How it began
I blame the television. My wife and I had come to terms with our inability to have children. Gynaecologists had come and gone, pursed their lips and presented their fee notes, and we had finally accepted the inevitable. We had considered adoption, but this was the 1980's, and the advice was that we were too old to be looked on with any favour by our Social Services. So, after 16 years of happy marriage, and well into our 40's, we were both working and, frankly, enjoying ourselves.
Then those pictures invaded our screens, as anguished reporters told the world of their discoveries in 'orphanages', of tens of thousands of children existing in quite appalling conditions. And these human dustbins were within a stone's throw of the comforts of Western Europe, whose inhabitants were used to starvation and squalor as problems which existed on other continents.
Our comfort zone was breached. We watched as convoys of aid donated by households throughout the country left for Europe, while doctors, nurses, plumbers and bricklayers joined a straggling alliance to bring some comfort and repair to the neglected infants and the buildings which housed them. We had to do something, but lacking the skills to wield a paintbrush or intravenous drip, we decided instead that we had to answer the televised plea of a returning doctor - to rescue a child.
International adoption was not common, but despite the lack of legal or administrative signposts, we blundered ahead, spurred on by the tears of a number of commentators who were able to access these dreadful places. To our astonishment, we faced opposition from civil servants in both Romania and England - some born of indifference, some from an astonishing assertion that removing a child from the sewer was taking him from his 'heritage'. We suspected that many of the hurdles presented by local and national government were the product of an assumption that the children were so damaged that they would arrive in England, only to be surrendered to Local Authority care.
(I was to learn, later, from figures produced by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Barnardos and The Childrens Society, that as many as 5 per cent of UK adoptions break down. The older the child, the greater the percentage. A recent well researched survey suggests that adoptive placements after the age of 5 carry a 17% risk of breakdown (a percentage which continues to increase with age). Of the pitifully few Romanian adoptees, some 150 to 200 who managed to find a home in the UK, the figure is apparently just one).
I could not speak Romanian or Russian, but as a teenager I had become fluent in conversational French, and I gathered that French was the second language to many Romanians, so hopefully communication wouldn't be wholly beyond me. But where on earth should I start? Any question of a matching process or of choosing a child was out of the question. 'And think not you can direct the course of love, for love if it finds you worthy, directs your course.' (Kahlil Gilbran, The Prophet)
I found, by luck or coincidence, a couple (through news reports in a national daily newspaper) who had completed a rescue of two babies, a Baptist minister who was running supply convoys into Romania from our locality, and a recently formed charity which identified some volunteer medical staff in Bucharest. I also recruited my mother, since speed of return to the UK would be of the essence if and when I found an infant, and that meant air travel, something which Carmel, my wife, found impossible.
But from these first contacts I learned nothing but bad news. That I would not be welcomed in Romania, that finding a child would be something akin to 'pot luck', that the British Embassy would be less than helpful, that the Department of Health in London would, if anything, be even more obstructive, that the Romanian Embassy would supply me with a list of 'orphanages' scattered around the country and would, for a small fee (in cash, naturally) give me clearance to enter the Country but not much else, and so on. The list seemed endless. I learned for the first time of 'Entry Clearance', a creature of the Department of Health, and of Visas, the responsibility of the Home Office. In due course I was to find myself entangled in a circular nightmare - I would not obtain Entry Clearance without a visa, and, inevitably, I would not be granted a visa without entry clearance. And of course, I needed legal approval - from the courts of a country which did not recognise any adoption undertaken in Romania. That meant an application for which, in those days, there was no recognised procedure, and before that could be contemplated, the completion of a 'home study' report, to satisfy both the court, and, before it, the various government offices in London, that the two of us were suitable adopters to bring a child into the country.
So, we sat down with the list, and started at what we took to be square one: the preparation by our Local Authority's Social Services of a Home Study report. And there we received the first of our rebuffs. There was quite enough work for social workers with responsibility for children and families already, without taking on investigations of possible overseas adoptions, we were told.
That response didn't satisfy us; rather it strengthened our resolve, and although we were not habitual complainers, we wrote to the Secretary of State in London, who, whether through embarrassment or parliamentary recognition that the UK really ought to be doing something collectively rather than leaving everything to individuals, persuaded our Social Services that it should, after all, appoint someone to carry out the necessary investigation. Which in the event, they did with a good heart and in pretty short order, because within three months we had the report and the approval of our local Adoption Panel.
And then the endeavour got underway. Nearly a quarter of a century later, my memories of the odyssey, of the suffering which I encountered, the bloody mindedness of officials, and the generosity of a Romanian family who took up our cause are as clear as ever, and with the help of Crux Publishing, my struggle and its ultimate successful outcome is now in print, in Nobody Comes, a title which comes from the words of a Scottish nurse whom I met at Orphanage nr 2 in Bucharest.
Nobody Comes
Then those pictures invaded our screens, as anguished reporters told the world of their discoveries in 'orphanages', of tens of thousands of children existing in quite appalling conditions. And these human dustbins were within a stone's throw of the comforts of Western Europe, whose inhabitants were used to starvation and squalor as problems which existed on other continents.
Our comfort zone was breached. We watched as convoys of aid donated by households throughout the country left for Europe, while doctors, nurses, plumbers and bricklayers joined a straggling alliance to bring some comfort and repair to the neglected infants and the buildings which housed them. We had to do something, but lacking the skills to wield a paintbrush or intravenous drip, we decided instead that we had to answer the televised plea of a returning doctor - to rescue a child.
International adoption was not common, but despite the lack of legal or administrative signposts, we blundered ahead, spurred on by the tears of a number of commentators who were able to access these dreadful places. To our astonishment, we faced opposition from civil servants in both Romania and England - some born of indifference, some from an astonishing assertion that removing a child from the sewer was taking him from his 'heritage'. We suspected that many of the hurdles presented by local and national government were the product of an assumption that the children were so damaged that they would arrive in England, only to be surrendered to Local Authority care.
(I was to learn, later, from figures produced by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Barnardos and The Childrens Society, that as many as 5 per cent of UK adoptions break down. The older the child, the greater the percentage. A recent well researched survey suggests that adoptive placements after the age of 5 carry a 17% risk of breakdown (a percentage which continues to increase with age). Of the pitifully few Romanian adoptees, some 150 to 200 who managed to find a home in the UK, the figure is apparently just one).
I could not speak Romanian or Russian, but as a teenager I had become fluent in conversational French, and I gathered that French was the second language to many Romanians, so hopefully communication wouldn't be wholly beyond me. But where on earth should I start? Any question of a matching process or of choosing a child was out of the question. 'And think not you can direct the course of love, for love if it finds you worthy, directs your course.' (Kahlil Gilbran, The Prophet)
I found, by luck or coincidence, a couple (through news reports in a national daily newspaper) who had completed a rescue of two babies, a Baptist minister who was running supply convoys into Romania from our locality, and a recently formed charity which identified some volunteer medical staff in Bucharest. I also recruited my mother, since speed of return to the UK would be of the essence if and when I found an infant, and that meant air travel, something which Carmel, my wife, found impossible.
But from these first contacts I learned nothing but bad news. That I would not be welcomed in Romania, that finding a child would be something akin to 'pot luck', that the British Embassy would be less than helpful, that the Department of Health in London would, if anything, be even more obstructive, that the Romanian Embassy would supply me with a list of 'orphanages' scattered around the country and would, for a small fee (in cash, naturally) give me clearance to enter the Country but not much else, and so on. The list seemed endless. I learned for the first time of 'Entry Clearance', a creature of the Department of Health, and of Visas, the responsibility of the Home Office. In due course I was to find myself entangled in a circular nightmare - I would not obtain Entry Clearance without a visa, and, inevitably, I would not be granted a visa without entry clearance. And of course, I needed legal approval - from the courts of a country which did not recognise any adoption undertaken in Romania. That meant an application for which, in those days, there was no recognised procedure, and before that could be contemplated, the completion of a 'home study' report, to satisfy both the court, and, before it, the various government offices in London, that the two of us were suitable adopters to bring a child into the country.
So, we sat down with the list, and started at what we took to be square one: the preparation by our Local Authority's Social Services of a Home Study report. And there we received the first of our rebuffs. There was quite enough work for social workers with responsibility for children and families already, without taking on investigations of possible overseas adoptions, we were told.
That response didn't satisfy us; rather it strengthened our resolve, and although we were not habitual complainers, we wrote to the Secretary of State in London, who, whether through embarrassment or parliamentary recognition that the UK really ought to be doing something collectively rather than leaving everything to individuals, persuaded our Social Services that it should, after all, appoint someone to carry out the necessary investigation. Which in the event, they did with a good heart and in pretty short order, because within three months we had the report and the approval of our local Adoption Panel.
And then the endeavour got underway. Nearly a quarter of a century later, my memories of the odyssey, of the suffering which I encountered, the bloody mindedness of officials, and the generosity of a Romanian family who took up our cause are as clear as ever, and with the help of Crux Publishing, my struggle and its ultimate successful outcome is now in print, in Nobody Comes, a title which comes from the words of a Scottish nurse whom I met at Orphanage nr 2 in Bucharest.
Nobody Comes
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