Anecdotal semi-autobiographies from the great and the good are often disappointing. Their authors are invariably economical with the truth and rarely have a self-critical perspective. Publishers have been seduced by the silly notion that because these people are famous, they can write.
There are exceptions: Luis Bunuel's great The Last Sigh and recently Bob Dylan's recent memoirs are poetic, witty, poignant, and unique. Kate Adie, one of Britain's national treasures, is much too modest to aspire to this elite. But as you would expect from the woman who has filed some great television reports from the worst of wars, she has that uncanny capacity to avoid being over-sentimental in the face of the tragedy and desperation inevitable within the stories she describes. In Nobody's Child, her third and best book, and a companion to her excellent autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, her singular talent for memoir and reportage is integrated into her experiences as an adopted child in Sunderland and stories from all over the world about other foundlings and adopted children. Her writing is witty, compelling and never mawkish.
Great fiction has regularly capitalised on our prurience about foundlings: the Romulus and Remus story, Fielding's Tom Jones, Dickens's Oliver, Kipling's Mowgli and, more recently, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs and Jeanette Winterson's Jordan.
By contrast, all Adie's characters are real and she provides us with a rich rigorous subtext. Her simple style draws us subtly into her special, unfamiliar world. Most of us have experienced ambivalent feelings about our fathers and mothers and what we have inherited physically, emotionally and psychologically. But knowing who they are, warts and all, is crucial to our sense of identity. With clever, confrontational chapter headings, Adie postulates simple, familiar questions connected with personal identity which foundlings, unlike the rest of us, would have difficulty in answering with any kind of confidence. Such questions as 'Have you brothers or sisters?' or 'Is there anything in your past we should know about?' provide absorbing opportunities to investigate issues and anxieties which inevitably occur when people with no knowledge of their real parents are asked to discuss identity. Adie allows them to do so with intelligence, charm and dignity.
For example, a common anxiety among foundlings is that their mothers might have been prostitutes. The moral hypocrisy of the church is still disgraceful in this context. Bede recounts that after seeing some beautiful abandoned 'Angles' in a Rome marketplace, Pope Gregory dispatched St Augustine to Britain on a mission of conversion: 'The worry about a child's soul has accompanied decisions about foundlings right up to the present day. Baptised or not? Christian or other?' writes Adie.
The church did little to take care of the unwanted baby and throughout history there are pitifully few examples of anybody else doing much, either. Adie describes the gradual evolution of the foundling hospital and their notorious eponymous foundling wheels: 'A baby could be placed on the wheel, effectively a simple turntable, which then, with one turn, delivered the child into the building.' Who would want to start their lives like that? Later in the 19th century, philanthropists such as Thomas Coram with his extraordinary Foundling Hospital in London gave shaming publicity to public indifference.
Even in the Fifties in Ireland, fired by Catholic prejudices against proselytising, the adoption laws led to a ghastly trade in the illegal export of babies. This created a public scandal when the 'two and only' movie star Jane Russell adopted an Irish baby. It's ironic considering that Eamon de Valera, a founder of the Irish Republic, was born in an American hospital for abandoned children.
Mixed into her encounters with celebrities such as Olympic gold medallist Fatima Whitbread ('I was abandoned in a flat in Islington ... left to die'), Adie tracks down people we would never have heard of, like May Prosser's mother who was 'put in a basket by the side of a river, close to a place where the Han Jiang river meets the South China Sea', or fellow travellers in war zones such as the obstetrician who was found in a telephone box by an underground train driver coming off his night shift.
For me, the most moving of many such chapters is set in Russia where it has not been a crime to abandon babies. This unacceptable official stance is epitomised by a desperate 1993 letter from a mother with a Down's syndrome baby: 'Why coddle such freaks?' She wanted to put her unwanted baby to sleep. This chapter takes in the Soviet era and Beslan, ending with a 'tour' around a destskii dom, or children's home. There, children ran towards Adie shouting their welcomes. 'They call you "Mother",' said the teacher. 'They call every visitor "Mother",' added the deputy director. '"Mother" has no sense for them.'
