Lydia was born in 1933 and attended the Foundling Hospital School at Berkhamsted. She married her husband Don in her mid-twenties and had two children with him and they adopted a third. Sadly their eldest child died when he was fifteen. She now lives with her husband in Berkhamsted and has very close ties with other former pupils of the Foundling Hospital.
Into the World
‘I was so innocent, I was so innocent. The first time a boy kissed me and it wasn’t a passionate kiss I mean apart from a peck on the cheek and it wasn’t a long passionate kiss but it was a kiss that I thought was really quite nice, I went into the toilet in the office where I worked, I knelt down on the floor and I said, “please God don’t make me pregnant.” We didn’t know a thing, weren’t told you just learnt by word of mouth.’
Reflections
‘Coram girls we have a real laugh together you know but again how much is it really covering up? We don’t know do we…we’ve been brought up with having to keep feelings down, I do remember this…talk about keeping feelings down. I never cried I don’t ever remember crying in this place, I was determined not to.’
School Life
‘We girls had midnight feasts and people say to us, ‘Well, what did you have to eat?” Oh! When we had this currant bun once a week, or whenever, we’d save it up, two, three, four weeks, wouldn’t care if it was stale and of a Friday evening we would sometimes, I don’t think always, we’d have a Fry’s chocolate bar or something like that, and we’d save little bits of this, and the carrots we scrumped, just grabbed them, rubbed them, never washed them, put them under your pillow and that was our midnight feast. Oh, it was wonderful, wonderful!’
Search for Birth Families
‘Oh my real mother that’s a sad, sad story. When I left school I like the majority of girls and boys wrote to the offices, have you got any news of my real mother, they wrote back the standard letter no nothing for the last fifteen years, because I was fifteen when I left school. Well then about three years later the offices, where you’ve been in London, they got in touch with me and said two aunts wanted to meet me. They were actually my mothers half sisters but they were blood relatives. They wanted to meet me so I met them up in London. And they did the usual, took me to a nice hotel for afternoon tea you know to impress me. And that’s when I learnt that my mother died at the tender age of 34. I must admit when I heard about her…and the fact that she had another child out of wedlock but was kept within the family I felt pretty bitter about the whole thing. And from being very very bitter about her…I’ve worked through the emotions because after all I think, and I don’t think you come to it suddenly, I think maybe you come to it gradually, you find yourself thinking, “hang on hang on you were born in the thirties. There was no national health. There was no social services. There was no money for people like this.” On top of which, the worst thing out it was such a stigma. Never mind the people in the same road knowing that your daughter had a child out of wedlock, people around the next road, you know. It was such a stigma, how could our mothers keep us? They couldn’t.‘
