EXTRACT | ‘Lucky Bastard’ by Anthony Akerman

When award-winning playwright Anthony Akerman was 10 years old, he was told he’d been adopted. It was a seismic event that turned his world upside down. He didn’t know where he came from or who he was, and the law prohibited him from finding out. Fast forward to the late 1980s: he was living in exile in Amsterdam when he heard the Children’s Act had been amended to allow adoptees access to information about their biological parents.

The more information you had, the easier it would be to trace your biological parents. So he wrote and asked his adoptive parents if there was anything they hadn’t told him that might be helpful. After 38 years, his dad broke his silence and told him what his name had been when they adopted him.

Armed with this information, he wrote to the Adoption Centre in Cape Town and asked if they could trace his birth mother. They promised to try their best and he prepared himself for the worst — she might be dead, she might have left the country or she might refuse to have contact with him.

On 19 April 1989, he received a letter from a social worker called Anne Bruce saying they’d located her whereabouts. She lived in Cape Town, not far from the adoption centre, and  Bruce had been to see her. The social worker wrote, “She was understandably taken aback and moved to tears when I explained the reason for my visit. You have always been in her thoughts and she has very deep feelings for you … should you wish to meet at a later stage she would be agreeable.”

They immediately began corresponding and running up high phone bills but, as the South African government had recently refused Akerman a visa to enter the country, their meeting was delayed until after Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

In this lightly-edited excerpt from his memoir Lucky Bastard, the author reconstructs what happened between the day he was born and the day he was adopted.

“Order of Adoption”

Anne Bruce had told me she could apply for documentation from my adoption file and on 1 August 1989 she sent me five documents, copies of which I forwarded to my mother and to mum and dad. These included a copy of my original birth certificate. My name was recorded as Peter Farnham.

I was born in The Homestead, a Salvation Army unmarried mothers’ home, on a Friday afternoon. After my mother had been in labour for 23 hours, the doctor was sent for because Major Enever, the midwife, thought a caesarean might be necessary, but I was born an hour later at 5:15pm. My mother told me she’d breastfed me for six weeks and that it then took two weeks to wean me. It had never occurred to me that I might have spent the first two months of my life with her in an unmarried mothers’ home. In most other scenarios I’d invented, we’d been separated at birth.

“I was with you until that moment you were handed over to whoever fetched you at The Homestead. I only left Durban some days later,” she wrote.

On Tuesday October 4 1949, just over eight weeks after I was born, my mother was taken to the Children’s Court in Durban. In the presence of Mr CM Plowes, the Commissioner of Child Welfare, she signed three documents. In an affidavit, she stated she was my mother, that she was unmarried, that she’d not been influenced in any way to put me up for adoption, that she agreed to non-disclosure of the identity of the adoptive parents, that she’d not received “any consideration in this matter” and that my father was “of European descent”.

She also signed her consent to the Order of Adoption that stated I’d be the legitimate child of the person or persons unknown to her and that from that date forward “all legal relationship between myself and the said child will cease and determine”. Then she went back to The Homestead and waited for the inevitable. She didn’t have long to wait.

Dad must have told the family they wanted to adopt a child. I’d assumed — although it was something I could never discuss with him — that dad knew the mumps and complications he’d had when he was 13 had made him infertile. But perhaps that wasn’t a scientific certainty in 1945 and they’d hoped to have children of their own. They only put their names down to adopt three years after getting married. They knew they’d have to be patient because the Children’s Act stipulated that neither adoptive parent should be under 25.

Several years after receiving the first five documents from my adoption file, I applied to the Registrar of Adoptions and received my complete file. That’s how I’ve reconstructed what happened next.

Dad would immediately have arranged for a locum at the health centre so he could take leave. On the evening of Friday October 7, he’d have packed the brand-new carrycot on the small back seat of the Chrysler coupe. Early on Saturday morning, as dad turned into Durban Street, they glanced back at their house knowing that when they returned to Fort Beaufort they’d be a family. “We’ll fill up in Butterworth,” said dad, as mum added condensed milk to the cup of percolated coffee she’d just poured from the Thermos flask.

On the Monday morning, dad drove to Timber Street in downtown Pietermaritzburg to consult Walton Lister, the family attorney. He said he’d have his secretary type up a certificate that he’d have ready for collection before dad drove down to Durban the next day. Uncle Walton testified that dad was “eminently suitable — culturally, professionally, financially, socially and in every other way — to undertake the adoption of a child.”

On Thursday, 13 October, they both signed the Application for Order of Adoption. My mother was unaware that my future parents were staying with family friends only a mile away from The Homestead. The next morning, Major Enever came into the nursery, squeezed her hand and told her to say goodbye to Peter. Mum and dad had driven down from 487 Essenwood Road and parked in the street outside 71 5th Avenue, where they were met by Major Enever. When mum carried me down to the car, Peter remained behind in the nursery. Dad opened the door and mum got in carefully, with a bewildered Anthony John in her arms.

Then dad engaged the Chrysler’s fluid drive, throbbed down 5th Avenue, turned into Mitchell Crescent near Greyville Racecourse — where Major Enever and the Salvation Army collected on race days — and took me to my grandparents’ home in Pietermaritzburg. That’s where I spent my first night as a member of the Akerman family and I’m sure it explains why I’ve always felt a visceral attachment to that house.

My mother was dazed and bereft as she closed the street door of The Homestead. She’d made friends here and had celebrated her 21st birthday with young women in a similar predicament. But what had happened here would remain a secret although, unavoidably, some people did know. She picked up her suitcase and, still unaccustomed to the humidity, started out along 5th Avenue towards Mitchell Road. The light sea breeze made her thin cotton dress cling to her body. She’d regained her figure, but not her confidence or self-respect.

When she reached the bus stop, she asked a stranger which trolley bus she should take. She put down her suitcase and waited. In her hand she clutched the return ticket to Cape Town paid for by my grandfather, the wine merchant Douglas Green. Did he ever spare a thought for the grandchild he’d never see? And what about his son Dougie? He must have calculated he was a father by now. Did that make him feel different? Did he wonder whether his firstborn child was a boy or a girl? When he later married and held a baby in his arms, would he be able to suppress the thought that his child already had an older brother or sister?

Mitchell Road ran alongside Greyville Racecourse where, a few months earlier, Milesia Pride had won the July Handicap. The trolley bus crossed Alice Street and she got off at the stop in front of the station. After having been cut off from the world for six months, the pedestrians and traffic in Soldiers Way felt disconcertingly present.

She walked across the station concourse and found the right platform. A helpful conductor showed her to her compartment and put her suitcase on the overhead rack. She sat down next to the window, opened her purse, and took out a few black-and-white photos of me. Perhaps she should have thrown them away, because she was expected to put the past behind her and pick up the pieces of her life as if nothing had ever happened.

Lucky Bastard is published by Praxis Publishing and is now available at Exclusive Books and most leading bookstores – also on Takealot, Amazon and Kindle