As I tore open the brown envelope, three small black-and-white photographs slipped from a single sheet of paper on to my desk. I gazed at them and thought my heart might miss a beat.
I was staring at a familiar-looking chubby child, barely a year old. He was smiling as he hung on to the playpen. Next to him was a cute blonde girl who didn’t look as happy.
I stared and stared. Another photo showed the same boy on a blanket on a lawn, playing with two other boys. The little blonde girl was there, too. The chubby infant was clearly me. I was incredibly moved: I’d never seen photos of me so young before.
The earliest I knew of was a picture of me aged two-and-a-bit in a red duffel coat and Rupert Bear trousers. That one had been taken in Nazareth House orphanage in Cheltenham shortly after I was introduced to the wonderful couple who adopted me.
Hurriedly, I read the handwritten letter that accompanied the photos. It was from Mrs Philomena Olver, who, coincidentally, lived in Bristol, where I was born in February 1961.
We’d talked the year before, when the hardback edition of my book Finding Margaret was published. She said she’d worked at Nazareth, my home for nearly three years, and remembered me. I thought that very unlikely and said so. Subsequently, Philomena had rooted out the old photos in her attic. Turning them over, she’d found my name written in ink: Patrick.
Yes, definitely me. Just a few weeks before my birth mother had taken me to Nazareth House, I’d been baptised Patrick James Connolly. It was my adoptive parents who’d changed my name to Andrew Pierce.
Philomena told me: ‘You were a shy little thing; you never said very much. I especially remember you because you never had any visitors, not like some of the others.’
Andrew Pierce as a young child in Nazareth House alongside a little girl called Ann
Andrew pictured alongside children Ann, Adrian, Patrick and Nigel
That is not quite right, I told her. My birth mother Margaret Connolly, then living in Birmingham and working as a nurse, had visited me at the orphanage.
‘Well, if she did, I never saw her,’ she said. ‘There was one girl who visited her child every day. She was a nurse, like your mother, but she rented a place opposite the orphanage so she could see her.’
Margaret, a devout Catholic, could also have visited more often had she put me in the Nazareth House home in Rednal, eight miles from Birmingham city centre. But she’d opted for an orphanage 60 miles away, where she was unlikely to be spotted by anyone she knew.
Her visits had then come to an abrupt halt after two-and-a-half years, when she consented to give me up for possible adoption.
Many years later, as I pored over official documents about my early life, I realised that she’d deliberately covered her tracks by giving only scant information about herself. Clearly, she wanted to ensure no one in her loving and supportive Irish Roman Catholic family could ever discover her secret.
As my book revealed, I did find Margaret again – after a gap of 45 years and a tortuous search. Yet, to the very end of her life, she refused to tell me anything about my time in the orphanage or reveal who my father was. Even in her 80s, she was terrified that anyone would find out she’d had an illegitimate child.
But back to Philomena, herself an orphan who’d lived in various Nazareth Houses until the nuns sent her to Cheltenham at 15 to work in the nursery.
‘I would play with you, talk to you and try to give you the love you were missing because you had been abandoned,’ she said.
‘If there were potential adopters, the nuns would always dress the baby or child in their finest. It was like Sunday best. When your [adoptive] parents came to see you, they put you in those long Rupert Bear checked trousers.’
What had become of the other children in the photos, I asked? One of them showed a Nativity scene being gazed at by three boys named as Adrian, Nigel and Patrick – though I wasn’t sure about the one identified as me because he seemed too tall.
She didn’t know what had become of Adrian. Nigel had been moved to the Bristol Nazareth House in 1965 when the Cheltenham home closed, and was later adopted.
And little blonde Ann? Philomena wasn’t sure. ‘Ann’s mother wanted to make a home for her little girl. But her parents, who were well-to-do, weren’t having any of it. So little Ann stayed in the system for a long time.’
I asked Philomena if she’d been aware of routine cruelty by the nuns and helpers. ‘I never saw any of that,’ she said. ‘I heard about it. But if a child wet the bed, there was a terrible hullabaloo.’
I’d been a bed-wetter, a habit that accompanied me when I was adopted. It took Betty and George, my mum and dad, several years to break it, even after I’d become a happy, integrated family member.
My birth must have been a brutal, emotional experience for my birth mother. There’d been no friends or family with her when she arrived in Bristol, heavily pregnant, at the end of 1960. A few weeks before I was due, Margaret had checked into St Raphael’s, a home for unwed mothers run by a Roman Catholic order of nuns.
Not only was Margaret a single pregnant woman in the harsh, unforgiving social climate of early 1960s Britain, but she’d also been brought up to believe that sex outside marriage was one of the gravest of sins. Having her baby in her home city of Birmingham, where she’d have risked public shame, would not have been an option.
Andrew pictured with his birth mother Margaret
For years, I’d assumed she must have been a gym-slip mum, but not a bit of it: Margaret was only three months from her 35th birthday when she had me. Had she fallen madly in love, I wondered, perhaps with a married man? St Raphael’s, like many others of its kind, espoused a regime that was punitive, inflexible and often lacking in any empathy.
Unfortunately, I’ve hit a brick wall in trying to find out more as the file to my first temporary home has been closed until 2043 due to concerns that the publication of material could be too hurtful.
However, over the past 15 years, shocking stories have been emerging about violence and abuse in similar mother-and-baby homes. Some mums would go to the dormitory where the infants slept to give them their bottles, only to discover their babies were no longer there. Heartbreaking.
Some children were sent to Ireland to be put in care. Others dispatched as far afield as Australia. The mothers were often never told where their babies had gone.
Overlaying everything was a powerful sense of shame. Margaret would have felt it strongly at St Raphael’s and again at Southmead Children’s Hospital, where she gave birth to me. There, she was kept in a separate room from the married women, so they could avoid being ‘tainted’ by her sin. Unlike them, Margaret was presented with a birth certificate that stated my father was ‘unknown’. Did he perhaps live or work in Bristol? Was that one of the reasons she’d chosen to have me there? If so, she never told me.
At five weeks I was transferred to Nazareth House in Cheltenham, some 40-odd miles away.
I’ve always wondered: what were those first crucial years truly like for me? At the end of last year, I stumbled across a report marking the 120th anniversary of CCS Adoption in Bristol, the agency that handled my transition from orphanage to happy family life.
One of the sentences in this report said: ‘Previous residents of Nazareth Houses in Bristol and Cheltenham have reported mixed experiences and some complaints were raised…when reports of historical abuse, including being beaten and suffering sexual abuse from other residents and adult helpers, were in the Bristol Evening Post.’ I quickly found the articles, testimonies from people who’d been in the homes at the same time as me. Chillingly, some had been toddlers, too.
Again and again, there were reports of children being beaten for wetting the bed. Punishments included being forced to sit in a galvanised steel bath while two assistants poured buckets of cold water over the child’s head. Urine-sodden sheets were wrapped round their legs or neck.
At night, there were checks to ensure all the children slept on their backs with their arms crossed so that, according to one person’s story, ‘if we died in our sleep, we would go to heaven’.
Teresa Smith, who was still living in Bristol, was 41 when she spoke to the newspaper about the ‘ritual of abuse’ that she had undergone. I was 40 at the time, so a contemporary of hers. ‘With the exception of one nun,’ she said, ‘their role seemed to be to punish. One of my most vivid memories was being locked in the cupboard and spending hours in the dark. I saw nuns grab hold of girls’ hair and pull them upstairs, hitting them with a hairbrush.’ John, 55, spoke of a ‘regime of fear’, saying: ‘The nuns or helpers would pull sheets off the bed and if your hands and arms weren’t folded, you had to kneel on stone floors. If you wet the bed, you were put in a bath of cold water and scrubbed with disinfectant.
‘One of our duties was to clean a 200ft stone hall floor. There would be two or four boys, scrubbing on our knees. Standing above us would be another boy who’d swing a broom to ensure we didn’t put our head up and stop cleaning.
‘One of our helpers, not a nun, was particularly cruel. She told my brother and I that our mother didn’t want us and nor did they.’
Then there was Arthur, who was sent to Nazareth House at three and remained there until he was 13. He, too, was scrubbed with disinfectant when he wet his bed.
‘We had no protection, no cuddles or anyone to care for us,’ he said. ‘At night, I felt so lonely I cried.’
Michelle Daly, a former carer at the home, said she was shocked by what she’d seen. ‘Babies were neglected and the nuns only made an effort for visitors,’ she said.
She had painful memories of a five-year-old called Marie who was still in nappies: ‘Marie was left in a storage room and used to crash to the floor, banging her head, making it bleed. I bit my lip, hearing her screams in there.’
After the home closed in 1970, she tracked Marie down – and, at 19, Michelle became the youngest woman in the country to adopt. She said: ‘Marie wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t been so utterly neglected. All they cared about was how clean the place was; no child was ever cuddled.’
Daniel, another resident, recalled. ‘Once, when I was angry, I flooded the bathroom. The nun stripped me naked in front of 100 boys and put me in a bath of icy water. Then she tied me to a shower and beat me with a stick which hung round her waist. I was nine.’ He also recalled being locked in a cupboard for a day at a time: ‘The nuns told us we were a curse on the world.’
Is this how I was treated during my most vulnerable years? All I know is the stories have uncanny parallels with what I uncovered during regressive therapy with an eminent psychologist.
He’d put me under hypnosis so he could try to take my unconscious mind back to the orphanage. And, during these sessions, I’d heard a child crying and had known instinctively it was me.
There was cloth (a sheet?) wound so tightly round my legs that I couldn’t move them and the strong smell of urine. Then I appeared to be shivering in an icy bath, held down by strong hands.
Did being wrapped in urine-soaked sheets explain why my adoptive parents said I came to them with dreadful sores on my legs? When I later told my adoptive sister about the regressive therapy, she had more to add. ‘You told us the nuns used to shut you in the cupboard,’ she said.
Did Margaret know any of this? No – I’m certain she was oblivious to any ill-treatment in the orphanage. For one thing, she probably visited only a couple of times a month at most because of her busy work schedule as a nurse in Birmingham. For another, the nuns would have ensured I was on best behaviour for any visitor.
What gives me heart now is that I look so happy in the photos Philomena sent me. At the point those photos were taken, Margaret was still visiting me and had no intention of giving me away. She was still clinging to the noble idea that one day she’d be able to create a loving home for me.
The photos have also helped underline how difficult it must have been for Margaret to walk away from me. I was a toddler – walking, talking, laughing – and she’d had time to forge a loving relationship with me.
For her, everything changed when a man called Patrick Lennon asked her to marry him. She suddenly faced a choice: walk away from me – or lose the man who offered her a chance of security, happiness and legitimate children (she went on to marry Lennon and have three more children).
I completely understand why she made the decision she did. But as I look at the photos, I also think that her wedding day must have been tinged with sadness.
Some of the orphanage’s residents still have nightmares and flashbacks. I don’t. What I do have now are three wonderful photos and three names: Adrian, Ann and Nigel. I hope that, by publishing their photos, maybe someone will recognise these children.
I’d love to meet them. To see if they remember much about the home. To find out if they, like me, have been astonishingly happy.
In the end, I was lucky Margaret gave me up for adoption. If she hadn’t met Lennon, I could have remained in orphanages for many years. I’d almost certainly have missed my chance to be adopted by Betty and George, who’d have found another lucky little boy to make their family complete.
Adapted from Finding Margaret, by Andrew Pierce (Biteback, £9.99), to be published in paperback on March 27.
© Andrew Pierce 2025. To order a copy for £8.99 (offer valid to 05/04/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
