‘You’ve got my chin’: That was the moment BRIAN VINER knew this woman was the birth mother who gave him away as a baby. Hearing about her bohemian life of poets, jail and a smitten Soviet colonel, perhaps life had dealt him a lucky break…

A woman I’d never met, or even heard of, wrote me a letter in November 1997 that actually made my knees buckle.

I’d never before received news that had a physical impact like that, like being hit by a car. And that even included the evening in 1976 when two police officers arrived at the front door to tell my mum and me that my father had been carried lifeless off a train earlier that day, after suffering a massive heart attack.

This woman’s name was Monica Bradley. She worked for an agency that helped people find the children they had given up for adoption years before. And, in collaboration with my birth mother, she had found me.

‘This letter will probably cause you some surprise,’ is how it began.

Some surprise? Probably? She must have known how understated those words were but she was trying to gently break it to me that my understanding of my own life, of who I was and where I’d come from, was about to change.

Monica’s letter filled me in on further details of the woman who had given birth to me on October 25, 1961. ‘She subsequently married and had two sons, who have both known of your existence from an early age.’

We all experience life-changing moments, but I suppose some more than others. A few weeks ago, on February 4, I wrote in these pages about the seismic loss of my father, Allen, 50 years earlier to the day.

He and my mum, Miriam, had adopted me when I was three weeks old. They couldn’t have children ‘of their own’ (I have always hated that expression), so they went down the adoption route and, after collecting me in London, whisked me north to live in Southport, a seaside town firmly in Lancashire until the 1974 municipal boundary changes rudely shunted it into Merseyside.

Our contented little family was just them and me. I would have liked a brother or even a sister, but at the age of nine, frankly, not as much as I would have liked battery-powered Subbuteo floodlights.

That was how old I was when I found out I was adopted. My mum broke the news. We were in the car, which was parked outside our local Post Office. My dad had nipped in to buy some stamps and that’s when she told me.

It was a prosaic backdrop to such a moment, but they must have engineered it so that he wasn’t there for the big revelation. He was always uncomfortable with deeply personal stuff like that.

I don’t recall being upset, just intrigued. My mum was able to give me only the tantalising nugget of information that at birth I’d been named Robin, almost an anagram of Brian.

Soon after that bombshell outside the Post Office, however, all life’s certainties returned. I asked no more questions and, even after my dad died when I was 14, I never wanted to know who had fathered me biologically.

In my mid-teens when, both floundering in our grief, my mum and I had some proper screaming bust-ups, it didn’t remotely occur to me to detonate my nuclear option. Far from passing my lips, the terrible line, ‘You’re not even my real mother’ never so much as crossed my mind.

I duly grew into adulthood assuming that I would never know my birth story and, despite becoming a journalist, a profession powered by curiosity, that suited me fine. I felt entirely secure about myself without needing to dig up my roots.

That might have changed in late 1992 when my girlfriend Jane, soon to become my wife, became pregnant. There were medical questions about the family history of this condition or that, and we only had her side of the equation.

She exerted some gentle pressure on me to start investigating, but I was resolute. It would have felt utterly disloyal to my mother, still very much alive, and my late father. And for all I knew, it might have opened a can of worms better left untouched.

By November 1997 we had two children, four-year-old Eleanor and Joseph, aged two. The following August we would add a third, Jacob.

I got Monica’s letter on a Saturday morning. We lived in Crouch End, north London, and I was home alone. Jane had taken the children to the park, a ten-minute walk with a pushchair and a dawdling toddler, but a two-minute sprint with a letter from an adoption agency. Jane was as thunderstruck as I was.

Explaining that my birth mother was called Doris Rau, Monica wrote that she ‘simply wishes you to know something of her circumstances and that there is the possibility of making contact with her should you ever wish to do so’. After recovering from the initial shock, I did wish to do so.

Remarkably, Doris – or Pip, as she preferred to be known – lived only three miles away from Crouch End.

A week or so later we set eyes on each other for the first time in 36 years. We met in a restaurant called Odette’s, where her memorable opening gambit was: ‘You have my chin.’

Over dinner, as we filled each other in on our respective lives, I recall her saying what rich pickings there would have been for an eavesdropper.

She’d been 22 when she inconveniently got pregnant by her then-boyfriend, Robin Welch. She was Jewish and he wasn’t, but that wasn’t her reason for choosing to have me adopted. She was a restless and relentless traveller and a baby would have cramped her style.

Rebelling against her middle-class upbringing, she had lived in the late 1950s at the notorious Beat Hotel in Paris (where the poet Gregory Corso, the ‘bad boy’ of the Beat generation, introduced her to pot).

The word ‘colourful’ hardly sums up her early adult life. In 1960 she was thrown into jail in New York City for her part in a nuclear disarmament rally. Later that year, after driving from London to Russia, she was involved in a near-fatal car crash and spent six weeks in a Russian hospital where a Soviet army colonel fell in love with her and proposed marriage. Usefully for me, I suppose, she turned him down.

Robin proposed to her too when, back in London, she got pregnant early the following year. He was an up-and-coming potter who would become one of the most acclaimed of his generation. He wanted to marry her and keep me, but again she declined.

Eventually, he gave the adoption his blessing on condition that she would never look for me. He disapproved fiercely when later she did. But once she’d found me, his strength of feeling dissolved just as mine had.

He and Pip had split up not long after I was born but they had always stayed friends. Which is how, a few weeks after I’d met her, another highly eavesdroppable dinner took place, this time at a random Cafe Rouge: her, Robin and me. Without explaining its mighty significance, we asked a passing waiter to take our photograph.

Robin had gone on to have three more children – two daughters and a son – so the next stop in this rather overwhelming journey of discovery was meeting the five half-siblings that I’d known nothing about until a month or so earlier. Joyously, as I write this almost 30 years later, I can report a fulfilling, loving relationship with all of them.

But I still vividly remember my faintly apprehensive knock on the front door of a house in a village near Cambridge, early in 1998. It was my half-sister Polly’s home.

We had written to each other but still hadn’t met, and here I was, with Jane and the children, about to join her, her husband and their two children (who were almost exactly the same age as ours) for Sunday lunch. Weird as the situation was, it somehow felt life-affirming when the door was opened by a woman who looked very much like… me.

Neither Pip nor Robin are with us now. When he died in 2019, aged 83, I gave the eulogy at his funeral.

Later, as a sort of personal homage, I went to see the gigantic ceramic candle holders he’d made for Lincoln Cathedral, said by those in the know to have been at ‘the very outer limits’ of what can be achieved on the potter’s wheel.

I always correct people who call him my dad, because my dad was Allen. But seeing those amazing candlesticks, taller than the average man, I nonetheless felt genuine filial pride.

Pip was 85 when she died the summer before last, having long since parlayed her love of travel into a world-renowned collection of central Asian textiles and costumes, which she would sometimes rent out to filmmakers. Gladiator (2000) and Troy (2004) looked as authentic as they did thanks partly to her incredible eye.

To suggest that she embarked on the quest to find me with the tenacity of Russell Crowe in Gladiator or Brad Pitt in Troy might be stretching a point. But it really did take her years.

The law used to make it off-puttingly difficult for people who’d given up children for adoption to find them again – it was much easier the other way round. But the 1989 Children’s Act removed some of the obstacles.

Eventually she found out my name, not a common one, though there are a handful of us. The challenge was to find the right Brian Viner, which is where the Mail on Sunday enters the story. In 1997 I won a What The Papers Say Award for my work as the newspaper’s television critic. At the time those awards were prestigious enough, I can immodestly add, to be reported elsewhere in the Press.

When Pip’s son Alexander saw my name in The Guardian, it didn’t take much sleuthing to buy that weekend’s Mail on Sunday. He assumed there would be a picture of me, which there was. And as soon as Pip saw it, recognising not so much her chin as my striking resemblance to Robin, she knew she’d found her firstborn.

By then she had expert Monica Bradley on her side, so once they’d unearthed my address, Monica became the intermediary.

She knew better than anyone that it can be a fraught business, connecting an adopted child with its birth parents. Indeed, Pip had attended some counselling sessions, chaired by Monica, with other women looking for their long-adopted babies.

Pip would often say, with a mixture of sadness and smugness, but mostly smugness, that of all the powerful stories aired in those meetings, hers was the only one with a happy ending.

The main reason it was a happy ending, as I think she understood, is because of my mum and dad, who gave me such a solid start in life.

My mum, incidentally, died in 2017, at the great age of 92. It wasn’t easy to tell her about that 1997 bombshell letter but, with some trepidation, I did. She responded with typical matter-of-factness. ‘Are you OK with it?’ she asked. I said I was. ‘Then that’s all that matters,’ she said.

We never talked about it again.

Fundamentally, I never resented Pip for giving me away because I felt she did me a favour, and I have another letter to prove it. Dated January 12, 1962, it was from the National Children Adoption Association.

‘Dear Miss Rau, We are pleased to tell you that we have the happiest news of Robin; he has completely settled down – he is in excellent health and spirits and is much loved by his adopting parents who are anxious to legalise his adoption so that they can make provision for his future security…’

The letter went on to rebuke her for not turning up to a previous appointment for legal documents to be signed. It urged her to attend the next one ‘in the interests of Robin’.

I loved and admired Pip, but it was characteristic of her, certainly at that time in her life, not to show up. That’s why I know, without any doubt, that even as an obstreperous, fatherless teenager re-named Brian, Robin’s interests were served.