'Sleeping under the Table' by Jan Lloyd

As I gazed at the old photograph of my father I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness. The small, neglected figure stared out at the photographer with a careworn expression, as if inwardly pleading for help. It was a picture from an unknown world which I never knew about. It was taken before my father had been adopted and in a town of which I have very little knowledge. His mother had been forced to give him up when he was four years old and he told me, whilst still alive, of his bitter memory of being taken to the railway station and waving a tearful farewell to his mother. The train he boarded took him away from Hartlepool to a new life in South Wales but did not bring him the comfort of which he must surely have dreamed. He had been sent to an elderly couple who did not provide the loving home he so wished for; instead he spent more miserable years, always yearning for his real mother, with the painful memory of her waiting on the platform etched in his mind, as she watched the train take away her little boy.
The limited information I gleaned from my father was that his mother was single and could not afford to keep him when she became pregnant with his brother. This was in the early 1920's and he remembers the poverty and having to sleep under the kitchen table where the draughts from the back door sealed his watery eyes shut. His feet became deformed due to wearing ill fitting shoes and had to have numerous, painful operations to correct the deformities later in life. My poor father was greatly affected from this terrible wrench in his childhood and I believe he never recovered from the heartache he endured.
He did manage to find his real mother, who he was reunited with in later life but, unfortunately, a short time before she passed away. He thinks, too, that she had been greatly traumatised by her plight and although she was pleased to find him again could never recover from the loss of her first born. My father was also introduced to the brother he never knew and had some years of comfort in sharing the memories of time gone by.
One of my many ambitions is to trace my paternal family tree and find out about my grandmother and the hardships she courageously bore. I have a photograph of her which doesn't make me sad as she is smiling warmly at the camera and I see similarities in her face to mine. It makes me feel content and happy that she saw her son again and was able to take him by the hand and tell him she loved him and to see her name on the back of the photo, Mary Hannah.