Finally – an apology

Enforced adoption has been swept under the carpet for too long.

At last the UK government has officially apologised for the unmarried mothers and adoptees who were so cruelly torn apart by the adoption system ruthlessly enforced by state and Church in the UK from the 1940s to as late as the 1980s.

(Plas Gwynfryn, Llanystumdwy – the site of the mother and baby home ran but Sisters of Nazareth in the 1950s and 1960s.)

The Sounds a House Makes

I have spent months immersed in their testimonies describing institutional shaming and abuse in mother and baby homes across the UK, Ireland and commonwealth nations, and have just completed a full length novel, The Sounds House Makes. The book is set in early 1964 in North Wales and Merseyside. Unmarried and pregnant at seventeen, Kitty must be hidden from the world. But when her sister-in-law Diane agrees to keep her out of sight, both women recognise how thin the line of respectability really is.

Told through converging dual narratives, the novel sets Kitty’s passions and exposure to harrowing injustice against Diane’s guarded anxiety about appearances and bruising experience of married life. Together they create tension – two women watching each other from opposite sides of the same trap. The novel’s tragic argument is that love can sometimes arrive too late to save anyone. I was moved to write their stories when I heard a 2025 Woman’s Hour interview with Diana Defries from the Movement for an Adoption Apology. This triggered the memory of a family secret shared by my late mother in the 1990s. To my shame, I didn’t find out more at the time.

The interview left me with a burning question – how could other women, including my own mother, be involved in such widespread cruelty?

In the cupboard

So the novel speaks to a moment when campaigners for a UK apology have brought these histories back into public view. They have been working for decades to be heard, and today, July 2nd 2026, their hard-fought apology has at last been issued.

The skeleton, the bare bones of this novel, are straight from my own family’s cupboard and I have fictionalised an event that my late mother and estranged aunt experienced as very young women almost a decade before I was born. The rest, as they say, is fiction.

As Karen Constantine, author of Taken, experiences of forced adoption explains, it’s estimated – though we have no true record of the actual figure, unbelievably – that up to half a million babies were forcibly removed from their young single mothers shortly after birth in the years between 1945 and the early 1980s. This figures far exceeds the government’s own estimation of around 185,000 adoptions.

These mass state and church removals now represent an undeniable social injustice on a par with the UK Post Office scandal. Pregnancy outside marriage was severely frowned upon until as late as the early 1980s. Vulnerable women were given little choice but to give in to societal pressures exerted on them by a combination of their own parents and authorities working at the NHS, social services and churches or “charitable” organisations around the UK. Surrendering their newborns for adoption was presented to them as the only choice, “best for baby”. They were systematically denied information about welfare housing and financial help, which existed and was available to them at the time. Importantly, these women were never found to be unfit mothers; they were simply prevented from becoming mothers at all.

Why this novel?

I am someone who strongly desired to create my own family after bereavement and addiction recovery. Fortunately, I was privileged to finally have two children starting in my late 30s. This is a real driver to represent the story of denial of motherhood, of deep social injustice, misogyny and resulting mental anguish for so many mothers. Woman’s Hour reminded me that I needn’t look far to find familial experience of forced adoption, although my mother only spoke of it once, when I was too young and inexperienced to ask her what actually happened. I can’t even remember the context for her confiding in me, but I remember the conversation as I listened to brave accounts on Radio 4, crying as I drove in the rain.

Breaking the silence

And now it is too late. My own mum died a year ago and the details died with her. The wider family clearly never spoke of the events at the time and this is probably true for so many mothers whose babies were taken from them and who are now at the end of their lives or passed away.

The Movement for Adoption Apology continue to coalesce to give survivors a voice. The UK apology comes long after those of the church and governments in other countries. I hope this book helps too.

As Harriet Harman stated (JCHR joint committee report published July 2022), “Everyone has a right to family life… The adoptions took place decades ago, but the pain and suffering remains today.”

About the book

Told as a dual-perspective narrative, in close third person, the book follows Kitty and Diane’s experiences across ten months, divided into trimester sections, and ending with a postpartum coda.

They may be separated by class and a marriage certificate, but Diane is so much more than a witness to Kitty’s tragedy. As a parallel protagonist, she’s complicit only because her own safety rests on obeying the same rigid social codes that endanger Kitty.

Early in the book, we see separate lives. By chapter four, their experiences are rendered twice from disparate perspectives, and by the final scene their voices have merged into a single point of view.

From the Sounds A House Makes

Here’s an extract from the beginning of trimester three – Kitty is being left by her brother Gerard (Diane’s husband) at Nazareth House, Plas Gwynfryn, near Criccieth in North Wales:

Already Kitty felt judged by the tall, mullioned windows with thick panes – you might be able to see out of them but you certainly couldn’t see in. Overgrown rhododendrons crowded the base of the building, their leaves a dense oily green, and the driveway ended at an arched entrance where a heavy oak door stood half-open as if the house knew to expect them.

Kitty stayed in the car after Ger switched off the engine. He got out and went to the boot. She heard the suitcase set down on the gravel as he slammed the boot shut. She opened her own door slowly. The air had a bite after the hot summer months and smelled of wet leaves.

Ger was already carrying the case to the house. He looked at the doorway, then back at her.

She caught up and took it from him.

We’ll get you settled, he said, And Mam’ll get in touch, you can write letters. He paused, They’re good people, Kitty, I’m sure. It’ll all be over before you know it. Everyone back home’ll be none the wiser.

They entered the house together, through the impressive carriage porch, and Kitty was even more astonished by the hallway and entrance, mainly empty apart from a large chandelier overhead and some heavy oak furniture bigger than her bedroom. Diane would have approved as the place was spotless. A stone staircase swept up from the left with a heavy barley-twist oak banister, the treads worn smooth and concave at their centres. Against the far wall, a statue of Our Lady in a deep-blue robe, hands open, looked past Kitty to the door. At the statue’s feet was a vase of flowers – sickly smelling lilies in cream with orange dust on their petals.

A door behind the staircase opened and a nun in full habit came towards them pushing the chair of a very elderly patient. The nun spoke quietly to her patient but scowled at Kitty.

Kitty looked to Ger and whispered, Is this a hospital? I thought it was just mothers and babies?

Ger said that he didn’t know much more but this was definitely the right place – there couldn’t be another one this remote.

I should think the nuns care for the elderly too, he said, It’s part of their order or something.

As he spoke, another nun stepped into the hallway and greeted them both with a kindly smile, I’m the Mother Superior, Sister Margaret, she said, You must be bringing Kathleen to us?

She wore the same habit along with a large crucifix on a heavy chain hanging from her neck. Kitty noticed several dimples in her pale cheeks and the crow’s feet around her eyes. Mother Superior. Kitty wondered about this for a moment – it felt like a lie.

Ger stepped forward to address the nun, giving Kitty’s full name, but not his own, and she asked him to follow her. As Kitty made to join them, the Mother Superior said gently, You can wait here, Sister Agnes will show you the house shortly.

Ger came back quickly, Right, he said, everything’s done. There was something to sign, that’s all. They have everything ready for you.

He hesitated, looking down at her feet. Then he looked up and quickly put his hand on her shoulder, speaking quickly, I’m glad it’s all sorted. Sorted for you Kitty. And not too long now. Before the – before – Anyway, the sisters will let me know when you’re – you know – when I’m needed again.

Kitty wanted to say something but realised she didn’t have a clue what and anyway he’d turned on his heels and was almost at the car again. She watched as he got in, slammed his door and immediately started up the engine. He rolled down the window and exhaled a trail of cigarette smoke before heading off.

She couldn’t bear to watch him any longer so turned to stare at the chandelier and the many dozens of sparkling glass teardrops suspended from the ceiling. Each glass fragment was sharp-cut, the light trapped and splintering inside. With her head back almost to her shoulders, and her throat exposed, she gazed upwards. The whole piece looked so heavy she thought it could easily fall and crush her any minute and maybe that would be for the best.

She stood like this, alone with the suitcase at her feet, listening to the sounds of the house. She’d expected a hushed reverence perhaps, but instead there were doors being open and closed, voices of young women but also a low muttering, and she thought that must be the elderly patient in the nearby room.

She walked towards the door closest to her, which she pushed inwards – it was heavier than she’d expected so she had to lean into it with her shoulder. The big black hinges were well-kept and the door opened noiselessly. She saw the ground floor room was immense and cold, flagged in a pale grey-green limestone. The windows in this room were north facing, giving only a poor light. Everything had the look of being clean but not warm. Above her another embellishment – a ceiling rose with ornate plasterwork cornice, curling leaves and rope moulding, thick with old whitewash. There were many chairs and tables in here, pushed up against the walls. They were mainly made of ply with metal legs and looked squat and out of place. She retreated to the entrance hall again.

There was a strong smell of carbolic soap, almost smoky so that it caught your throat, along with floor polish, and a faint trace of incense. On the right, a long corridor led to a window overlooking fields and stands of trees with a thin sliver of sea in the background. Kitty could hear a rhythmic sound and the clank of something metallic. She squinted into the dark corridor and saw the silhouette of a pregnant girl with a mop and bucket, the ragged woollen mop head flopped over the edges of the bucket as she paused to laugh as another girl leant in to say something in her ear.

Kitty stood and waited.

Fiction

This is primarily a work of fiction. Some real-world locations - like the mother and baby home near Criccieth – and historical events are referenced, but the characters and dialogue are entirely invented. As I reconstructed the strange story of two very young women, from such different backgrounds, forced together in their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and infant care, and sworn to secrecy, I found real empathy for survivors and their peers, often forced into complicity.