One morning, I noticed something that I hadn’t absorbed before. On the wall of my little side room was a poster of a smiling mother propped in bed with her nightdress unbuttoned and her newborn baby held to her chest. Breast is Best, it said. I pointed to the poster. I couldn’t speak. A nurse moved towards it and I scrunched my eyes shut. When I opened them, the poster was gone.

Now
The Choice

One year and eleven months later

Bath, Tuesday, 9 April 2019

I don’t drive far from Eliza’s before I pull over on one of the most peaceful streets in the city to try to calm down. It is a circle of Georgian houses surrounding a grass island with trees in the middle. This arrangement is supposed to represent the sun. Just a street away is a crescent of houses that mimics the shape of the moon. The stonework on these houses is decorated with serpents and acorns and sculptured roses, and I can hear birds chirping as I sit in my car.

My hands are shaking as I look through Alice’s identity documents. The first thing I come to is her birth certificate. Now I understand why her NHS records are so scanty. According to this, she was born in Montenegro. The certificate is in what I think must be Montenegrin, with an approved translation of the document into English, paperclipped to the original. The birth was registered when Alice was five days old, on 23 May. That was nine days after my own baby was born. Eliza Wilmot is named as the mother, and Zachary Hunter as the father.

The next thing in the pile is a photocopy of an Application to Register an Overseas Birth of a British Citizen. Eliza and Zac did this when Alice was a year old. The section about the Child’s Parents’ Marital Status shows that Eliza and Zac got married the week before they signed the form. There are copies of their own birth certificates, and one of their marriage certificate too.

There are three receipts. The first is for tracking the application to the Overseas Registration Unit in Milton Keynes. The second is for paying the registration fee. The third is for the purchase of four copies of the birth registration certificate, one of which is in the document wallet. To most people this would seem like overkill, but Zac knew from Jane what a mess citizenship could cause. It isn’t surprising that he and Eliza should take a great deal of trouble to document something so important for Alice, then keep it all in a fireproof box.