Part One: Chasing Amy

My grandmother, or 'mama' as I called her, was born in the May of 1936, in the same single room she would call home for the first five years of her life. The day before she entered the world, Amy Johnson had reclaimed her flight speed record for England to South Africa when she touched down in Cape Town, 3 days, 6 hours, and 29 minutes after leaving Kent. I don't know how my great grandmother heard the news. I don't know how long she laboured for; if it felt in those hours like it must have felt for Johnson, far above the Atlantic, flying into the unknown, trusting her plane to find its course. I do know that my great grandmother named her daughter Amy Rose, in honour of the pioneering aviatrix. Of course, like Johnson, the journey was one my great grandmother had made many times before: my mama was her thirteenth child. Trusty and battle-hardened, her body did its work, and on the 8th May she held tiny, newborn Amy in her arms for the first time.

Whatever abuses she later inflicted upon her daughter, she must have loved her in that moment. To give her such a name, full of pride and hope.

My mama had vivid memories of her early life that she often shared. I knew that my great grandmother's surname was Keen, and that my mama never knew who her dad was (because my great grandmother didn't know). I knew my great grandmother’s first name was Nellie. “Nellie Keen,” my mama would muse, “I think I must have Irish blood”.

Nellie was 43 when she had my grandma, and mama remembers her saying: "I didn't think I had anything left in me: you're the scrapings of the pot" [Charming!]. When my mama was little, my great grandma was engaged in what I would term 'survival sex work' (what my mama termed 'going with men from the pub for money'), as well as selling bits and bobs (rags and bones) at the Bullring Market in Birmingham. She had a live-in boyfriend with the surname Griffiths who my mama remembered only by his nickname, ‘Coalie’, so-called because he was always black with soot. My mama remembered him as a kind man. Sometimes they would lie together on the bed at 1 Back 9, Floodgate Street and my grandmother would pick the lice out of his clothes and hair and pop them between her fingers. She remembered his gentle blue eyes. She once said to me that the men in her life had always been good to her, it was the women who had done her damage.

The physical image she painted of my great grandmother was very vivid. Nellie was a small woman, with a humped back, and two brown stains below her nostrils courtesy of her addiction to snuff. I can only imagine the toll that thirteen births will take on your bladder; my mama remembered she always smelt of urine. But there was clearly something about her – despite her less-than-pinup appearance my great grandmother was never short of male attention.

My mama was an attractive child. My mum had one picture of her from around the time she was adopted, and it shows a pretty, round faced girl, with jet black shiny curls. You can’t tell in the smudged sepia print of the photo, but my mama’s eyes were periwinkle blue – an arresting combination. The other stallholders at the bullring would often give her little things, including ribbons for her hair. On market days music would play, and my mama would dance, shaking her ribbons and curls. It often drew punters to Nellie’s stall. A fellow stallholder noticed the attention that young Amy got, and made my great grandmother an offer. In exchange for adopting Amy, she would give Nellie additional ration tokens. My great grandmother accepted.

Amy Rose Keen was adopted by the Boycott family. Her name became Mary. No longer named after the brave and mould-breaking Johnson, for the rest of her life my mama instead carried one of the saddest names in the history of womanhood. Poor Virgin Mary, who lost her firstborn son to the world. In retrospect, her new name seems remarkably prescient.

The Boycotts did not treat my mama well. She was essentially an unpaid servant in the household, made to do all manner of backbreaking and menial chores. She was rarely allowed to attend school (too much work to do) and remained illiterate (in later life she taught herself to read, and would devour a Martina Cole book for breakfast, but she never could write much more than her name). She was often beaten for minor infractions, and if there were none, her adopted mother would design some. There was no toilet in the Boycott house, so the residents had to use the public privy at the end of the street. At night, groups of teenaged boys would congregate around the entrance, laughing and smoking, cat calling the girls. They terrified my mama. She would do anything to avoid having to use the privy after dark. So her adopted mother would feed her laxatives before she went to bed, giving her two choices: brave the dark threat of the public toilets or soil the bed. For the latter she would receive a whipping.

My mama would sometimes see both Nellie and Coalie around Birmingham. Once Coalie told her: “I loved you as though you were mine, and I would never have let her give you up if I had any say in the matter”. Despite the fact that Nellie had essentially sold her into servitude, my mama still loved her mother. She remembered sneaking pennies into her hand outside the pub, pennies stolen from her adopted mother’s purse. Doubtless these thefts were discovered, and my mama was beaten. But it must have felt worth it to her, to help her mother out.

My mama left the Boycott house as soon as she was able. At fifteen she had been invited to a dance by her boyfriend, Albert. Working on the markets independently by then, she had siphoned off enough money before handing it over to her adopted mother that she was able to buy herself a beautiful white lace dress. She said it was the loveliest thing she had ever owned. When she came downstairs wearing it the evening of the dance, her adopted mother fell into a rage. “HOW DID YOU BUY THAT DRESS?” She punched my mama full in the face, and blood spurted from my mama’s nose, all over the pure white lace of that lovely new dress. My mama said the fury that filled her was like nothing she had ever experienced before. She attacked her adopted mother, beating her badly enough that from that day forward the woman never laid a finger on her.

My mama left home soon afterwards. She met my grandad at 16, and they married the next year. Because she wasn’t yet 18, she had to get permission from her adoptive mother. Mrs Boycott said it was of no matter to her, but that she couldn’t think why my grandfather would want to marry such an ungrateful wench. “And by the way,” she added, “She’s no cook. She can’t even boil an egg”.

“That’s alright,” my grandfather gamely replied, “I don’t like boiled eggs.”

At 18 my mama became a mother herself, to my Uncle David. At 20, she had a daughter, my mother, Susan. She loved those two children with all her heart, determined to lavish them with all the affection and devotion she herself had never experienced. They both remained very close to her throughout their lives. She was a doting grandmother to both me and my little sister. The four of us were the light of her life.

At 17 my mum was diagnosed with Wilson’s Disease, a liver disease that is generally manageable through diet and medication. Following on from her diagnosis and treatment, she continued to lead a normal life. When she was pregnant with my sister, and having spoken to her GP about the possible risks of her medication for her pregnancy, a decision was made to lower her dose. Sadly, this precipitated a chain of events that resulted in her dying from Wilson’s Disease two years later.

My grandmother was heartbroken. The weight of her grief was something she carried with her for the rest of her life, and its magnitude was something I couldn’t really comprehend.

The year I finished university, my uncle was diagnosed with leukaemia. He died the next year. He did not have any children.

Having lost both her own children, my mama spent a long time reflecting about the nature of ‘family’. She would often talk about her childhood: about Nellie, and Coalie, and the Boycotts. Her memories of her older siblings were hazy, but present. She missed them, even though she barely knew them. They were her flesh and her blood. She wondered what had become of them, what they had made of their lives. She wondered how many half-nieces and half-nephews she had in the world, how many second cousins for me.

In the late 80s my Uncle, a journalist and researcher for shows like Panorama, so no slouch on the investigation front, had attempted to track down my mama’s family. With the assumption that Nellie Keen was Irish, he was hopeful that if he could prove this connection he could claim Irish citizenship, and by that route then acquire a visa to live and work in the US (a lifelong dream of his). However, he kept hitting a brick wall: Nellie Keen seemed to flit in and out of the record books, disappearing for years at a time. He could not find a birth certificate for her. He could not find any proof that my mama’s half brothers and sisters had ever existed. And so he gave up.

This post contains a lot of misery, but I would like any readers to know that my mama was not a miserable person. None of these terrible things that befell her broke her spirit. She was a force of nature, loud, vivacious, charming, hugely funny. Quick to anger, but just as quick to laugh, she collected friends just as easily as she collected pretty bits and shiny bobs for her amazing antique collection. Well into her old age men would try and chat her up (to no avail). My step-grandad, ten years her junior, despaired. They had a tempestuous but very happy relationship. As my mama said, the men in her life always did alright by her.

Towards the end she was pretty sick, although her mischievous eyes never lost their twinkle. My stepgrandad said that in the last few weeks she spoke a lot about her long-lost family again. Wondering what became of them.

She died when my son, her first and (so far) only great grandchild, was less than a week old. She was overjoyed when I fell pregnant, and I honestly think she hung on just long enough to see her lineage continued. On the day she died I was coming down with mastitis. Shaking and feverish, still trying to feed a screaming newborn (who it would turn out had chronic cow’s milk protein allergy), I just didn’t have the strength to grieve her. I put it in a box, and pushed it down.

Recently, I’ve been brave enough to open that box. But sometimes grief can feel like a very passive process, and I wanted to do something. So I decided to pick up the mantle from my Uncle and try and discover more about my mama’s roots: about her family, about my great grandmother, about her long lost half-siblings, and about any living relatives she (and I) might still have.

Armed with a subscription to findmypast and some birthday money to order in hardcopy certificates from the GRO when necessary, this is the story of my search…