Dublin
Blue-Eyed Son
I’ve personally never actually gone through that phase of wondering if I was adopted … too many strong familial traits from both sides to allow of any doubt! But it’s a topic that’s certainly come under the microscope in my professional life in relation to medical ethics.
Radio presenter and TV personality, Nicky Campbell, always knew he was adopted and it seems appropriate to talk about his story in the week a teacher whom he accused of abuse during the 60s and 70s has been named – hitherto this man was a ‘protected person’ legally.
Nicky was fortunate enough to be brought up by a strong loving family. Dad was a map publisher and erstwhile major in the Indian army; Mum a psychiatric social worker. They had one other child, Fiona, five years older, and were keen to adopt to give her a sibling after four miscarriages. A GP friend who knew Nicky’s biological mother, made the necessary arrangements. Those were the days!!
Though they were not well off, his parents paid for a private education for him in Edinburgh, and he graduated with a degree in History from Aberdeen University, before moving into the world of radio and TV where he became something of a celebrity. So content and safe was he in this warm and loving family that he felt no need to try to find his biological family until he was 29 and going through an emotional quagmire himself, a slough of marital despond, as he phrases it.
His autobiographical book, Blue-Eyed Son: The Story of an Adoption, has instant impact:
I was committing adultery in Room 634 of the Holiday Inn in Birmingham when my wife rang to say they’d found my mother. It was ten thirty on Saturday morning.
Biological mother is Stella, an Irish protestant, well educated, and aged 37, respected Matron of a hospital in Dublin, when she had him in Portobello, near Edinburgh, beside the sea.
I was born at 8 a.m. on 10 April 1961 … in an out-of-the-way downstairs room at [my mother Stella’s] Portobello digs … I arrived after only an hour’s labour and was delivered by the landlady Mrs Blackie herself with Stella, who was of course a qualified midwife, yelling instructions through the pain.
Stella was inconsolable when she walked away from her baby boy aged 5 days, an emotion Nicky could only really appreciate when he had his own children. But he recognised that times, pressures and prejudices back then were very different. Stella had already given up another baby, Dierdre, eighteen months before. He was picked up by his new family at one month. For three years Stella inquired about her baby boy from the GP, but then severed the link. Later she was diagnosed with manic depression, and she harboured other deep-seated issues: she never forgot or forgave her fiance (a doctor) who betrayed her with a young nurse while Stella was in hospital with TB. Her subsequent marriage to a violent and ‘satanic’ Irish ‘gnome’, who beat her all the time, lasted only four and a half years.
At the point in his life when Nicky met Stella for the first time, his own state of emotional turmoil left him with limited resources to respond to her emotional needs or understand them. But by the time he was united with his sister Deirdre (by now known as Esther) he was in a much better place in a new more stable relationship with his future wife Tina. The two siblings developed strong bonds.
It was a further twelve years, and three children later, before he began the search for his biological father. Joseph was a Catholic policeman, and a lot younger than Stella. Nicky and he established an instant rapport. They had the same blue eyes, the same stubby fingers, unmistakably father and son, and again, Nicky discovered a raft of new relatives came in the package. But when Joseph shared his political thoughts and aspirations, Nicky discovered a serious mismatch between the principles of his adoptive Protestant father and the philosophy of his biological one. He struggled to reconcile their different value systems and judgements. Which inheritance would he lay claim to? It was Joseph who summed it up:
I’d have no right to judge you. Just a duty to understand.
And that’s exactly the philosophy Nicky tried to espouse.
Alongside the exploration of his own lineage and inheritance, Nicky shared his sister Esther’s search for her biological father, and they together discovered unexpected links in their history, alongside jointly building a relationship with each other and with their mother.
Last year Campbell attracted media attention by revealing the sexual and sadistic abuse which took place at his private school when he was ten, but this has not been allowed to dominate the main story of his adoption in this book. It’s a very personal account, the more colourful for the backdrop of the Irish troubles, but through it all the bonds of family and shared history emerge as beyond price.
In Dublin’s fair city
Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Dean Jonathan Swift, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett … yes, all famous writers. And all sons of Ireland.
I’ve just returned from Dublin’s fair city, ‘where the girls are so pretty’ – home of everything from the tragic heroine Molly Malone herself, to the famous Book Of Kells and the amazing library of Trinity College – greatly encouraged. Because writing and storytelling are very much at the heart of things.
Whether you follow a City Tour, or visit the Writers Museum in Parnell Square, or chat to the Irish in their natural habitats, you’ll hear tales of homegrown literary giants; tales moreover told in wonderfully lyrical Irish accents which are poetry in themselves. Some of the detail may be embellished (as one guide said, ‘Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?’), but the essence is the same: Dubliners are proud of their literary heritage. Even ordinary people tell of at least trying to get to grips with Ulysses – the story of the experiences which beset a Dubliner, Lionel Bloom, on 16 June 1904 when his voluptuous wife Molly commits adultery – which is more than can be said of most Joe Bloggs elsewhere, isn’t it?
I suspect the majority of us could get no further than the occasional famous quote from this particular classic: ‘history … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’, maybe, or ‘God is a shout in the street’, or ‘Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance’, or possibly, ‘To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.’ And indeed, even if we’re familiar with the sayings, how many of us knew they’re from the hand of James Joyce?
If ever I decide to seriously tackle this epic with all its density and complexity and impenetrable prose, I think I stand the best chance of persevering if I’m in Dublin itself, surrounded by people who admire and revere its author. People who don’t closet their acclaimed writers away in an esoteric museum. No. Rather they erect statues of them; they call buildings, bridges, roads after them; they speak of them on the buses, in the pubs and cafés. A nation that is proud of her men of letters. Brilliant.