The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

A Memoir

Justine Cowan

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063251717
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Far from growing up in the wealthy, fox-hunting circles she had always suggested, her mother had in fact been raised in a foundling hospital for the children of unwed women." — Editor's Choice, The New York Times Book Review

"Extraordinary … fascinating, moving." — The Telegraph

"This emotional and transatlantic journey is a page-turner." — Editor's Pick, Amazon Book Review

"Book groups will find as much to discuss here as they have with The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and Educated by Tara Westover." — BookList

Recommended by The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, Amazon Book Review, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus and more, Justine Cowan's remarkable true story of how she uncovered her mother's upbringing as a foundling at London's Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children has received acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.K., it has been featured in The Mail on Sunday, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror and The Spectator. The Telegraph calls it "extraordinary and Glamour magazine chose it as the best new book based on real life.

The story begins when Justine found her often volatile mother in an unlit room writing a name over and over again, one that she had never heard before and would not hear again for many years – Dorothy Soames. Thirty years later, overcome with grief following her mother's death, Justine found herself drawn back to the past, uncovering a mystery that stretched back to the early years of World War II and beyond, into the dark corridors of the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children. Established in the eighteenth century to raise "bastard" children to clean chamber pots for England's ruling class, the institution was tied to some of history's most influential figures and events. From its role in the development of solitary confinement and human medical experimentation to the creation of the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts, its impact on Western culture continues to reverberate. It is the reason we read Dickens' Oliver Twist and enjoy Handel's Messiah each Christmas.

It was also the environment that shaped a young girl known as Dorothy Soames, who bravely withstood years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of a sadistic headmistress—a resilient child whose only hope would be a daring escape as German bombers rained death from the skies.

Heartbreaking, surprising, and unforgettable, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames is the true story of one woman's quest to understand the secrets that had poisoned her mother's mind, and her startling discovery that her family's fate had been sealed centuries before.

1

Dorothy Soames

I always knew my mother had a secret. She guarded it fiercely, keeping it under lock and key. That was how I envisioned it—a hidden chamber tucked away in the recesses of my mother’s twisted mind. But her secret was too big to be contained, and it would ooze out like a thick slurry, poisoning her thoughts and covering our family in darkness.

When I was nineteen, my mother accidentally gave me a clue to her past, yet it would take me years to gather the courage to learn more. Eventually I followed a trail of bread crumbs that led me across an ocean into an institution’s macabre and baroque history. Only then did I discover the agony of generations of women scorned by society, and of thousands of innocent children imprisoned although they had committed no crime. And I would dredge up family secrets that forced me to reassess everything I had ever known.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that when the phone rang that morning. I only knew it was an odd time for my father to call.

“I need your help. It’s your mother.”

His voice was strained and loud.

I had trouble concentrating as he described the events that had unfolded earlier that morning—my mother tightly clutching the steering wheel as she careened through a labyrinth of twisting hillside roads, my father racing close behind in his matching black Jaguar, desperate to stop her. Luckily, he’d caught up with her before she could run herself off the road.

“She said she had to go to the hospital.”

“The hospital? Why? Was she hurt?”

“No.” My father offered no further information, but he wasn’t really calling to explain. And I wouldn’t find out where my mother had been trying to go that day until years after her death.

“I have to be in court today.”

I don’t care, I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat. One thing I’d picked up in my nineteen years was the intuition to dread what I knew was coming next.

“It’s not safe to leave her alone.”

Images flashed before me. Jagged shards of glass on an Oriental rug, a papier-mâché piñata swinging from a tree, broken dolls strewn across sleek hardwood floors. I pulled my textbooks out of my backpack and returned them to the desk as my arms began to tingle, my fingers going numb. I usually had more time to prepare myself.

I tried not to think about what I would find as I drove across the Bay Bridge, watching the city’s skyline come into view before heading south, toward Hillsborough.

We’d left San Francisco when I was six, my father eager to escape the damp city fog that triggered his claustrophobia, my mother more than happy to relocate to one of California’s most prestigious zip codes. On the face of things, the wealthy enclave where we landed was a magical place for a child, and the neighborhood kids had the run of its wide, quiet streets. We’d duck into gaps in the hedges that concealed manicured gardens, using the holes in the thick vegetation as secret tunnels to evade capture during our games of hide-and-seek. On our corner stood an empty manor house we’d crawl into through an unlocked window, running through its grand rooms with our arms spread wide as if we were flying, or taking turns riding from floor to floor in the dumbwaiter. One at a time we would climb into the small wooden box to be hoisted and lowered by the rest of the group, the ropes creaking as they threaded their way through the rusting pulleys.

But Hillsborough lost its brilliance as I got older, and soon I could see only its blemishes, reflected in my mother’s eyes—her blind idolatry of wealth and status, how she name-dropped the famous people who lived around the corner in the English accent she hadn’t lost despite her decades in the States, her triumphant grin when we scored the best table at an exclusive restaurant.

My eventual escape to Berkeley had given me the perfect antidote to an upbringing I’d grown to despise, the clamor of urban life providing a comfort our home never could. I basked in the grittiness of noisy streets, the beatnik cafés and bookstores, the street vendors and shirtless hippies whooping through games of hacky sack on Sproul Plaza. Even though I was only forty minutes away, my life felt like my own.

By the time I pulled into the driveway, my father was gone. I parked a few feet behind my mother’s shiny black Jaguar, in its usual spot. Nothing seemed out of place. The lawn was freshly mown, the roses untrammeled. I climbed a set of brick stairs to the front door, surveying the row of arched windows that lined my childhood home for any hint of what awaited me.

The front door was unlocked. I took a deep breath as I pushed it open and peeked into the living room, where the gold-upholstered furniture perfectly complemented the giant handwoven rug, and the various objets d’art gathered by my mother on her frequent trips to Butterfield & Butterfield were strategically placed on antique tables and in glass display cases. It was the sort of room designed to impress or intimidate. But I was only looking for signs of disarray—a couch cushion off-kilter, a toppled figurine.

None of the ornate furnishings appeared to have been disturbed, so I inched down the hallway, gently dragging my fingertips along the bright white walls. Each week a young woman who spoke little English spent hours mopping the floors, scrubbing the bathrooms and the kitchen, dusting every room and nook and cranny, though rarely to my mother’s satisfaction. After the house cleaner had finished her tasks, I often found my mother wiping the walls with a vinegar-soaked rag. Scratches and red patches on her knuckles were telltale signs that she’d been on her hands and knees, rescrubbing the bathroom floor.

My shoes made no sound as I approached my mother’s room and knocked lightly, hoping she was asleep.

“Justine, is that you?” she called out.

I tiptoed inside, feeling a familiar wave of guilt over the fact that I didn’t actually want to see or speak with her. The room was dim, but I could make out my mother’s silhouette as she sat up in bed. Her nightgown reflected the light streaming through the gaps in the heavy white curtains.

She was holding a notepad. I immediately recognized her old-fashioned calligraphic script, with its precise bends and curves. I couldn’t make out the words in the shadowy light, but I saw deep indentations in the thinly lined paper, along with dark smudges and small tears where it looked like a pencil might have broken.

She turned the notepad toward me, and a splash of morning light illuminated the page. Each line contained a name, written over and over, with the same unwavering precision. It was a name I had never heard before, and would not hear again for many years.

Dorothy Soames Dorothy Soames Dorothy Soames

2

Ghosts

I didn’t love my mother, but I cried when she died.

Twenty-five years had passed since I left California and moved into an adult life that kept my mother at arm’s length, and I’d made it to her bedside with hours to spare. Her battle with Alzheimer’s had been lengthy, but at the end her decline was swift. In a matter of months the disease had transformed my mother into a soon-to-be corpse that bore little resemblance to the woman who had raised me. Gone was the imposing figure who radiated nervous energy and was rarely at rest. Any idle moment would be spent flitting around the house, tidying up invisible clutter. Even while sitting still, shoulders square, her spine barely touching the back of her chair, she would fiddle with her fingers or pick nervously at the skin on her arms until she bled. Now, no longer able to speak or move as she slipped in and out of consciousness, her arms sank into the thin hospital blanket like leaden stumps, her contorted fingers curved under her bent wrists.

I sat solemnly beside her, watching her die. My father and sister were in the room, too, but we rarely spoke. The stillness was broken only by the quiet wheezing that emerged from the back of my mother’s throat as she struggled for air. Once she’d heaved her last, gasping breath, I rushed from the room and huddled on a small bench in the hallway, sobbing wildly, struggling to breathe, my head between my knees. The wails erupted from deep inside, one after the other, as if they had a life of their own.

During the days that followed, I would be bewildered by the strength of my feelings for a woman who had caused me so much pain. Eventually I transitioned into a heavy fatigue, palpably weighed down by the emotions that had overtaken my body. I found it difficult to perform even the most mundane tasks, and sought escape in sleep whenever I could find it. When I did leave the house, I was prone to weeping at inopportune moments. Strangers would approach to ask if I needed help. The woman who took my dry cleaning came from behind the counter just to hug me.

“My mother died,” I told her as she wrapped her arms around me.

But she was comforting a fraud, a cheat. Would she have held me with such compassion had she known how I truly felt about my mother?

We buried her in the town of Rogersville, where my father was born, in a small cemetery near the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She was laid to rest beside long-deceased family members of his, people she had never met, in a town where she had never lived. My father had picked out their plots long ago, and my mother didn’t object, having no family of her own.

A year later he joined her, in a grave not far from where his own parents had been buried.

I never spoke to my mother about Dorothy Soames, or the day she’d taken off through the winding streets in her shiny black car. Not even as I watched Alzheimer’s whittle away at her brain, stealing a few words here, a memory there.

I didn’t want to know her secrets. Perhaps I suspected that her story would be too painful for me to carry. More likely, I feared that knowing the truth would give her a power over me that I couldn’t bear.

She had tried to tell me, but only years after I had left home. Once I’d graduated from Berkeley, I moved as far away as possible. I traveled to Asia on a whim, living for a year on the wages I earned teaching English to schoolchildren, then on to Washington, DC, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, always ensuring that there were thousands of miles between us.

I was living in Nashville when I got the letter. It was brief, with few details. She wanted me to call her. It should have been an easy thing to do—pick up the phone, ask her what she meant by the cryptic phrase she’d dropped near the end of the letter.

She wanted to tell me about her life as a foundling.

It was an old-fashioned word, not one I’d ever heard uttered in our household. But it soon slipped my mind as I tucked my mother’s letter under a stack of unopened mail. I had long since stopped caring about her secrets or her motivations, a mode of self-preservation I’d refined into a precise form of science.

She called me later that week, asking if I had received the letter. “We can go to London if you like, together,” she said. “I can show you where I was raised, and where it all happened.”

Instead of piquing my curiosity, her call aroused my suspicions. It had always been understood that my mother’s past was off-limits. To bring up the subject was to risk a swift rebuke—or, worse, a retreat, my mother disappearing into her bedroom and emerging hours later, eyes red and swollen. Now she was proposing a visit to her homeland? Lunch would have been a stretch. A girls’ trip to London seemed as distant a possibility as a quick trip to the moon.

“I want to tell you everything,” she added, her voice filled with an unfamiliar buoyancy. Her willingness to talk seemed sudden, to say the least, and I was dogged by the fear that whatever she had to say would somehow be used against me.

“It’s too late,” I told her.

She didn’t need me to expand to understand what I meant, and her disappointment was unmistakable. But I was unmoved, resolute in the stance that my mother’s past meant nothing to me.

And that was true. Until twenty years later, when I went to London with the man who’d recently become my husband.

The trip was a belated honeymoon of sorts, a monthlong tour of Europe. Our actual honeymoon to Costa Rica had been cut short—a car accident on a curvy mountain road, followed by a tropical illness that sent Patrick to the hospital. It was just as well. In the months surrounding our wedding, we’d buried Patrick’s mother, his sister-in-law, and both of my parents.

Our trip to Europe was supposed to be our fresh start, the beginning of a promising life unburdened by the past or our mutual grief. Our ambitious itinerary reflected our hopes, with stops planned in London, then Paris, Bruges, Amsterdam, Florence, and Rome.

A visit to London would be no different than traveling to any other city, I tried to convince myself. We would visit the sights, sample the local food, and come home with full bellies and a spring in our step, ready to begin our new life together.

My husband didn’t understand why I’d avoided England so stubbornly. He’d heard...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1: Dorothy Soames
• 2: Ghosts
• 3: Secrets
• 4: Scrutiny
• 5: Bastards
• 6: Running
• 7: Admission Day
• 8: Hope
• 9: Fear
• 10: Longing
• 11: Healing
• 12: War and Isolation
• 13: Sustenance
• 14: Escape
• 15: Mothers
• 16: Belonging
• 17: Reunions and Reckonings
• 18: Love
• Afterword: What Came After . . .
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher