ identity hidden there was little chance she could find me if she wanted to.
I was three and a half years old when The Authority served a Notice on my mother via her church in Ethiopia to say that ‘all the rights and powers of the parent of Lemn Sissay be vested in the local authority it appearing to this Authority that the parent has abandoned this child’. The document further states that: ‘If not later than one month after the service of this notice, you shall serve a notice in writing on the Council objecting to the resolution, the resolution shall lapse on the expiration of fourteen days from the service of the notice of objection . . .’
She was given one month to object to the notice. Then she would have fourteen days to take The Authority to court, where she would have to prove to the court that she was a fit mother. The notice would have taken approximately a month to arrive in Ethiopia and another month for the letter to return. There were no direct flights from Addis Ababa to London. My mother would have had to fly from Addis Ababa to Athens and then from Athens to London. It was an impossible deadline. It was a set-up.
The Authority depends on the sleeping prejudice of assumptions because for this notice to have any premise we must assume that the mother didn’t want the child or that she was unfit to keep the child.
Miss Y. Yemarshet Sissay
c/o Ethiopian Union Mission
P.O. Box 145,
Addisababa,
ETHIOPIA
COUNTY BOROUGH OF WIGAN
CHILDREN ACT 1948 AND CHILDREN AND YOUNG PERSONS ACT 1963
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that on Tuesday the second day of December One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventy the Mayor Aldermen and Burgesses of the County Borough of Wigan acting by the Council the Local Authority for the said County Borough (hereinafter called “the Council”) did resolve:-
“That in pursuance of the powers contained in Section 2 (1) (b) of the Children Act 1948 and Section 48 (1) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963, all the rights and powers of the parent of Lemn Sissay be vested in the local authority it appearing to this Authority that the parent has abandoned this child.”
You are the mother of the aforesaid Lemn Sissay and therefore pursuant to Section 2 (1) (b) of the Children Act 1948 and Section 48 (1) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1963 your attention is drawn to the fact that if not later than one month after the date of the service of this notice, you shall serve a notice in writing on the Council objecting to the resolution, the resolution shall lapse on the expiration of fourteen days from the service of the notice of objection unless within that period the Council make complaint to the Juvenile Court in which case the Court has power after hearing the complaint to order that the resolution shall not lapse.
DATED this 2nd day of December, 1970.
My story begins without her or any knowledge of her.
CHAPTER 2
I will build an embassy
In your heart over time
There is a plot of land inside me
Build one in mine
The Greenwoods and I lived at Number 2, Osborne Road, where the swallows came each summer to nest in the eaves. It was a semi-detached house fronted by sandstone with a sheer, solid, red-brick gable-end wall flush to a cobbled street on the left. The garden at the front just about coped with a giant laburnum tree lunging from the bottom left corner. Google Dictionary tells me the laburnum is ‘a small European tree which has hanging clusters of yellow flowers followed by slender pods containing poisonous seeds. The hard timber is sometimes used as an ebony substitute.’
We had roses round the perimeter and a pathway on the right side. There was symmetry between our house and next door’s. Both had giant bay windows downstairs and up. Parallel to the cobbled street were the backs of houses facing Wigan Road where the big park was. At the front, beyond the laburnum tree, across Osborne Road, was the Flower Park.
There was a chemist and two doctors in Market Street, a baker’s and a butcher’s where we went on Saturdays, two junior schools, a grammar school and a comprehensive and the shoe shop where my mum worked her first job before she became a nurse. It was a small town sown with housing developments from different eras. They were separated by parks. There was no river. All the water was in the baptismal pool beneath the floorboards in front of the pulpit in the Baptist Church.
We attended Bryn Baptist on Wednesdays and Sundays. We wrapped ourselves in hymns and were lost amongst the flock. It’s where our friends and family were. And we prayed. We prayed at breakfast. We prayed at lunch. We prayed at dinner. We prayed before sleep and in the mornings. There was good and bad in the world. There was God and the Devil around us. There was darkness and light, daytime and night, black and white.
On the surface Ashton-in-Makerfield was a plain-speaking Lancashire town. Even the street names were plain-speaking: Liverpool Road led to Liverpool, Wigan Road to Wigan, Bryn Road to Bryn. Market Street is where the market was. And the road to hell went to hell. And racing through the fields, hidden from view, was the fast, furious East Lancs Road linking Manchester to Liverpool.
Ashton was adventureland – shop doors rang when they opened, milkmen whistled from milk floats, old men tipped their flat caps, a horse and cart drove through the mist early on Saturday morning. It was the rag and bone man shouting ‘Rag and Bone’ in three notes like church bells.
Norman Sissay 29th May, 1968.
Norman is a healthy contented child, who is well settled in this home. The foster parents are devoted to him as are also their respective families. He is a very affectionate child with a happy smiling face and large appealing eyes. Needless to say when he is taken out he attracts a great deal of attention.
Norman is well settled in his routine. He goes to bed between 6.0. and 6.30. in the evening and sleeps through until 8.0. o’clock the following morning. He has an excellent appetite, enjoys his food. The child experiences the occasional tummy upset, but this usually occurs when he gets too warm. The day I visited, there had been a change in the weather and Norman had been upset by it, but had quickly recovered from it. He was enjoying a bottle before going to bed.
Norman is very well and appears to be very happy at the present time. He is a contented child with a winsome smile, and huge liquid eyes, which at once attract people to him. He is very little trouble, and is contented both during the day and during the night. Mrs. Greenwood is pregnant and is expecting a baby at the end of August or beginning of September, but she does not seem to find Norman any trouble at all. She tucks him under her
