It is Long Lost Family time again. Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell travel the world to reunite separated families. This week the Long Lost Family team features two stories which explore the feelings of abandonment.
Peter Gunn has struggled to come to terms with the decision his mother made to give him up for adoption. Adopted at just nine-months old, Peter had always known that he was adopted and he had a very happy early childhood. When his parents’ marriage broke down, feelings of rejection began to resurface. Peter began to think about his birth mother and when he was eighteen years old he accessed his adoption file. The file revealed that his mother’s name was Daphne and that she had to choose between her family and her baby. Peter was devastated by this and spiralled into a cycle of drug and alcohol addiction. Miriam, Peter’s adoptive mother, re-mortgaged her house to pay for his rehabilitation.
It was during his treatment that he began to reassess his original feelings about the reason his birth mother had given him up. ‘I had looked at the situation in a selfish way…it must have been the hardest decision anyone could ever be asked to make’. The Long Lost Family team track down Daphne living in Arklow in the Republic of Ireland, where she had grown up. Daphne describes to Nicky how devastated she was when she had to give Peter up all those years ago. ‘If I had any chance at all I would have never given him up’, she says. ‘No matter what words I can say, I can never tell him how sorry I am’.
Next we meet a brother who has been searching for his sister. Seventy-one year old Ron Williams is searching for his beloved sister who disappeared from his life when they were children, over sixty years ago. Ron and his sister, Christine, had both been born out of wedlock between their mother’s two marriages. As a result of these affairs their mother was subjected to persecution and rumour in the local community. To distance herself from this torment she gave her children to her parents to look after. Growing up in a rural village, Ron and his sister were inseparable. ‘It was bliss really…they were good times’, recalls Ron.
When Ron was four their grandmother became ill and Ron was sent back to his mother. Christine did not join him and as the weeks turned into months he realised he may never see her again. Ron’s mother never mentioned Christine and referred to him as an only child in public. Ron eventually had the courage to ask his mother abut Christine and he was told that she had been adopted. From then on he felt a heavy guilt. Why had she been given away while he was kept? ‘It did make me feel terrible really…I was kept and she wasn’t’. The Long Lost Family team find Christine, now living in New Zealand, having emigrated over forty years previously. Will she want to meet her long lost brother? Find out tonight at 9pm on ITV.
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