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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Tortoise Investigates. It's half past ten on a December night in 2010. Jess, who was found abandoned as a newborn baby 22 years earlier, is sitting on her sofa, having a conversation she's waited half a lifetime to have. She's on Facebook, messaging the person who found her, the woman who spotted a Sainsbury's plastic bag on a lonely verge and looked inside.
Just to thank her because she'd obviously saved my life and just, yeah, just to say, hi, thanks for finding me.
Except that's not all that Jess wants from this conversation. Six months earlier, an elderly lady called Jean, who lived near that verge, had mentioned something. Rumours, she said, that some people in the village may have known more about the baby than they let on.
Well, there was a couple of nannies in the village, she said, and they work from around here. She said, I'm sure one of them has something to do with it.
The woman Jess is messaging was a nanny who worked nearby at the time. So once Jess has thanked her, she takes the plunge.
She types. A lot of people in the village still think you have something to do with it for some reason.
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Chapter 2: What significant event prompts Jess to take a DNA test?
And that's when the messages turned from being quite pleasant, I suppose, to a little bit more defensive and sour.
Not sure why anyone would think I had anything to do with it. I'm a bit confused. I lived within a large family who saw me every day. It's a bit hurtful to think that people are so cruel. I didn't really know anyone in the village. I don't even know if the family I nannied for is still in the area. I also mixed with other nannies in the area, but God knows where they are now.
Sorry, I'm not much help. But I can assure you, if I knew more, I would tell you.
But Jess isn't convinced.
Yeah, I was kind of a bit taken back because it was just, I was trying to put myself in her shoes and think, well, if someone had said that about me, I would just be like, oh, no, I'm not sure. I'm unsure about why they think that. But I certainly wouldn't have been defensive. I think she was perhaps hoping I would take that as gospel and leave it there. Because she knew nothing else.
There was nothing else to say. Nothing else we need to talk about. There's nothing else to discover. No more digging. Did you stop digging then? No, because I think because I just didn't believe her and I felt like there was more to it. And I thought, well, there has to be someone that knows something.
I'm Lucy Greenwell, and from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer, you're listening to Foundling. Episode 2, Under One Roof.
Under One Roof
Jess tells me she has a strong hunch that Jennifer knows more. But once the Facebook conversation is over, she's at a loss.
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Chapter 3: What does Jess discover about her birth mother during the Facebook conversation?
Jess tries to put it behind her, get on with her life. But she's forgotten about something else that's still in play. Weeks before that Facebook conversation, her sister Laura had posted a message on a family reunion site asking if anyone remembers the nanny who found the Suffolk baby in 1987. That post is still out there, languishing in some quiet corner of the internet.
Three years pass and it's only when Jess is leaving hospital, having just given birth to her first baby in 2013, that a sense of being abandoned comes roaring back.
It was 2013 and it was snowing and I had to take him home in the snow and I couldn't walk. And I remember sitting there waiting for his dad to bring the car around with no one around, just looking at him in his car seat, this tiny, tiny little bundle and thinking... Could I leave him right now?
I can really imagine this, that these anxieties could surface at this moment, in those very vulnerable hours after you've given birth.
I convinced myself I'm as bad as her, even though I've got the baby there, I'm breastfeeding the baby. Did she feel like this? Did she have this disconnect right from word go?
Jess says she's worrying that she's inherited an instinct to abandon, that she's a bad mother, a bad person. And then postnatal depression sets in. And when Jess gets home, midwives drop in on her every day for two straight months. For anyone who's had a baby in the UK, you know that that's a sign that they're seriously concerned about you.
So it dragged up these feelings that I was not expecting. So that's when it started again for me because I banked it and I really put it away. I really thought I'd handled it, but it dragged it up.
We know that babies have always been abandoned. Quite how many, well, that varies across time and place. In 18th century London, around 1,000 babies a year were left outside churches or hospitals, placed on doorsteps or hidden in parks. Since the 1970s, a register has been kept of the number of newborns abandoned each year in the UK. For the 1980s, it shows an average of around 10 babies a year.
But it's far from definitive. The figures don't include babies who are found dead or those who are later reunited with a parent, so the actual number is likely to be higher. These days, the numbers are vanishingly small. Over the last decade, the official figure has never been more than one per year. But foundlings fascinate us. Think of Moses in The Bullrushes, Mowgli, Thumbelina, Oliver Twist.
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Chapter 4: How does Jess's past influence her feelings after giving birth?
How many nannies did he have? We reckon about 50. 50.
She's joking, I think. But there were a lot of nannies over the years. Gussie's number four of the five children. In the 1980s, our two families were good friends and we'd often come here after school or at weekends. Gussie and her siblings were brilliantly badly behaved and the whole place crackled with mischief and fun.
I imagine it might have been quite challenging for any nannies with a delicate disposition.
It's literally her standing in that bedroom, in her dungarees, which are her famous dungarees. Well, that's Margaret. She was the horrid one. She must have been the one before.
We can't find the photo of Jennifer, but I see glimpses of other nannies frozen in various scenes in this 1980s world. School sports day, kids' birthday parties, a world that Jennifer would have stepped straight into upon arrival that summer of 1987.
She must have been quite responsible that one left her on for the whole night.
If Selina and her husband went away, 18-year-old Jennifer would be left in sole charge of the children overnight. And that's what happened on the night of Monday 5th October 1987. So in this large house there was just Jennifer and the family's two youngest children. At this point, Jennifer's been working as a nanny here for four months.
Selina arrives back late the next morning on the Tuesday and instantly she notices that something unusual's going on.
When I got back, the policeman and police cars, well, I thought there'd been a burglary or something immediately.
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Chapter 5: What historical context is provided about abandoned babies in the UK?
But for most cryptic pregnancies, labor is so unexpected and so downright terrifying that these women tend to end up in hospitals. They don't stay hidden. For Jennifer to have managed this, so many things had to go right for her.
If just one person, a friend, Selena, her family, had noticed her growing belly and spoken out, if one of the children had come in and found her, her cover would have been blown. And I know what you're thinking. that it's impossible that Selina wouldn't have noticed. A nanny living under her roof, heading towards full-term pregnancy. I mean, here's a woman who's given birth to five children.
If anyone knows how to spot the signs of pregnancy, she does. I asked Selina again. Surely you noticed something. Did she seem to be getting bigger? Did you notice her getting bigger?
No.
Because I knew nothing about it, I didn't sort of even analyse it. No, you weren't looking for anything?
No.
In the weeks afterwards, is there anything that you noticed that was her mood changing or her size changing? A sense of anything about her?
Nothing at all. Partly because I'd made up my mind it wasn't hers. I think I'd so much decided it couldn't have been possible that I didn't look for anything.
And you know what? I believe her. I was there too, and I didn't notice. While reporting this story, I learned something about my own mother, who's no longer around, a memory I'd never heard before, that my mum and Selina actually had a bit of a disagreement about it, with my mother insisting that it must have been Jennifer's baby, Selina adamant that it can't have been.
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Chapter 6: How has DNA testing changed the landscape for foundlings?
While the investigation was underway, we know officers continued to probe Jennifer for more details. They were clearly unconvinced by her story. And Catherine remembers this. She recalls offering Jennifer advice.
I remember distinctly saying to her, well, if they keep asking you whether it's your baby, I said, all you need to do is let them give you an examination. Then they can see that you haven't had a baby.
And she didn't reply. Jennifer doesn't take up Catherine's suggestion to have a medical examination and she lets it go. I feel sure that there must have been other signs, clues, things that didn't feel quite right. I keep wondering, if it was my best friend, how far would I push it?
No, I never asked her outright. I didn't really feel that I could, because she would then think that I didn't believe her. Did you believe her? At the time, yes, I did. But looking back... Too many things were not quite right. She had these dungarees that she wore almost all the time.
I remember those dungarees. When I picture Jennifer, she's always wearing them.
It was gurgling, smiling.
And when I re-watched the clip of her on the TV news, there they are, pale denim, big and baggy, with white buckles.
But it was perfectly happy.
It was her signature outfit. Years afterwards, I remember talking to Gussie and my siblings about how those dungarees would have been absolutely perfect to conceal a changing body shape. And Catherine thinks she spotted that change one night in Jennifer's bedroom.
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