Foundling

About the Book

Abandoned as a baby in a London street, the author was adopted by an unmarried woman when she was about four years old. Her parents were never traced.Foundling: An Adopted Child’s Search For Her Identity, makes the connection between what happenedto the author — abandonment, her conflicts with her adoptive mother and other substitute parents — and the development of her inner life.

The driving force behind the book is the need to record, analyze and explain her need for the phantom parents, and to describe her relations with her friends, mentors and, in particular, with the woman who adopted her.

The flow of the writer’s daydreaming, memories and associations is expressed in the two distinct voices of prose and poetry, a technique inspired by Dante’s La Vita Nuova.

The book is written in three parts. Part I, ´1st Movement: Allegro moderato´, opens with a letter to the unknown father:

‘Dear Father,

I don’t know you. I know nothing about you—except in my imagination. Words may help me find you; they’ll be an exchange for your absence. With the passing of time you become more and more elusive.

Where can I send this? Usually a letter is addressed to someone we know.

I am your daughter. Why, then, do you act like a stranger?

Because you are one, you say? You are a stranger—but let’s not allow that to stand in the way of writing to you. If only I could see you, know what you look like, hear your voice, know what you sound like. And why can’t I know where you’ve lived? Know whether or not you’re English, and if you’re not, what is your nationality? And I want to know your name.

Why won’t you tell me about all these things? Or are you non-existent, or, since I have no memory of you and you are without substance, are you one of the dead men? But then, even the dead have a family genealogy.

On waking this morning my intention was to say to you, “We’re in this together.”

There is consolation in the exchange of affection.

I may not have known my family but I must have had one’...

In addition to letters to the unknown parents, ´1st Movement: Allegro moderato´ includes, through newspaper clippings and official letters, an account of the process of adoption as it was in one individual case in England in the 1930s. In general, though, ´1st Movement: Allegro moderato´ is dream-like in mood, interweaving people, places and time through memory and meditation.

Part II, ´2nd Movement: Andante con moto´, consists of letters to the father and mother in an imaginary dialogue describing the girl’s responses to people and events. These include the background of the Second World War, life in an English boarding school, her increasing involvement with music and her eventual entry to the Royal College of Music in London, her move as a married woman with children to the United States and her struggle there with thyroid cancer. Here is part of one of the letters to the unknown mother:

‘Dear Mother,

Miss Braun’s depressions meant trouble. Children’s Encyclopedias are scattered over the floor of my bedroom on the third floor.

All afternoon I’ve been enjoying the colored pictures in the books, especially the ones of dinosaurs to whom I feel connected by a vague give and take with the past. Some of the books lie open, a few in the ten-volume, dark-green set are still shut and I look forward to getting to them later. I am crouched on the floor with the books. The door opens. Miss Braun stands there, just over the threshold, arms raised, looking fierce. “How dare you. Clear this up at once. All you do is cause trouble!” In a thunderbolt and a flash she’s burst into a huge rage. Unlike her to lose self-control. Usually when she’s angry she’s icy, cold as ice, or like iron, mouth set, open and shut, black and hard. I’ve never seen her turn into a red-hot fire before, screaming at me louder and lou

About the Author

At the age of about fourteen months Mary Sturge was found abandoned in a London street in England. Her parents were never traced and she was adopted at age four by a middle-aged single woman. Educated at the Royal College of Music in London and the New School in New York, she has been writing and making music from an early age. In 1961 she emigrated to the United States with her husband and four sons. She now divides her time between New Hampshire and Derbyshire in England.