How meeting Margaret was no tear-jerking reunion - read what happened next in The Mail on Sunday or on Mail+ tomorrow.Was I doing the right thing? With the help of friends, I'd finally tracked down a woman who'd gone to extraordinary lengths never to be found.
At that point, I used my newspaper to clear the cab's steamy rear window. And there she was! Although the slight figure walking up the street was still too far away for me to discern either her age or her features, I knew with total certainty that my quest was over.At the age of 48, I'd finally found my birth mother.
In fact, it wasn't until I'd left home and was working as a journalist that it dawned on me I didn't even know the name of my birth mother. By the time the adoption was finalised, I was calling Betty 'Mummy' or 'Mum'. Apparently, the word came easily. It was the first I'd heard of the change in adoption law, but all I really cared about was that Mum was upset. So I dashed off a letter arguing that 'blood wasn't necessarily thicker than water', and asking why I'd ever want to find my 'birth mother', when I had the mum I loved at home.
A decade later, by which time I was working in London, my newspaper sent me to do some research at the General Register Office. While there, I thought it might be interesting to find my birth certificate. I had an image of her in my mind as a pregnant teenage Irish girl with dark hair, a slim figure and high cheekbones — just like myself. She'd have come over to Britain, I guessed, to have the baby far from her disapproving family.
Jane told me I needed to get hold of my adoption file. Several months after filing a request for it, I was given a date to turn up at my local social services department, and advised to bring a companion — so I took my close friend, the Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell. For another, she'd stayed at a Catholic home for 'fallen women' in Bristol, just before and after I was born — though how she managed that when she lived and worked 100 miles away in Birmingham was unexplained.
Jane Moore ran out of leads within a few weeks. But on the very day she decided to give up, she had one last trawl through the paperwork — and came across an almost illegible letter that had become detached from the others.
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