What she had never found were answers. As she sat opposite the social worker clutching her adoption paperwork, she thought things were finally about to change. But when a stricken look flitted across her face, Sarah knew she was not about to hear the news she had hoped so much for.
“My main fear was finding out I’d been conceived via rape or some other violent relationship,” admits Sarah. “And by the look on the social worker’s face, it was clear she had something difficult to tell me.”
The social worker asked what Sarah wanted from the meeting and her reply was simple, to know who her parents were. But that was the one thing they couldn’t tell her.
“She handed me a copy of my original birth certificate and where the name for my mother should have been, it said ‘unknown’, just as it did in the spaces for my father’s name and his occupation,” Sarah says.
“I didn’t understand. Then I saw that under date of birth it said I was born ‘on or about 18 May 1967’. My place of birth was given as ‘Found on a train at Willesden Junction station’. The word ‘unknown’ jumped out.
“I was stunned, but I wasn’t angry. No mother abandons a baby unless she is desperate. I just wanted to find her, put my arms around her and tell her it was OK.”
As Sarah, who lives with her partner Nic, 38, delved deeper, she discovered she was an abandoned baby, a so-called foundling, who’d been dumped soon after birth. Hammersmith Social Services, which handled her adoption, helped Sarah get access to her police and social work reports, which revealed that she was found just after 11am on May 25, 1967, inside a Wallis carrier bag.
Passengers at Willesden Junction in North West London had noticed the bag moving and looked inside to find baby Sarah dressed in a white nightdress with the word ‘Baby’ embroidered in pink on the bodice.
She was also wearing a white knitted cardigan and was wrapped in a pink blanket and a white shawl. “According to eyewitness reports, a blonde teenage girl and her boyfriend were seen getting on the train at Willesden that morning holding a baby in a white shawl,” says Sarah.
“They’d travelled in a loop to Richmond and back to Willesden where they left the train without the baby.
“Soon afterwards I was found on the luggage rack.”
The story of tiny week-old Sarah’s abandonment appeared in newspapers, including the Daily Mirror. Dubbed the ‘Luggage rack baby,’ police appealed for her mum to get in touch, but she never did.
Sarah was taken into care at Tudor Lodge children’s home in Wimbledon and, around 18 months after she was found, Sarah was adopted by Valerie and Peter Chilcott. She had a happy, idyllic childhood in Northolt, West London, and her new parents made no secret of the fact she was adopted.
Unable to have children of their own, they’d been thrilled to adopt Sarah and 18 months later they welcomed a second adoptive daughter, Nicky, then five months, into the family.
“Dad was a policeman and Mum stayed at home to look after me and Nicky while we were kids,” says Sarah. “Mum always told me that I’d been chosen, which made me proud to be adopted. But I was curious about my birth mother.
“I asked Mum what she knew about her. ‘She was young and unable to look after you’, she’d explained. I had no reason to suspect a twist in the tale.
“Mum told me I was born in the West Middlesex Hospital and it seemed like a regular adoption. But when I said I might like to find my birth mother one day, Mum made it clear she’d find it hurtful, so I let it drop. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful for being adopted. I was very happy with the life I had.”
For years Sarah put her questions to the back of her mind but when, at the age of 72, in 2005, her adoptive mother died of breast cancer, she realised she was running out of time.
She says: “When Mum died it made me realise how much family knowledge died with her – how much more could be lost if my birth mother died without me ever meeting her. And with my 40th birthday looming, my need to find her became more pressing.
“Clearly, if Mum was right about my hospital birth, she must have known more than the stark facts recorded on my birth certificate.”
Sarah turned to the only other person she could think of, her adoptive father, but he insisted he knew nothing that could help her.
Facing a dead end, she applied for her adoption records and began her own search for information. She soon discovered that three months after she was left on the train, police received an anonymous call, claiming Sarah’s mum was a girl of 17 called E Shepherd who lived in Willesden with her father, boyfriend and brothers.
While Sarah was unable to find out the girl’s first name and exact address, police had kept notes recording the events.
“Police questioned the girl and her father, but they denied that she’d had a baby,” says Sarah.
“Yet later, when they checked hospital records, they found that a Miss E Shepherd was admitted to the West Middlesex Hospital on May 17 and gave birth to a girl at 11.50pm. Eight days later, she and the baby were discharged.
“I was found abandoned at the station the same day,” explains Sarah.
But the trail grew cold and when police revisited the family in October, the girl had left.
Sarah says: “They intended to request a blood sample from the girl to compare with mine. Her father said she had married her boyfriend and moved out, but he did not know where she was.”
That, incredibly, was the end of the police investigation. And though Sarah can’t help feeling a little cheated by what, four decades later, appears to be a blunder, she accepts that in the 1960s, before DNA testing, things were very different.
Undeterred, she applied for her medical records and tracked down the retired social worker who’d handled her case and who had picked the names given to her on her original birth certificate – Sarah Frances Leonard.
“My names were randomly chosen after her friend’s baby, her own middle name and her former sociology lecturer!” Sarah laughs. “But she remembered me well and even said that she recognised my smile.”
Sarah has now spent the last five years scouring family records and social networking sites looking for Miss E Shepherd.
On occasion, she has spotted a possible match on social networking sites like Facebook and has made cautious approaches. Sadly, she has so far drawn a blank.
“Mum clearly thought it best not to tell me what she knew about my past,” says Sarah, whose adoptive dad died aged 78 in 2010 without knowing of her search. “But I have a void to fill, everyone should know where they come from.
“I do believe that the girl the police found is my mum and she gave birth to me on 17 May, 45 years ago. It’s a little irritating that my birth is recorded as 18 May and for 40 years I raised a silent toast to my mum on the wrong day. But now I tend to celebrate my birthday across two days.”
Now all Sarah, a breast cancer researcher, wants is to finally trace her birth mother, and get the answers to those questions she has never been able to find.
“I always wonder if she is thinking of me and I will certainly be thinking of her. I hope she finds the courage to get in touch. But I’m not expecting a big reunion or to play happy families
“If I had one message for my birth mum and dad it would be they made the right decision to leave me. I don’t want them to feel guilty,” she says.
“The outcome for me was perfect as I could not have wished for a more idyllic childhood. I’ve had a good life and I wouldn’t change a thing. But I’d still love to find out who I really am and hope that one day I will.”
source:Mirror
