MY MOTHER WANTED TO PROTECT ME FROM THE TRUTH OF MY BIRTH

THE GRAINY black and white photograph shows a line of young women at Birdhurst Lodge, the unmarried mother-and-baby home in Croydon, in 1951. Most are girls, smiling and laughing in the image, and young enough to shrug off the humiliation of being social outcasts for the mere "sin" of falling pregnant outside wedlock.

- By Jane Warren

But in the back row third from the right is a woman of 40, attempting to hide herself from the intrusion of the photographer. "You can see how humiliated she felt," says her daughter, the writer and journalist Maureen Paton.

The mother-and-baby home has long gone, but for Maureen, 73 Daily Express TV and theatre critic in the late 1990s the desire to learn more intensified when she discovered after her mother's death in 2001 that she was actually born there.

And this investigation into her past proved to be so fascinating that Maureen has ended up writing a gripping debut novel that fictionalises her mother Blanche's life but with an entirely new twist.

"I have always known I was illegitimate, as they used to say in the bad old days," says Maureen, speaking from her home in London. "My mum wore her wedding ring all her life and would explain to people she had 'lost' her husband, without elaborating further."

But what Maureen only found out later was her mother had to stay in three unmarried mother-and-baby homes one in Oxford, the one in Croydon (where Maureen was born) and one in Hampstead. "My mother took her 50-year 'shameful' secret to the grave, until my detective work unearthed the hidden truth of my birth. She never revealed these experiences to me, and I only discovered them all after her death at the age of 90."

Dedicated mother-and-baby homes first appeared in London's East End in 1890. Established by the Salvation Army, in reality they were bleak hostels for women considered social outcasts because of the shame associated with having a baby out of wedlock. The women had to sleep in dormitories, carry out domestic work to earn their keep, kneel for group prayers when required and were marched into church like children.