The Times, April 5 2000
FEATURES

For 17 years, Ariel Bruce has brought adopted children and their mothers together. The novelist Maeve Haran describes her inspiring work.

Ariel Bruce: "It takes at least six months to get a result"
Photograph: MIKE WILKINSON

My novel Baby Come Back is the story of a young man, Joe, who knows he is adopted and decides to search for his birth mother, only to find she's a Helen Mirren-ish sex symbol he has fantasised about since boyhood. The fallout is both funny and profoundly disturbing.

Had Joe been able to draw on Ariel Bruce's services, his search would have been far easier. Bruce describes herself as an "independent social worker" but is also a people-finder extraordinaire.

Her typical clients are adoptees searching for their birth mother, who will already have been searching for years before enlisting her services. "It usually takes at least six to nine months to get a result," she explains, "although the search can in the worst case take years and span continents. At the moment I'm working across five or six countries."

From the moment I walked up the three flights to Bruce's top-floor London flat I found her riveting, almost like the heroine of a novel herself. She is in her forties, Jewish, with short dark hair, streaked with grey and a quietly imposing manner. By her own admission she is dogged, quirky, a can-do person, with just the right degree of disrespect to take on any stonewalling authority. She's also deeply committed to reuniting separated families.

Bruce had what she describes carefully as a "disjointed childhood, not always with my own family", which helps her understand how clients feel to be cut off from their roots, and their pressing need to rediscover them.

Although she declines to talk about it, it's on the record that it was Bruce who found the news reporter Kate Adie's birth mother. In her Face to Face interview with Jeremy lsaacs, Adie told how, reporting in the Gulf War after her adoptive parents had died, she desperately envied the letters the soldiers received from home so decided to look for her birth mother. Anyone who watched that interview saw a transformed Adie when she talked about the reunion. Adie now has a lively, noisy family.

The process of finding a lost relative, especially a birth mother, is a deeply sensitive one and Bruce strongly advises that when the mother is finally found, it should be she or another intermediary who makes the initial approach. "I have to say to some clients who've found their birth mother: 'Don't go and screw it all up by turning up on their doorstep.'

"When I actually find the mother I send a discreet letter with my phone number on it and a hint that I am working for a 'lost relative', not mentioning a child at all. From then on I leave the initiative to her. It may take six weeks or six months and it's often very hard for my clients to restrain themselves. I have to explain that if they want a chance of a reunion and a lasting relationship with the mother, they mustn't intimidate her. I've learnt through experience that the move must be made by her. The mother needs to feel she's getting back some sense of control. Almost always, she eventually rings."

Sometimes it's Bruce who then brings the mother and grown-up child together on the neutral ground of her own flat. "Usually I leave them alone together. There can be dead silence for up to 15 minutes, which makes me pretty nervous. Then the talking starts, often laughter - and four hours later he's been invited home to meet his grandmother."

But what most fascinated me as a novelist was the phenomenon known as "genetic sexual attraction" that can follow a successful reunion.

"It's incredibly powerful to meet someone who looks and feels like you, with whom you feel at home and yet towards whom the usual taboos don't operate," explains Bruce. "In the occasional case you may have to tell a client that it's boringly usual to be sexually attracted and that they mustn't act on it."

This is precisely the situation in Baby Come Back when Joe, 25, discovers that his long-lost mother Stella, an extremely sensual 45, is the star of a famously sexy poster he's had on his wall as a schoolboy, and he has to cope with his confused feelings.

Much has changed in the years that Bruce has worked in the field of adoption. In particular, there is more sympathy now for the birth mother.

The mores of 30 years ago forced unmarried mothers to give up their babies for adoption. Yet today, according to last week's Family Policy Studies Centre report, the fastest-growing group of lone parents is the single never-married. The same young girls who probably gave their babies up 30 years ago. Is the modern situation any better?

Bruce is characteristically upbeat. "If you or I had a young daughter who got pregnant and really wanted to go ahead we wouldn't force her to give the child away. We'd help her and support her all we could. That's an amazing change and it has to be a good thing."

Baby Come Back by Maeve Haran is published tomorrow by Little, Brown (£9.99).