I was separated from three of my children, the first at the end of the 1960s when I was seventeen. A familiar story in those years. Unmarried mothers were often hidden away, and babies adopted shortly after birth. An agreement was signed that we would never contact our children again. Giving our babies away to ‘proper mothers’ was considered a sign of how much we loved them. Later we were branded as the kind of women who could give away their own child.