My mother wanted to protect me from the truth of my birth

THE grainy black and white photograph shows a line of young women at Birdhurst Lodge, the unmarried mother-and-baby home in Croydon, in 1951. Most are girls, smiling and laughing in the image, and young enough to shrug off the humiliation of being social outcasts for the mere "sin" of falling pregnant outside wedlock.

But in the back row - third from the right - is a woman of 40, attempting to hide herself from the intrusion of the photographer.

"You can see how humiliated she felt," says her daughter, the writer and journalist Maureen Paton.

The mother-and-baby home has long gone, but for Maureen, 73 - Daily Express TV and theatre critic in the late 1990s -
the desire to learn more intensified when she discovered after her mother's death in 2001 that she was actually born there.

And this investigation into her past proved to be so fascinating that Maureen has ended up writing a gripping debut novel that fictionalises her mother Blanche's life - but with an entirely new twist.

"I have always known I was illegitimate, as they used to say in the bad old days," says Maureen, speaking from her home
in London. "My mum wore her wedding ring all her life and would explain to people she had 'lost' her husband, without elaborating further."

But what Maureen only found out later, was her mother had to stay in three unmarried mother-and-baby homes - one in Oxford, the one in Croy-don (where Maureen was born) and one in Hampstead. "My mother took her 50-year 'shameful' sec-ret to the grave, until my detective work unearthed the hidden truth of my birth. She never revealed these experiences to me, and I only discovered them all after her death
at the age of 90."

Dedicated mother-and-baby homes first appeared in London's East End in 1890. Established by the Salvation Army, in reality they were bleak hostels for women considered social outcasts because of the shame associated with having a baby out of wedlock. The women had to sleep in dormitories, carry out domestic work to earn their keep, kneel for group prayers when required and were marched into church like children.

"The Croydon centre was locally and insultingly known as 'the home for naughty girls'," explains Maureen. "It wasn't until I looked up my full birth certificate after my mother's death that I discovered I had been born in a hostel for unmarried mothers."

The address given on the document was an address in south London - Birdhouse Lodge - that she thought sounded "rather grand-sounding for my poor mum", and so Maureen decided to investigate.

A health centre now stands on the site, and when Maureen called to ask about the Lodge, the woman at the other end of the phone hesitated, dropped her voice and murmured discreetly: "Do you mean the old mother-and-baby home?"

And that was how Maureen found out about the hidden history of her birthplace.

It was once hinted at by her secretive mother when she told how other girls had "cried and cried for weeks" after giving their babies up for adoption. Maureen says: "Because I was unable to have children of my own, I was not aware until more recently that a normal birth would not have entailed such a long stay in hospital.

"It was then that I realised the 'other girls' must have been fellow inmates at Birdhurst It was the missing piece of the jigsaw that showed the humiliating ordeal she had gone through."

In fact, Blanche had married once, but what really mattered to the moralists of the day was that she was not married to the father of her child. Maureen explains: "For the purposes of crime fiction, I've made my hostel more sinister than the one my mother was in, but they were still deeply depressing places. It seems incredible that women should have had to hide their 'shame' in such forbidding institutions."

These were "austere relics" of 19th century workhouses and 18th century penitentiaries. Even worse were the cases of unmarried mothers discovered in mental asylums in the 1970s, having been incarcerated there for decades.

This was due, in part, to the post-war influence of so-called "experts" like child psychiatrist John Bowlby, who condemned the "neurotic character" of the "socially unacceptable" married mother.

Maureen discovered that the turnover at Birdhouse Lodge was brisk, with each woman's stay limited to three months: six weeks before the birth and six weeks afterwards.

"The timing was partly to give the mothers a chance to bond with their babies before deciding whether to have them adopted, but also to let enough time to elapse to make sure the babies were developmentally healthy, since adoptive couples did not want disabled children. The official stigma surrounding illegitimacy, together with queues of childless couples wanting to adopt in the days before fertility treatment, meant mother-and-baby homes were seen to neatly solve two societal problems in one.

"Widely established between the two world wars by the main churches and the Salvation Army, they operated, effectively, as baby farms." It also made economic sense as adoptive parents would donate money to the religious charities who had provided them with children.

Maureen also discovered that her Irish father Bill had met Blanche in Oxford, where the refrigeration firm she worked for as a filing clerk had relocated from London.

"At the time, she was on the rebound from a disastrous, unconsummated marriage to an Oxford college cook," says Maureen. "She had known my father for only 18 months when, in November 1950, she realised she was pregnant."

"Bill's reaction was to tell Blanche, 'I bet you wish you'd never met me,' before leaving the area. She went to the garage where he worked and was told he had 'got a girl into trouble' and gone back to Ireland."

As for her mother, although she was 40, she was young for her age: "She knew little of the facts of life after a very religious upbringing in south-east London with a Baptist foster family." History appeared to be repeating itself, as Blanche herself was the illegitimate daughter of an abandoned birth mother. So dreading the reaction of her foster family, she took herself to Birdhurst Lodge, which was run by the evangelical organisation, Mission of Hope.

During the course of researching her family history after her mother's death, Maureen tracked down a woman called Gwen Bishop who had also given birth to a daughter there, six months before Maureen's birth.

Gwen told her how it had been "a comfort" being with 20 other girls in the same boat. She also explained how they were required to hand over their government maternity allowance to pay for their keep, and still had to work hard, scrubbing the huge staircase and doing all the washing.

They were even forced to get down on their knees in a group to repent.

Without family support, the teenaged Gwen had no alternative but to give up her daughter Anne for adoption. Renamed Jan, she was joyfully reunited with Gwen in 1983, at the age of 32.

"What struck Gwen immediately was how alike she and her long-lost daughter were in their mannerisms, even though they had not grown up together," says Maureen.

Thankfully, Blanche was not forced to give up Maureen for adoption after Blanche's foster sister Ethel took pity on her. She offered mother and daughter a permanent home after making a first marriage in late-middle age to Ralph, a kind widower with two grown-up sons but no daughter.

Maureen says: "This remarkable couple were old enough to be my grandparents, but they became a second mother and father to me and had a lasting impact on my life.

"My mother read magazines, but Uncle Ralph was a voracious reader of books and used to take me to the library, which he would call 'the working man's university'.

"I was a curious and inquisitive child and he looked after me. We were terribly lucky - an awful lot of women had no choice but to give up their babies for adoption."

Sadly her relationship with her mother was never as easy. "I think being deserted after her divorce scarred her emotionally. She was very repressed and found it hard to show emotions, and would sometimes cry," Maureen says. "When I was a little girl she would make such a fuss of me, but she found it harder to relate to me as I grew older."

The writer was also determined to find out more about her father, whom she had "obsessed about" as a teenager.

She discovered he had not, in fact, gone back to Ireland, but moved from Oxford to Birmingham after abandoning Blanche. "He died a lonely old man and could have done with a daughter in his old age," says Maureen who discovered a slew of "wonderful cousins" instead. "My mother and father may not have been well matched, but this has been a wonderful outcome. They have been so welcoming," she says.

Maureen's novel, The Mystery At Rake Hall, imagines a collision between the rarified university world of the Narnia creator CS Lewis and the hidden world of a mother-and-baby hostel in Oxford in 1947, when one of Lewis's students goes missing.

"What inspired me was the fact that my mother's stay in the Oxford hostel coincided with Lewis's time at Magdalen College until he was headhunted by Cambridge in 1954.

"Since CS Lewis was known for his great humanity, I'd like to think he would have been sympathetic if my mother and he had ever met.

She adds: "I think my mother wanted to protect me from the truth of my birth, and she also wanted to forget the shame of it. But I do wish she had told me herself."

The Mystery At Rake Hall by Maureen Paton (Swift Press, £16.99) is out now