Thank you so much, Bellamarie, for the mask and elastic information! I will pass all of that on to Madeleine.
Barb - I entirely agree with all you say about unwanted pregnancies in the past. One of my mother's older sisters (now deceased) became pregnant (I have never really been told the details) but although their family was very poor and not at all smart, they did not react as your family did - instead they all (siblings as well as parents) just about ostracised the poor woman, and even when I was a child they all still seemed to have an immense grudge against her, though I was not told why at the time. They were absolutely obsessed with 'what people would think' - I know that was a big deal in those days, but it's clear from your own family that some people could get over that. My own mother is now quite close to my cousin (the younger of this sister's two 'legitimate' sons, born after she was married - I have no idea what happened re the original pregnancy, whether an illegal abortion was obtained or the baby was born and handed over) and his wife, but isn't it awful that all that bitterness could last so long?
Unfortunately Mum's family was full of things like that, so many long-held grievances. By contrast, my father's family - equally, if not more, impoverished - had a very laid back attitude. My father was the son of my grandmother and her husband, but after the husband died in the flu epidemic of 1918, my grandmother had another son whose father remains unknown. (This is the part of the family that now lives in California.) No-one in that family has any issues with this at all - in fact my mother thought for years that my uncle didn't know about his ancestry, but when she finally thought she should tell him, he had known all along - my late grandmother had never kept it from him, and he is not bothered. My grandmother brought both boys up alone - it was a somewhat chaotic household but they were loved. In my mother's family love was always conditional.
It's also true that many children were brought up to think that their grandmother or aunt was their mother - there were so few checks in those days.
And re adoption - my uncle and his wife had some great tragedies with their own children, in that their first baby was stillborn, their second had brain damage and died after a few months, and the third was born with a deformed arm. (Though he is still very much alive, and this has not stopped him living a normal life.) After that they suddenly acquired a mixed race son - I don't think there were any formal adoption papers, he was probably just the baby of someone local (they lived in New Cross, which was home to a high number of West Indian families in those days) who was unable (or not allowed) to keep him. He was the loveliest child, so easy going and kind - and so far as I know he is still living with my uncle (my aunt died) in the US, he must be over 50 now. The strange thing was, after all those tragedies and then this 'adoption' they had a baby girl with no problems at all - again she is fine and living in the US.
There was an interesting programme on last week about Prue Leith, who is a very well known cook, writer, restaurant owner, businesswoman, etc here. She is one of the judges on the Great British Bake Off. When she was first married in the 1970s her husband did not want children, as he already had 3 from his first marriage, and he was substantially older than Prue. In the end he caved in and they had a son, whom they both, of course, loved on sight (he is now a Member of Parliament apparently). A few years later Prue decided they should adopt a baby - so they acquired a tiny girl, Li-Dah, from Cambodia who had been put on one of the last flights out of Phnom Pen before the Khmer Rouge took control. Li-Dah is now in her 40s and a successful film maker with her own family, but she wanted to trace her roots - she had virtually no paperwork. What was most interesting about the whole thing was that Prue said she now feels terribly guilty for having cut her daughter off from all her cultural ties, but in those days that is what happened - she felt, quite rightly, that they were able to give Li-Dah a wonderful life (which they did, and the daughter was very happy) and no-one ever even discussed any of the issues that are now so important. Prue and Li-Dah are immensely close, so they travelled together to Cambodia and tried to find her birth family. In the end they were unable to do so, but they then discovered that some of her distant relations are actually living in Long Beach, California, so she spoke with them by phone and is hoping to meet them soon. And while in Cambodia they did find one of the pilots who flew those last babies our of the country - the one who had taken her has now died, but they met with one of his colleagues, and it was so touching. As Li-Dah said 'without that man I would have died' - as the Khmer Rouge were indiscriminate in their killing of babies as well as adults, and many were slaughtered.
And Barb, I agree with you about dramas and books that do not show things as they really were. In the UK, any freedoms that came the way of women after the war were strictly for the middle classes; women in the kind of family I come from were indeed put straight back into their boxes, and I think my mother has been frustrated about this all of her life - she wanted so much more of an education and career than she was allowed to have. And if you have seen the film Vera Drake, that does not pull any punches about the position of unmarried mothers and the backstreet abortion trade, even some years later.
However, the book I talked about yesterday - The Village - does not seek to romanticise post-war life - it is about how things changed for the upper classes, and how they had to come to terms with not having it all their own way any more. Of course they mega rich were not affected, this is dealing with the 'upper crust' in a small village. And the daughter, Margaret, is now having to do a dead-end job that she hates because her snob of a mother won't allow her to do the one thing she loves and is good at - cooking - and would rather see her bored to tears and lonely, filling in forms for X-Rays at the local hospital, than doing something that she sees as a 'lower class' occupation. They can't even pay for Margaret to have further training, as their funds have been so depleted, their business has (predictably as the husband is useless) failed, and all their money has gone into paying for the other daughter's schooling (as she is clever) and to buying gourmet treats from Fortnum's for the mother, as the doctor has ordered them to do this when she has a breakdown.
I recall that when I was a teenager my mother actually told me that if I ever got pregnant without being married she would throw me out. I don't know if she would ever have carried through with that, but it has stuck in my mind all these years - even though at that time the chances of my getting pregnant were precisely NIL, as I was at an all girls' school, had no siblings and was too scared to go anywhere except the library! I did not even have a boyfriend until I went to university. But such were the ideas that had been drilled into my mother by her own family - it was all to do with appearances, even though (or maybe because) they had nothing.
Thank goodness, despite all the problems in society today, most people no longer have these outdated and cruel ideas.
Rosemary
