The Extraordinary True Story of Susan Francis [re-release]

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We were sitting there, and I remember the way Truth came over to give us coffee, and she said something like, oh, it's so nice for two sisters to have time to have coffee together. So it was the first time anyone had acknowledged physical appearance between me and somebody else, and also the biological link that we shared, so it was amazing. She was a very soft person, and she felt like my sister. To tell you, the.

Truth never has the cliche truth is stranger than fiction applied more than to the life of the woman that you're about to meet. You really couldn't make Susan Francis's life up. It is that extraordinary. It begins with an adoption story and miss of her biological parents. It includes a secret sister, a heartbreaking confrontation, a tragedy, unexpected love, and a series of events that were so dramatic that she had to write them down in a memoir just

Here's Susan Francis.

Susan, when did you find out that you were adopted?

I always knew I was adopted. I can't remember when Mum and Dad first told me, but I always knew, and I always remember them saying to me, you were adopted, but you're very special. We especially went to get you. We wanted you so badly. We went to the doctor and we got you. So I always knew, but I didn't to begin with, consider it a negative thing.

I literally did go to the doctor and get you.

Didn't they literally did.

They were very different adoption now than it was in the late fifties.

Sixty one, nineteen seventy one. It's very different now. They literally so. Mum and dad worked for an accounting firm, so Dad was working of a night time. They're working during the day, working very very hard, and the people that they worked for knew the doctor and knew that

Many years later, you found you tracked down your biological mother. Was she happy to see you, happy.

To hear from you?

Oh?

No, she was not. In nineteen ninety two, I think it was they changed the legislation and so people who'd been adopted could get their real adoption certificate. And I was really angry about the fact that I could not find out who I was. I couldn't understand why mothers were given the preference over the children, why mother's identities were hidden, and therefore children's identities had to be hidden. And as I grew older and my dad got sick with cancer, I had my own son, and that all

And I had did that fail?

I suppose. I kidded myself thinking that I know I was right with this. You know, I know that she might not want to. I kidded myself thinking that it would be all right. And I kidded myself thinking that what I was really after was just information, But of course underneath there was also some kind of wish for some kind of relationship, some kind of acknowledgment, because I remember when I was on the phone to her, when I rang.

What was that phone like? How did you gear yourself up to make that phone call? Where were you?

So I was living so my dad. I think my dad had either just passed or he was very close to passing away, and I'd move back to Newcastle to help my mum look after him because he wanted to die at home. And I had John O, who was four years old, and during the week we were living in this little flat in Lambton in Newcastle, and I would go out and look after Dad at Mum's house and then Mum would look after him on the weekend.

And what was the response on the other It.

Was really really awful. I can't tell you how awful it was. She she was screaming at me, saying, I don't want to know who you are. I put that time behind me. That was the worst time of my life. I don't want to know who you are. I don't want to know anything about you. And she kept calling me miss Hull. I don't want to know who you are, Miss Hull. I don't want to know about your child.

Who you are, yeah, who I am, where you came from?

Yeah? And she just couldn't get past It felt to me like I feel sometimes that maybe I shouldn't put it down too much because she has her own story. But I felt it was very much about her and that this was about something she wanted to forget, and I was that thing that she wanted to that event in her life.

How did you react?

So I immediately fell into the chair and started crying. And I wrote about this in the book. Mum just picked up the phone, grabbed and she just kept saying over and over and over again, Susan's a good girl. She's a good girl. She just wants to know where she comes from.

And that broke my heart, that idea of I mean, every child in moments fantasizes that they might be adopted and there's this perfect mother out there. You really were adopted, and of course I imagine that you had fantasies and thoughts about what she might be like and what that reunion might be like, and so many of the adoption stories we hear are very positive ones. How do you recover from that?

So I got really angry.

So after the grief, yeah, after.

And I suppose it was a few months, like it's well over twenty years now, it's almost thirty years.

So you're in your late twenties.

Yeah, And I just had JOHNO.

So he was and you would have been proud, like you would have proud and Mom, tonight, that is a beautiful boy. And I'm successful and I'm getting my masters.

Be proud of me, and you know, my dad's dying, so it's really important to me. I've had my child and on the other hand, my dad is dying, so it's this pivotal moment in my life. And John I didn't really look like me, and it was very very important to me to see somebody else who looked like me, because you kind of feel like you've just been made up and put in this spot and there's nothing behind you. You've just been plumped down and there's nothing tethering you

So you turned up on her doorstep, I truly laugh. It's terrible, but with his like thinking now you think, well, that wasn't a great idea. No it wasn't, but it was an act of desperation.

But it was twenty years later, so I wrote her a letter after that first phone call in nineteen ninety two, I'm going to say and in my letter, I was furious and I said, I have rights, you need to tell me these things. And that's when she sent me the letter back saying, oh, your father's an IRA fundraiser. He and I traveled all around australia're raising money. We stopped at Newcastle, you know, to have you and then we kept going around and.

The IRA, for people who don't know, is it like a terrorist organization, a domestic terrorist organization in Ireland. Yes, So that was that. That's a weird story.

That is such a weird story. And I didn't even know that existed. I knew it existed in America because a lot of Irish people had gone to America, but I didn't realize that happened in the sixties in Australia. So that whole letter to me felt like a total fabrication, that she was just making this story up just to kind of fod me off. And so after that letter, and I could never find him. She thought he was this name or that name, and I looked and could

I'm so sorry.

If no, it's all right. So she was dying, and my mum had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and I met Waine and Wayne said, let's go to Spain. I love you. I can give you everything you want. And I realized, because Liza died and because Mum was so sick, that if I didn't try one last time, I would never know. And he was an incredibly strong man, and he said, I've got you back. We'll go up there, we'll sort it out a little bit. All fine.

I don't had you guys been together at this time.

Not very long. He was also a Gemini and probably more impulsive than me. If had anything online he was looking just for someone to have dinner with, and I suppose I was looking for a bit of diversion. Work was really hard, the children's lives were very hard, and so I went online and he went online at the

So I was lucky.

I was just in the right place at the right time, and lucky he was, thank you. So yeah, we met online and we met physically very soon afterwards.

How old were you both when you met?

So, I'm not real good with maths, but I think I was around about fifty two fifty three and he was fifty seven or fifty eight.

So you both lived life, you had you had one child, or you'd just one chat so you'd had a previous relationship, yes, and he what did you know about his background?

Not a lot. I really jumped in with both feet. He told me a little bit about his background, about him growing up in New Guinea and how abusive his father had been to him. But really maybe it was one conversation. Maybe two, but he obviously didn't want to talk about it, and I didn't want to push him. And the things that he told me about his father,

Wow. So Wayne and his siblings grew up without access to their mum.

Yeah.

So a lot of shared sort of trauma among you both. And he then backed you to go and visit your mother in person before you you both decided to move to Granada to start this new life.

And also my father and face some other people that I probably needed to face. I was always I think, growing up adopted, you are a people pleaser. I'm still a people pleaser, although I'm trying really hard.

To Why do you think that is?

Oh, it's well documented that children who are adopted are terrified of being sent back. So they're given to somebody. They have to behave in the very best way they can and do everything right so that they're kept and break. There's study study studies about this, Like it's a really well known well within people who study that kind of stuff. So all your life you are trying really hard to be loved, That's what it's all about.

What was it like setting eyes on your mother for that first time? How did you get the courage to knock on her door?

I felt I got the courage, and I remember as I was running across the road, like I was so terrified because I was really scared of her. But I also knew that if I didn't do it, I would never do it and I would never know, you know, so I really really had to do it, even though I was so scared, and it was amazing seeing somebody that looked like me for a start, she really did. There were resemblances, you know, the size of our shoulders out, coloring her eyes so that that was extraordinary to see

She didn't know you were coming.

No, she didn't, and that was bad. I know that was bad.

You must have still had fantasies of her throwing her arms around you, and.

She yeah, I did. And I thought, I thought, if I face her, if she doesn't know I'm coming, and I face her, she'll have to tell me stuff. You know, She'll have to give me the information that I want, because I still knew nothing. You know, twenty years later, and I still knew nothing because the letter had seemed so so much of a fantasy, and because I could never find my father of the names that she'd given me.

Did she invite you inside?

Oh god no. She slammed the door in my face, and after giving me the name of a man who she claimed was my father, I remember her husband stood there. We were in the rain on outside. There was screaming, and.

It was like.

On one side of the fence was she and on the other side of the fence was me. And I realized that I was never going to get more than what she was giving me that afternoon, which was the name supposedly of my father.

And it was a different name to the one that she'd given you before.

Yeah, it was a different name to the one she'd given me in the letter. But by this time we had Google. So when she'd first given me all those names, that was where I would go to the post office and look because we had no way of checking those names. I had no name, no way of checking those names. So you go through all the postbooks at the post office. But now I had Google, so raceback, opened the laptop.

Yes, because what's extraordinary and your right so beautifully about this in the book is that you discover that your mother had actually had two daughters within eighteen months adopted them both out. They were both named Susan, and this was the father of the other Susan who she'd had and adopted out.

That's right.

So you went on to meet the other Susan who was your sister? What was that like?

So she she actually looked more like me than my mother. So even sitting there. I went to Melbourne and we had coffee and we were sitting there and I remember the waitress came over to get us coffee and she said something like, oh, it's so nice for two sisters to have time to have coffee together. So it was the first time anyone had acknowledged physical appearance between me and somebody else, and also the biological link that we shared. So it was amazing. She was a very soft person

Had she had a similar experience with your mother of being rejected or she hadn't even tried.

No, she hadn't tried. But she had much more documentation than what I had. There was a whole lot of documentation from the hospital at the time where she'd been relinquished, where our mother's parents, our grandparents had wanted to adopt her. Even my mother's sister had wanted to adopt the other Susan, but our mother didn't want that. She wanted Susan gone. Gone, yes, gone. And so from those notes, the other Susan knew that in the woman that I call my birth mother in

Yeah, so she protected herself by not she did.

Yeah, and she respect that and I respect that. At the end of the conversation, I said to it, look, I know who your father is because I thought he was my father, and she declined, knowing she didn't want that information, and I.

Ended, I know, imagine having that information right there at your fingertips and saying no, I don't, I don't want that.

I know. It was really like I understand, and I don't understand. It's not me, but it's definitely it was definitely her, and so we met and we connected and I saw somebody who you know, we could have almost been twins.

How did that relationship develop?

No, so in a month when I went so, I thought I'd give her some time. I rang back, but no, that she didn't want any more contact with me.

That must have been heart break on heart break on heart.

Right now, look, I respect her because at least she met me and at least we talked, and at least we made that connection, and then she made a decision. Not like my mother who just said no from the outset and would not move in her position at all. Susan at least met me and we talked, and that she explained why she So there's two kinds of people who are adopted. There are the people like me who are desperate to know, and then there are the other kind of people who want to stay where they are.

Stay here because it's a bit complicating factor, isn't it. It's like there's you, and then there's JOHNO. And then there's Wayne, and then there's your Like, it's a lot to take on. I've seen it in friends of mine who've discovered siblings. It can be a wonderful thing, but it's it's highly disrupting whatever way you look at it.

And it's highly complex.

Yeah, it's so emotional.

Yeah, and you know, I sounds awful, but I feel like I got from her what it was I was looking for. I found her, I met her, I saw the resemblance. I found out what her story was, and so that satisfied me.

You did eventually find your father and your biological father, and Wayne came with you to meet him. He was in Perth, wasn't he?

He was? He was in Perth. And I would never have met him other than the fact that my other so complicated, my other stepsister or half sister, who'd been a baby when he'd left his wife and the children that he'd already had to run around Australia with my biological mother. So he left children behind when he ran off, and he left some kind of criminal past behind. Anyway, I contacted her because I eventually found out his former name looking for people with his former name. There she was,

So that was true. That was true.

Yeah, that was true. And he was still under an alias. So I would never ever have found him unless Mary had told me what his alias was.

And he turned very complicated. Well, he turned out to be a total creep.

Oh, he was awful. So he said, we'll meet in this pub at lunchtime. It'll be quiet, we'll be able to talk. And so Wayne and I walked into this pub and like literally there were people spilling out onto the road. There was an Irish band playing, there were

He was a.

Liar, kind of sitting on the fence. Half of him was saying, yes, I was with her in Newcastle. Yes, she told me that she was pregnant. But no, she told me that she got it seen to were his words, and those words are burned into my brain and I'm like, well, here I am. She obviously didn't get it seen too. Because you and her were together in a car, traveling around Australia together, running from the police, obviously living in very tight circumstances. How could you not know that she'd

So? And he weirdly like almost tried to crack onto you.

Yeah he did.

I know.

It's disgusting. And Mary had said to me from Melbourne that he was that's his daughter, Yeah, that's his your my heart, yeah, sister, yeah, so that is his daughter.

Had she warned you that he was not free?

She had, she had, and in fact, so had my biological mother. In that first letter she had said that he was not a very nice man, and you still hope. Yeah, you still hope, and you still think, well, maybe those people's judgments aren't one hundred percent. But I also I really like, I was really curious about the IRA thing, and you know, is this whole story about them traveling around Australia on the run, you know, like it's such a fancy, fanciful story, and it was true. And I

This, I guess behind you that's still still swirling around and very much present. You and Wayne decided to move to Spain to Granada. Why did How long had you been together? And that's that's a big move to make.

It's a massive move. What I didn't realize first up was that when it had cancer previously and had recovered, and also I think it had heart issues, but he didn't really talk about it. So for him, it was very much about living in the moment. He felt that he'd finally found a woman that he could love and who would love him. He talked about me being the love of his life, and of course that's what That's

In Part two of my No Filter conversation with Susan, we speak about the story of the unexpected love affair that she began a few years ago later in her life, after her first marriage ended, she was already a single mum, and we also talk about the twist that made her doubt everything about her identity all over again. It's an amazing story. Keep an eye out in your feed. We'll be dropping that episode later this week. Susan's book is called The Love That Remains and you can find it