We were soon out in the Hawke’s Bay sunlight. I held the file to my chest. Of course, I was crying.
At home, I closed the bedroom door. I needed to be alone. I spread the documents on my bed and saw my name on multiple papers. I was Baby Sumner. Then Lilian Sumner. And then Barbara McG.
The desperate letters I’d written in 1982 were there. In one document I am called ‘illegitimate’. In another I am ‘the transaction’.
A report states my adopting parents belong to the Church of England. ‘They are regular attendees at church’ and an ‘attractive young couple’.
Three weeks before my birth, a social worker alludes to trying to gain my mother’s consent. Fifteen days before, Mavis notifies a social worker. She expects to receive her child that week. Another letter, ten days out, says, ‘this couple is promised a baby by Dr Gleeson. They have been advised this baby is due any day.’
And then a letter two weeks before I am born. A district child welfare officer says: ‘If this baby is placed for adoption, approval will be given.’
The words stop me. If this baby is placed for adoption. Two weeks to go and it was not a done deal. They’d promised away my mother’s unborn child and left her without support or options, but their coercion had not yet worked. Her three months of isolation in the doctor’s home had not entirely broken her down.
But next, the adoption order. My mother’s signature below Mavis’s and Max’s. I imagine her in their lawyer’s office. She had no representation of her own. And I wonder if she signed without a fuss? All the fight gone out of her. Or whether they needed to steady her hand on the pen?
The documents left me empty. I gathered them up, climbed under the covers and fell asleep in the middle of the day.
A while later, I went back to the Ministry for Children. Even with a court order it took many more weeks to gain access to their records. When the file arrived, a staff member had redacted half the documents.
But I found the doctor’s address. The place where my mother had lived during the last stages of her pregnancy, where she’d cleaned and served and held her hands over her tummy. I stared at the address. It was a few doors down from where I live now. The place I’d insisted on buying four years ago.
But in all the information, one thing was missing — my father’s name.
On a whim, I moved my DNA from the American company to one based in the United Kingdom. When they load your DNA into their system, anyone with a match gets an email alert.
Within hours I received a message. I’d come in from planting a hedge of olive trees and I opened it at the kitchen table. My hands were still wet and there was dirt under my nails.
‘I’m your third cousin on your father’s side,’ Jeremy from London wrote. ‘It’s not an exact science. But it’s possible, one of my three great-uncles could be your father,’ he said. ‘May I call you?’
Jeremy had a deep understanding of the intricacies of familial connections and DNA. His explanation went over my head, but his accent calmed me. There was comfort in his conservative vowels, a resonance I could not explain. He asked questions. How did I end up in New Zealand? Did I know anything about my father?
As always, I was self-conscious about admitting I knew nothing. The shame that matches secrecy beat for beat caught at my throat. I used one nail to clean another. ‘The man I thought was my father was a Formula One driver.’ I was acutely aware of my rising inflexion.
There was a moment of silence. ‘One of my uncles was a racing driver,’ he said.
Alfred Lazarus Fingleston, better known as Les Leston, born in Nottinghamshire in 1920. That would make him forty when I was born — my mother just nineteen.
Jeremy offered to contact Les Leston’s son. He replied immediately and sent away for the DNA kit the next day.
While we waited for the results, I turned back to the distraction of research. I found my mother’s address from the passenger list for the Rangitata. The ship departed London on 25 September 1959 with my newly pregnant mother and her parents aboard. They had lived in Holly Cottage in Bletchley.
With the help of a friend who has an uncanny ability to find obscure documents, we put together a possible scenario.
The Brands Hatch racetrack was less than two hours from Holly Cottage. Graeme Hill and Bruce McLaren raced there regularly, as did Les Leston and Jo Bonnier. In early August 1959 and again, two weeks later, they’d shared the same racetrack. After the racing, there were friendly cricket matches. And parties. Motorsport magazine reported the swinging sixties started early for the racing world. There’s even a photograph of Stirling Moss in a bikini and heels with a stripper called Booby Galore.
A question continued to niggle at the back of my mind. I was born in late May 1960. Many of the documents seemed to indicate I had been expected weeks earlier, but my birth weight suggests I wasn’t particularly overdue.
Two race days, two party nights, two weeks apart. A summer month of racing, cricket and parties. What if there had been two candidates for fatherhood? And a simple mistake. The wrong candidate told in secret to a friend. And that secret passed on to me.
Oh, Mummy.
27
You are your DNA
The DNA took months to come through. ‘You’ve struck a busy time of year,’ the company apologised when I enquired.
Les’s son Skyped and showed me around his home. He described it as ‘our father’s house’. He’d inherited it and the businesses Les left behind. The house resembled a barn, with blackened timber beams. There was an indoor pool and a circular driveway with a Porsche on display. My possible brother said he did not need the
