There has been a lot of talk recently and BBC news this morning about women who were forced to give up their babies for adoption in this era, age 16 plus. Of course it's terrible and should never happen but those were very different times and the only way a woman - especially a teenager - would have survived would be if her parents were prepared to take her and her baby in. Most of them would not so the babies were adopted.
Nobody discusses the plight of those of us who were not adopted but kept by our single mothers. It actually was quite possible to keep your baby in the 1960's and many did.
You could get benefits and free nursery places for your child if you had to work.
However, most of us ended up in care or unwanted after a few years especially if our mothers married and then we were not accepted by the new family.
My mother had a very strong maternal instinct and insisted on keeping me with or without the help of her parents. She was 20 years old and from an upper middle class family.
We ended up like so many of us in a bedsit in London as London was more forgiving than the shires.
I slept on a makeshift bed in the kitchen, my mother slept in the one living room, the toilet, bathroom and kitchen was shared between around 10 other people as was common place in those days.
We had a group of other single parent friends from various backgrounds all of whom lived in similar squalid houses. No heating, no double glazing, rats.
The lucky ones qualified for council housing but for some reason my mother never applied.
It was a hand to mouth existence and once the initial maternal instinct wore off and we all started growing bigger and mother realised what shit she was in and largely unwelcome back home then the rot really started to kick in.
I remember visits back to the grandparents during the summer holidays, we were in the local village shop and some woman came up to me and said, Oh so you are Angela's bastard then" (names changed) with utter comtempt. i was only 5, I didn't understand what she meant. I couldn't understand why my mother's face was all red and we had to rush off.
This was my daily experience, at school, in nursery, back with relatives. This is what we faced every day. My mother became ever more mentally ill and would no longer leave the flat so I gad to do all the shopping and walk to school by myself two miles away at 7 years old.
Eventually my mother met someone and got married and her new husband was not prepared to have me trailing about behind them so I was placed in council care and they went abroad, I didn't see them again for 50 years.
Naturally we have no relationship and my siblings are not interested in me.
My friends (names changed) Michael died of drug abuse as a teenager, Michelle was abused by her stepfather and left home at 16, Richard is in prison.
I did the best I could at school and am now a professional because I was determined to have a nice life but it's left behind permanent mental scars and a general distrust of people and their motives.
Adopted children dreamt of their missing mothers, we dreamt of being adopted by a loving family and living in the countryside and being treated like normal children.
did anyone else experience being brought up by a single mother in the 60's? Id be interested to hear your story.