One morning in late September 2023, David Batty discovered by chance that his birth mother had been killed almost a year earlier. The revelation came while searching his work email for a stray message. In the bin folder, amid a slurry of irrelevant press releases, lay an unopened email flagging a long-forgotten Google alert he had set up for her name, Susan Barras. They had been estranged for almost 15 years, so this in itself provoked trepidation. He had cut contact with her when their relationship had finally become too fraught and emotionally exhausting for him to continue. Opening the email, he realised with shock that the alert had been triggered by a probate notice about her estate.
Susan was only 69 when she died, and David's first thought was that the breast cancer she was being treated for when they were in touch had returned. His second was the realisation that both his birth parents were now dead – his birth father had died of liver failure in late 2018, aged 70. But then the unfamiliar name listed on the probate notice, Suzann Doyle, captured his attention. Underneath this was confirmation that his birth mother had changed her name. Her address at the time of her death posed further questions. It was not that of the large detached house in Guildford he had visited just once, a few months after they were reunited, where she had lived with her husband. This address was for a tiny one-bed retirement flat overlooking Guildford train station.
David rang the law firm listed on the probate notice. Initially, they seemed reluctant to talk, perhaps because as an adoptee he had no legal claim on his birth mother's estate. But, eventually, a solicitor disclosed that in late November 2022, Susan had been hit by a car and died hours later in hospital. The solicitor added that her two adult stepchildren had been informed, but not her younger sister, who, like David, got in touch only after seeing the notice. This, along with the disclosure that Susan had left her entire estate (including her personal possessions) to charity, suggested that she might also have been estranged from the rest of her family.
In the following days, David tried to piece together what had happened in Susan's life since they last met and the circumstances of her death. Through the solicitor, he managed to speak, for the first time, to Susan's sister and her best friend. From them, he discovered that Susan had undergone bowel cancer surgery a few months before she was killed. She had changed her name and moved home after an acrimonious split from her husband, who had later died of cancer. Susan had cut contact with her mother, her sister and her brother, seemingly around the time David had broken ties with her. She had also recently fallen out with her best friend, who told him that this had happened repeatedly since they were at school together. Unsurprisingly, given her apparent isolation, there had been no funeral. Her ashes were scattered on the Isle of Wight, but where exactly and by whom no one David spoke to knew.
The Ghost World of Adoption
Adoption has often been likened to a ghost world, in which the adoptee, the birth parents and the adoptive parents are haunted by spectres of the past. For the birth parents, the primary ghost is of the child lost to adoption. For the adopted person, it is their birth mother. They may also be haunted by the ghost of their birth father; the pre-adoption child they once were; the imagined life they might have lived had they not been adopted; the ghost of the child their adoptive parents longed for; and, possibly, the ghost of the child their adoptive parents may have lost or been unable to conceive. Even after the deaths of both his birth parents, their spectres linger, because literally and metaphorically they were not laid to rest. David's birth father didn't have a funeral, because he was an impoverished alcoholic. David was left wondering how to mourn parents who had been a ghostly absence in his life for so long, and whose loss he had already grieved for many years.
Adoption has long been regarded as a fairytale ending by the British public. Children are widely regarded as lucky to be saved from birth families believed to be unwilling, unable or incapable of caring for them. Paradoxically, adoption reunion is also pushed as a happily ever after story by reality TV programmes such as Davina McCall's tear-jerking Long Lost Family. David's journey felt like walking into the artist Cornelia Parker's exploded shed, with all the scorched wreckage precariously suspended around him.
The Beginning of the Journey
It began in May 1974 when David's adoptive parents, Brian and Paula, took him from a Christian adoption agency in Muswell Hill, north London, back to their home in Brighouse, a town in West Yorkshire. Like many adoptive parents of that era, they decided it was best to treat him the same as if he was their birth child. (David has an older sister and a younger brother who are his parents' biological children.) Back then, psychologists and social workers considered adopted babies to be blank slates who could be moulded to fit their new families. A few weeks before his adoptive dad died last November, David discussed this article with him and asked about the circumstances of his adoption. His dad said he and David's adoptive mum, who died in 2020, were given no advice on how to raise him, other than that they should tell him he was adopted between the ages of five and 10, at a time that seemed appropriate. When David was told, aged seven, his adoptive dad recalled that he hadn't visibly reacted. He said he and his mum had explained that David was special because he had been chosen, following the expert advice of the time, which claimed this would offer comfort to children suddenly grappling with feelings of abandonment. (David recalls nothing about this disclosure other than his adoptive sister, then 11, comforting him as he cried in the garden shed.)
As a child and young adult, David had no idea how to comprehend or articulate the loss of his birth family, and how this had affected his sense of self. As a teenager, he began to search through his parents' bedroom cupboard for any adoption records they had, eventually discovering an incomplete version when he was 15. He was shocked to find out his birth father was Iranian; this had never been mentioned by his white British adoptive parents. It appeared, based on documents in the file, that the adoption agency had downplayed his mixed ethnicity because he passed as white. The agency's first letter to his adoptive parents said: You will notice that the baby's father comes from a Persian family but the baby who is very fair shows no sign of any colour. According to his adoptive dad, the agency said David's ethnic background was irrelevant and there was no need to mention it to him.
While David always intended to trace his birth parents, he waited until he felt he had the independence, security and resilience to do so. In 2003, he approached the Post Adoption Centre (now PAC-UK) in north London for help finding his birth mother, who he knew from the records had lived in Twickenham, south-west London. He was obliged to attend counselling before their reunion, because prior to the Adoption Act of 1976 adoptions were closed, and some birth parents were led to believe that their children would never be able to discover their original names or family. David's PAC-UK adviser thus acted as an intermediary and wrote a letter to Susan in the autumn of 2004 explaining who he was and why he was trying to contact her.
At the same time, David received a fuller version of his adoption file. What struck him reading through this again recently was how judgmental they were of his birth mother's unmarried status; appearing to affirm Susan's account that she was coerced into giving him up. In the UK, from the 1950s to the mid-70s about 185,000 unmarried women were pressured into relinquishing babies that they wanted to keep. A 2022 parliamentary human rights inquiry called this scandal a violation of family life. According to David's records, his birth mother was in contact with the adoption agency soon after discovering she was pregnant; after she had him, he was placed with a foster mother. What initial discussions took place about his future are not noted in the file. But the records show Susan took him back a month later. At this point, the adoption agency stepped in to dissuade her from keeping him, and her parents from trying to adopt him, warning that an unnatural family setup would probably result in him becoming a juvenile delinquent. The reverend who ran the baptist adoption agency branded David's birth mother, then 20, a rebellious daughter and a determined but probably disturbed girl. I would not be surprised to discover that over the years there had been conflict between her parents in the way that she should be disciplined, he added.
The First Letters and Meeting
Susan's heartfelt first letter to David in November 2004 didn't raise any red flags about their reunion. She wrote: I would like you to know that not a single day has passed when I haven't thought about you and wondered how you were and what you were doing. But her second letter seemed to allude to elements of the adoption agency's assessment of her emotional state 30 years ago. She wrote: I attended Chiswick school where I learned the fine arts of how to nut, give bother and put in the boot. After detailing her extended British and Irish family, sometimes with damning faint praise, she added: I should warn you that most of my early life was terribly unhappy and that I never (and still do not) get on with my family and I rarely see them. As a consequence, I may find the retelling emotionally painful, but I owe it to you to give you any and all the information that you require.
This letter also contained the first description David had of his birth father, an Iranian student whom she met on a business studies course at Luton polytechnic in 1973. He was quite serious (and, sadly, rather too religious for my liking), she wrote, though David later discovered this description bore no relation to reality. Susan said they had dated for six months until she found out she was pregnant and he decided to go to a university in Detroit, Michigan, adding: I have no idea where he is now or what happened to him and, to be honest with you, I don't care.
Looking back now through their correspondence and his adoption file, these were among several glaring signs of the difficulties that later beset their relationship. But, at the time, David didn't dwell on them, more interested to read about what they had in common: a love of art, architecture, design and literature. So, it wasn't until Susan and David met in the spring of 2005 in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall that he first had a sense of foreboding. He remembers scanning the crowd with the baptist reverend's description of her in mind: She is a slim, attractive girl with long fair hair and rather pointed features. His eyes settled on a small thin woman in black, with a somewhat severe dyed blond bob. There was something brittle in her manner that troubled him. To his surprise, his immediate thought was, Don't let it be her. Of course, it was.
Susan was smart and funny, making droll remarks about the artspeak of the gallery's picture captions. In the Tate members' bar, she produced several envelopes stuffed with family snaps. The impact of seeing David's own features in the photos of these relatives was unexpectedly overwhelming. In hindsight, it was revealing that she didn't acknowledge that he closely resembled the two men of whom she had the most complicated and painful memories: her father and his birth father. Susan promised to give David a photo of his birth father but never did. Instead, at that first meeting, she produced a printout of a miniature Persian portrait of a Qajar prince, which she claimed looked like him. Well, you get the idea, she said, adding her mother was worried she was going to have a black baby.
David only met two members of Susan's family during the time they were reunited. Her younger brother, a seemingly shy man, joined them in the members' room of the Royal Academy in London. They barely exchanged a word to punctuate the awkward silence. Some months later, David met Susan's husband, Terence, a lawyer and sometime property developer, at their home in Guildford. He seemed a kind and gentle man, although there was an air of melancholy about him. When Susan was out of earshot, he came over to David and whispered: Everything's going to be all right now you're back. This suggested that everything had not been all right before.
The Relationship Unravels
Over the next three years, Susan and David met every six to eight weeks, usually for lunch and an exhibition in London. Initially, their conversations struck a balance between discussing their current lives, David's as a journalist and then art student, and hers as a grammar school teacher, and their shared past. But, over time, Susan became increasingly fixated on the circumstances of David's adoption and its emotional toll on her. Her expressions of hurt and anger, usually towards her parents, whom she felt had not supported her before, during and after the adoption, became prolonged and more intense. She said David's birth had been physically traumatic and she had broken her coccyx in labour. She was distraught to learn that David had not received the handwritten note she had hidden in his baby clothes before she handed him over to his adoption social worker. She said she had post-traumatic stress disorder and had been in therapy for 25 years. (Her best friend later insisted Susan had never been in therapy.)
On another occasion, Susan took issue with a letter she purportedly received from David's adoptive mother after his adoption was finalised, which she described as condescendingly Christian. She said she had spent years trying to find David and, disconcertingly, had come very close, having determined that he lived in Halifax, the neighbouring town to the one in which he grew up. At another meeting, she claimed she'd been told David had died when he was 16. The mood became increasingly suffocating.
Several months after their reunion, David's PAC-UK support worker admitted that she thought Susan had seemed fragile when they first spoke on the phone. David replied: She doesn't want me. She wants her baby back. This epiphany, while painful, encapsulated the gap between David and Susan. She could not let go of the loss that had defined her life. She would never get to experience raising him. Here David was, an independent adult with another family's history and memories. He thinks she wanted him to need her, to depend on her, as if he was a child. But David felt as if he was dealing with a vulnerable teenage girl who had been psychologically arrested at the point of his adoption. You don't remember me, but I remember you, she would say repeatedly, leaving David to wonder whether he was supposed to feel guilty for this.
Years later, after David discovered his birth mother had died, he recounted this in a phone call with her best friend, who recalled visiting Susan in Athens, Greece, two years after David's adoption. The friend was shocked to discover Susan's apartment was undecorated except for one photograph on her bedside table – a studio portrait of David, aged seven months, sent from his adoptive parents via the agency. This was the image of him she had cherished over the decades they were separated.
The breaking point came over dinner at a Turkish restaurant in Mayfair, London, when David recounted a conversation with his adoptive parents and referred to Susan as his birth mother. She became apoplectic, and shouted: I hate that term. I wasn't a brood mare. Pausing to draw breath, she added: Your father wanted me to have an abortion. I hope you realise that. While David had always suspected that at least one of his birth parents may have considered aborting him, it still stung to have that flung at him in public. He took her comments to mean: you owe me your life. A few days later, she sent an email bluntly stating that this was something she had needed to say. There was no acknowledgment that her remarks may have upset him.
David's responses to her emails became more belated and intermittent. Eventually, he stopped responding to her requests to meet. She continued to message him for another two years, including at midnight on his birthday. In February 2008, she sent an email with the subject line confused. She wrote: Maybe you'll respond to this and maybe you won't but at least you'll know I'm still thinking of you. Eventually, David emailed back saying he was cutting contact because he could no longer cope with her offloading on him her resentment towards her mother and late father and, to a lesser extent, her brother and sister. It felt as if she was trying to recruit him as an ally in an entrenched family conflict, rather than allowing him to meet his grandmother, aunt and uncle on his own terms, he added. He ended the email by asking her not to contact him again unless he contacted her first. He never heard from her again.
David searched for this email again after discovering Susan was dead. Looking back now, he's able to sympathise more with her emotional pain. While she was wrong to treat their meetings as quasi-therapy sessions, they both lacked the support they needed to avoid retraumatising themselves and each other. In his grief he deleted the message; he suspects because on some level it reminded him of the original trauma of their separation as mother and baby. Now, her death meant an irrevocable separation.
Tracing His Birth Father
For many years, tracing his birth father, Monti, seemed an impossibility; there is very little support available here for adoptees seeking non-British birth parents. David had made a couple of attempts to trace him in his late 20s and early 30s, but only pursued it in earnest in his late 30s, after his reunion with his birth mother. A Google search on his name brought up a recently published blog – in Persian – by someone who matched the details in his adoption file. Translating the blog confirmed this was his birth father. David was surprised to learn that after studying in the US he returned to Iran and became a broadcast journalist: unknowingly, he had followed in his footsteps. His career appeared to have petered out after he emigrated to the US in the 1990s, eventually settling in Los Angeles. He had legally changed his name, taking a more anglicised forename. Most importantly, the blog revealed he was divorced and had another son, Bryan, who was half David's age. David decided to do nothing until this boy was 18, wary that he might be stepping into another fractured family.
In early January 2017, several months after his half-brother turned 18, David went through his Facebook account and found a post he made in 2013 for US national siblings day that said: To my half-brother who I will probably never meet … He doesn't know I exist. That week, David hired a private detective in LA, who tracked down Monti within 24 hours and said he cried on the phone when told David was trying to find him. David first spoke to his birth father on the day of Donald Trump's first inauguration, and the start of the ban on Iranian citizens travelling to the US. Monti gave David an account of his relationship with Susan that differed greatly from hers. He claimed that they lived together in his flat in south-west London and that she proposed moving to Detroit to raise David while he was at university in Michigan. More concerning, however, was the way he slurred his words. When David's half-brother reached out to him via Twitter the following day, he confirmed David's suspicion that Monti was an alcoholic.
Nevertheless, three months later David flew out to LA for two weeks to meet them. He had already established a bond with Bryan and they texted several times a day. The reunion couldn't have been more different from that with Susan. But as Leo Tolstoy's famous opening line of Anna Karenina puts it, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Certainly, everything had gone wrong in his birth father's household. The dashing young man in military service uniform in the photos on the blog, and the cheerful and dynamic Iranian TV journalist who had reported from the frontline of the Iran-Iraq war, from refugee camps and miners' strikes, were both long gone. He had holes in his shoes. He was living in an RV after being evicted. He never told David directly how he'd ended up in this state. But he said his first wife, an Iranian TV producer, had been killed, and nearly decapitated, in a car crash, and his youngest sister had been murdered in Rome in 1983. A Pan-Arab Jordanian terrorist had mistakenly shot her dead; his intended target, the Emirati ambassador to Italy, had only minor injuries, according to Italian press reports.
In March 2017, David met Monti at his favourite Persian restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, along with his half-brother. Monti took David's face in his hands, studying it before expressing disappointment that neither of his sons had inherited his cleft chin. Bryan was clenched in anger throughout the meal. It was only afterwards when they walked out to Monti's car that David understood why. The old station wagon's bumper was crumpled. Its interior was covered with a thick layer of cigarette ash. Its seats were piled with takeaway boxes, which his half-brother embarrassedly disposed of. As a metaphor for his birth father's life, it couldn't have been blunter. Later that fortnight, Monti turned up to another dinner wearing a foam support girdle over his shirt, which he said he'd been wearing since his belly button exploded due to an umbilical hernia. After he bad-mouthed Bryan's mother, David asked him why he had married her. I just wanted a son, he replied, adding wistfully: I should have stayed with your mother. Later that week, he failed to turn up to a meeting at his storage unit to go through his family photos and documentary films. He had got drunk instead.
Monti died of liver failure 18 months later. A combination of the long distance between them and his deteriorating alcoholism meant they remained remote. David's relationship with Bryan, however, is close – he visited him again in 2023 and they text regularly. Bryan endured a series of crises after Monti's death, including homelessness, but he is now working as an adviser for vulnerable people in LA. David has tried to take care that their bond is not built on trauma. But he is the only person Bryan has to talk to about his father, and Bryan said recently that David's presence in his life had cushioned his bereavement. During a Zoom call soon after Monti's death, Bryan became upset and said: I can't do this. You look so much like him. With age, that resemblance is stronger, sometimes still surprising David when he looks in the mirror.
Reflections and Unresolved Matters
Both of David's birth parents' lives followed similar trajectories. They grew increasingly estranged from their families, and died in tragic circumstances. But Monti's traumas were not related to David's adoption, nor was his family affected by it as deeply as Susan's was. Last December, one of Monti's surviving sisters reached out to David via social media. Over the next few weeks, she helped him to piece together more of his Iranian family's history, including several ancestors who held senior posts during the Qajar dynasty. That contact ended with the onset of the US and Israeli bombings of Tehran, where she and four other close relatives live. Now, like many others in the Iranian diaspora, David anxiously hopes to hear they are safe.
With Susan, much remains unresolved. Last November, amid growing calls for a government apology to those affected by forced adoption, David showed his records to Dr Michael Lambert, a historian of the British welfare state at Lancaster University and an expert witness to the 2022 parliamentary inquiry. He said the assessments of Susan and her family by the reverend and a moral welfare officer, a kind of social worker primarily concerned with unmarried mothers, were not based on fact but biased speculation, inserted to support the case for David's adoption. Lambert says: The reports articulate that your birth mother can't possibly be a fit mother because she's been nurtured in an improper way, and getting pregnant was her acting out to get attention. It follows the Church of England narrative at the time that unmarried mothers are incapable of being good parents. They're portrayed as promiscuous and a detrimental influence.
In February, David attended the trial in Guildford of the man accused of killing Susan by careless driving. He saw a grainy black-and-white screengrab of the CCTV footage taken moments before the collision. She looked thin and fragile, but her gait seemed decisive. He heard witnesses describe how she had shouted stop at the approaching car before being knocked to the ground, her head hitting the road with an audible crack. She died from internal bleeding 12 hours later in hospital. The driver, who said he hadn't seen her due to the low winter sun, was found not guilty. It seemed that once again Susan's trauma had been filtered through a legal process that didn't centre her.
David never expected that reunion would, on its own, resolve the complexities of adoptee identity. He's paid for therapy, as none is freely available to adult adoptees, which has helped him to better navigate the three families he is part of. Despite the stress and anxiety he's endured, he does not regret either reunion. There is power in gaining self-knowledge, and connecting with his cultural heritage that was erased by the adoption system. Perhaps an official apology to adoptees and birth parents affected by forced adoption, which children's minister Josh MacAlister said in March was being actively considered by the government, will help resolve the sense of injustice surrounding his and other adoptions. But any apology will come too late for his birth mother, and cannot undo the loss they both endured. For many adoptees, David included, dealing with that loss is a lifelong process.
