Beatrice was born in Nottingham, fostered in Chertsey during the World War II and went to the Foundling Hospital School at Berkhamsted. On leaving school she returned to her foster family and worked a number of different jobs. She has three daughters and now lives in Western Australia with her husband.
Early Life
‘But my mother– and you notice I call her mother because she is, my mother… she had told me when I was three, that I wasn’t her little girl… she sat me on her lap one day and–, Mrs Riggs next door had taken me on a boat trip and I had my best, purple dress on – well it was a lilac-ey colour that my mother had knitted, and white socks and things – and she sat me on her lap and she said that she wasn’t my mother, and I wasn’t really her little girl, and that one day I had to go away, to the big school and– where I would have lots of other children to play to with and, that, she probably wouldn’t be able to see me until I was a big girl. So she told me that, upfront. I didn’t understand it but, she– that’s what she told me. So I went next door, to the Woods family and told them and they said, “Oh, well, you see Babs, what it is, is, your mum didn’t want you, so she gave you away. And, so now you’ve got to go to the big school, and scrub floors, and live on bread and milk– bread and water.” And it didn’t matter what my mother had told me, these children told me– that I believed what they told me. So I dreaded going to school because I knew I’d have to have bread and water and scrub floors.’
Arrival
‘As I was saying before, a lot of the children, when they went to school for the first time, it, it was so traumatic, because their mothers and fathers didn’t tell them that they were going. They just were packed this little suitcase that we had to have and, off we went to school and we were just left in this big auditorium, which was really the theatre with the, the stage and everything there, but we didn’t know. And of course it was enormous that school. And, we, we had to sit there until we were called, and, then this very severe lady came and told us her name was Nurse Stamford and to follow her and she called out our surnames – because once we were at school we only had a surname – and, we had to follow her. And out of the…theatre, along a great long corridor, which seemed to be for miles, and we had to be in twos and not talk and then we’d turned right, and then right again, and a really long corridor, until we came to this set of stairs, and we all had to stop. And Nurse Stamford was– went halfway up the stairs and with her folded arms, she had a bun, very severe lady and she said that we– “You are mine, what I say goes, doesn’t matter what your mother said, what I say goes and, so you will follow me to your dormitory.” And then when we got to the dormitory she told us which bed we had to go in, and it was according to our birth date. And, and that’s how we all knew where– who’s was the next birthday because we always knew it was the one next to us. And we then had to be stripped off and go in a bathroom, which had the most enormous bath – three children in a bath, size baths in there, and we were scrubbed from head to toe. You can imagine.’
Into the World
‘Then I got a job — yeah, I was working in an aircraft factory then in Weybridge, ah, and I, I got the sack from there because I was a bastard. They– I was working in a department where we did multi-lith printing, and a new lady came to be in charge. And something happened one day….about my mother. Some conversation that involved my mother being retired. And she said, “How can you possibly have a mother retired at your age? She could–, she would have been in her fifties when she had you.” And I said, “Well she was, she’s my foster mother.” Well. She then set about finding out that I had been born illegitimate and there was no way she was working with an illegitimate child. And, that we should all be born– killed at birth because we carried the bad genes and, this Miss Minns insisted that I was removed, and I had to go, because she was the new person and she couldn’t work with me because I was illegitimate.’
Search for Birth Families
‘You know you have this mother image of a mother, each of us has our own different mother image. And so when I went and saw my real mother she was nearly six foot tall with blue hair and she was nothing like a mother to me, if you know what I mean. But, er….And it turned out that, she had named me Anne Randall and her mother was Anne Randall and her grandmother was Anne Randall. None of them had been married.’
