My mum and dad returned to Scotland after spending their first years of married life in New Zealand, much to the distress of my grandparents who had emigrated to join them here. By this time they desperately wanted children. They tried and tried but had no luck. This was in the days berore IVF. They had tests done and still no luck. Eventually, it was my dad who suggested they might try adoption. My dad came up with many of the best ideas: a rucksack rather than a wedding ring, and adopted children rather than a childless marriage. It took ages - my mum said five yers - before they found an adoption agency that would accept them despite their politics. In those days, the late 1950s, adoption agencies were mostly run by religious organizations. There was the Glasgow Social Services, who wanted to know how often my parents went to church and how close they lived to a church. My parents wouldn't lie about this. 'There was that woman who said, "Just put anything down on the form, gloss over it." She was off her head!' my dad says, indignant. "'Just say you attend a weekly service, that'll be fine.'"
'Why would we lie about something like that?' my mum says. 'Supposing we say, right, we go to church three times a week and then they check up on us, and find we're lying? What then? Do they take the kid from us? When we first got Maxwell and you, we had to have you for two years before it was official. At any point, at any point, during that time, they could have come and taken you away from us. And in those days the birth mother was allowed to change her mind within a six-month period.'
'Maybe she could see you were good people and was just trying to help you?' I say.
'Oh, come on,' my mum says. 'What kind of help is that?'
'Maybe she wasn't used to people being so honest. You could have ended up not getting any child.'
'We couldn't lie, could we, John?' my mum says. My dad shakes his head angrily, the memory of it all annoys him. It all seems so wrong. 'Lie about how often you go to church, Christ, it's not real, so it's not!'
