Foundling Tokens

 

In my last blog entry I spoke of the Foundling Home and the tale of Sabrina and Lucretia, who faced fate in the form of a high minded abuser named Thomas Day who adopted them from The Foundling Hospital. It was a member of my “chosen family,” a sister of the heart, who sent me that book “How to Create the Perfect Wife.”

This London institution, The Foundling Hospital, has a permanent exhibition of the tokens that were asked for with the relinquishment of a child – some small notion or trinket, a piece of cloth, a button, that could be used to trace a child one day back to its mother. The kinds of objects speak to the social and economic situation of the mother, a swatch of cheap cotton print, a piece of jewelry. A button from an officer’s coat hints to a father.

Relinquishment would dissolve the name of the child and replace it with a number and a new name. The token would be the fragile, invisible thread for all hopes of one day reuniting mother and child. Heart motifs dominate. Some of the pewter tokens insisted by engraving on a name and a date so that the child would not lose that birthright forever. 

I’m not sure I could face head on these traces (themselves orphaned now, with the centuries), these relics, these fossils of longing and loss. But it was of these tiny objects, mute and eloquent, I was thinking in my story "At the Edge of the Wood," which tells of a friendless foundling who goes to meet a kind of inheritance and a fate she couldn't have imagined in absolute solitude, or maybe again not as alone as she thought.

I cannot seem to find my way to give a voice to the tokens, to find  how to "tell" them, so I leave them to you without further ado, and perhaps they will speak to you of their stories in a way that you can hear and understand.

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