Britain’s mixed-race GI babies want to know why they were given away

CNN — A wedding ring and a photograph are all Leon Lomax has left of his mother, a woman he has longed to know his whole life. “It wasn’t a legal thing but this is what they did, which is outrageous.” Lucy found one case in which a black GI who said he wanted to marry his pregnant girlfriend was told by his commanding officer “if you do that you will be charged with rape, and the penalty for rape is death.” Such attitudes mean that many of the “brown babies” – now in their early 70s – have spent a lifetime searching for their identities after being separated from their parents. A war-widowed teacher, who already had two children when she fell pregnant, Deborah’s mother told her: “You look familiar.” Three little words, but enough for Deborah to believe that her mother knew her real identity. “But I understood, when I was a little bit older, that she didn’t get all the letters – my gran kept them aside, she didn’t want her going off and marrying this black guy.” By the time Dave was born in August 1945, his father had left the UK, but he sent money to help Joan raise his child, and continued to urge her to join him in America. “My mum could always remember his Army number,” he says, adding that she was “obviously totally smitten.” Missing puzzle piece When he was 12, Dave and his mother received Valentine’s cards from his father.