What A Birthday Surprise!

On her 50th birthday, Rae got a better present than she could ever have imagined.

- Gillian Harvey

Mum!” Sabina, my eldest daughter yelled, “it’s for you!” As I watched my daughter race back into the living room, I wondered who on earth had come to call. It was 2015 and I was celebrating my 50th birthday.

Andy, my little brother, was standing on the doorstep.

The surprise? It was the first time we’d ever met.

My biological parents were unmarried and in their early twenties when I was conceived in 1964, and whilst Andria, my birth mum, had wanted to keep me, she was encouraged to give me up for adoption by her family. Shortly afterwards, my birth father Robert moved to Hull with his parents and Andria never heard from him again.

My childhood was a happy one; raised as an only child to Jeanne and Eric who had been unable to have their own children, I was surrounded by love. They never made a secret of the fact I was adopted, showing me letters they’d received from Andria, and telling me the story of how they’d travelled to London to collect me.

Despite my happy upbringing, I was always curious to learn more about where I’d come from, so when I turned 18 in 1983, I applied for my original birth certificate and began to search.

After four years, I had a breakthrough. On visiting St Catherine’s House in London, I found a marriage certificate bearing my mother’s name. She’d married a man named Peter in 1973 in a village just 14 miles from where I lived!