In mid-20th-century Britain and Ireland, hundreds of thousands of unmarried pregnant women were sent to mother and baby homes, institutions often run by religious orders such as the Catholic Church, the Church of England, and the Salvation Army, and tacitly supported by the state through local authority referrals and adoption pipelines. Ostensibly established to shelter “fallen women” and safeguard the welfare of their infants, these homes in practice functioned as instruments of social control, designed to hide illegitimate pregnancies from view and to funnel babies toward adoption by married couples deemed more respectable. Women were typically admitted in the final months of pregnancy, stripped of personal possessions, sometimes assigned false names, and expected to earn their keep through arduous domestic labor—scrubbing floors, laundering nappies, and cleaning wards—often up until the moment of labor itself. Pain relief in childbirth was frequently withheld as a form of moral correction, and mothers were routinely separated from their babies within days or weeks, coerced into signing adoption papers under duress. It is estimated that between 1949 and 1976 alone, around 185,000 babies in England were placed for adoption, often without their mothers’ full consent.

The novel explicitly references this history through the Rosemundy Mother and Baby Home in St Agnes, Cornwall, which operated from 1919 to 1964. As depicted in Dr. Phil Frampton’s influential BBC documentary The Crying Shame, which the author cites as an inspiration, conditions in these homes could be cruel; some survivors recall being forced to perform heavy labor and being ostracized by the local community. The shame and secrecy surrounding these births inflicted lifelong trauma—depression, complicated grief, disrupted attachment in subsequent children, and, for the adopted children themselves, decades-long searches for biological kin. This reality reflected in the novel’s plot and in modern advocacy campaigns by groups like the Movement for an Adoption Apology, which have lobbied for and recently received a formal government apology for these historic practices.