When you're broken from the family tree

KATE Adie's passport contains a lie. Over the years, the document of the well-travelled war reporter has been scrutinised by drunken militiamen and crazed revolutionaries. All were probably unaware that, instead of being born in Sunderland as it states, she was actually born ten miles further along on the Northumberland coast.

"My deception began as a device for continuity," she says. "I was a teenager in a town where the Adies had been settled since the end of the 18th century. Claiming the town as my birthplace simply did away with any need to invent a story about a detour to a house on the Northumbrian coast. A house? Or a nursing home? Or a farm? Or a field... I didn't know. Nor did the Adies who adopted me."

It was her own experiences of being adopted which drove Adie to consider the futures of those children who, unlike herself, had been abandoned by their mothers, the foundlings left in carrier bags outside hospitals, churches and in telephone boxes.

Adie was a war baby. Her doctor father was away on service when she was conceived and born, and such was the social pressure of the day, her mother gave her daughter up for adoption.

She was chosen by Wilfrid and Maud, a pharmacist and his wife, and was brought up with them on the outskirts of Sunderland.

She was happy with her parents -"oft repeated and sincere words: 'we chose you'." But it was in 1990 when she was reporting from Saudi Arabia that she first felt the longing to dig a little and find her roots. The previous week she had buried Maud in Sunderland and Wilf had become increasingly poorly, retreating into himself.

While with the Press corps in Saudi, she found herself coming across the 'next of kin' section on a military form she had to fill out. She realised for the first time that she had no close relatives to put down.

"It was a very weird experience, coupled with going off to war," she says. "I had to say to myself: 'Snap out of it. Don't you dare start feeling sorry for yourself. There might be somebody.' I decided that if and when I came back, I would find out, which is what I did."

Adie was eventually reunited with her mother, Babe, two sisters, a brother and a big extended family. For Adie, who has never married and has no children, it opened up a new life.

"It's been wonderful," she says. "Having had loving people who brought me up and then finding another set of people. That really is a double blessing."

But for every story of adoptees being reunited with their birth parents, there are stories of those who have gone through painful experiences. Adie began to wonder also about babies who had been abandoned at birth. What was it like for these people, not having a clue as to their past, no name and no birth date?

"Though adopted children like me have many questions about our past, we do not have that void which faces foundlings; the near impossibility of discovering anything about your roots and why you were left to the care of complete strangers," she says.

As part of her research for her new book, Nobody's Child, Adie interviewed dozens of foundlings, fascinated as to how their fate had affected their upbringing and their lives.

She tells the stories of Christine, who was found in a paper bag in the back of a London cab, and of Tony, who was originally called Victor Banks because he was found abandoned on London's Victoria Embankment and was told that social workers could see his file but he couldn't.

Among the famous foundlings she has interviewed is former SAS soldier Andy McNab, who was found dumped in a carrier bag outside the emergency department of Guy's Hospital in London. He was adopted by a couple from south London and throughout his early life, thoughts about his origins never crossed his mind.

It was only recently, and with his daughter grown up and at college, that he began to have the "Where we have I come from?' thought. Intrigued, he had his DNA tested at an American university and discovered, much to his amusement, that among the main Indo-European heritage was a strand of Native American Indian. His search for his roots remains an interesting sideline to his busy life.

"I like to think the reason why I was left was the 1950s shock horror - an illegitimate child," he tells Adie. "At least I wasn't put in a skip. I was left at a hospital. How lucky I was picked and adopted - I might have been shipped off to a Catholic school in South Africa or wherever. But here I am, and I feel lucky."

Adie also travelled around the world, seeing what practices authorities abroad had in dealing with foundling children. She found that in Germany, hospitals were known to have 'baby hatches', a door in a wall behind which lay a plastic cot and a heated mattress. The idea came about because so many babies were being found dead, dumped in exposed areas.

Today, the number of babies in many Western countries has changed since the introduction of the Pill, legalised abortion and the acceptance of single motherhood.

But there are still foundlings in Britain and the mothers who abandon them are treated like criminals. Under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, it is illegal for a mother to abandon her baby if it is under two years old, and the offence carries a risk of imprisonment for up to five years.

It is an issue close to Adie's heart. She believes wholeheartedly that the law should be changed to allow women to relinquish their babies anonymously in an environment which will allow the child to survive.

"Lawyers say it is an obscure law they can't recall ever being used, and that social services would intervene. This is true, but any mother watching TV or seeing a newspaper headline would be fully aware that police were looking for her," she says. "And there is evidence from mothers who do come forward that they're frightened they'll be punished. Other mothers who make calls to hospitals and then don't appear are clearly scared or distressed. In these cases, the possibility of the law bearing down on them serves no purpose. Surely the law should be changed?"

There should also be a facility, she says, so that a mother can leave some sealed information, so that no child has to go through the agony of not knowing where they came from. More and more adopted people have proved that they can handle the information they receive about themselves, she says, whether it be a blessing to them or painful.

"We all need roots. We need to know about our past so as to be sure of who we are."

But for foundlings, without any information being left, it is unlikely they will ever find out about their biological family.

Perhaps surprisingly, most of the foundlings Adie interviewed believe their lives began from the day they were abandoned.

"'Life is what you make it,' I heard over and over again," she says. "No common thread of guilt or disaster ran through their stories. Just a profound desire to know more about the family tree and to hear why they had been broken off it. All accepted that their present identity was who they are now.

"'Life is to be got on with,' they all said, adding quietly, 'though it would be nice to know...'"

But for all Adie has learned about herself by meeting her birth family, she says she is happy to keep her place of birth as Sunderland on her passport.

"I don't want to invent a different identity so I stick to what I've always used," she says. "There are millions of us, all slightly at variance with our official paperwork. Each with some inner knowledge of who we are, which completes the picture of our tiny space on this Earth."

* Nobody's Child by Kate Adie (Hodder & Stoughton, £20).