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Articles> Mary Husted
Mary Husted will be exhibiting at the Murray Edwards College in Cambridge from end August to late September. As part of the exhibition, called Hush, Don’t Tell, there will be a collaborative piece by Mary and Luke. Her work can be viewed on Axisweb. Visit Murray Edwards College to learn more about the New Hall Art Collection.
It could have come straight out of a fairytale. A young woman loses her baby when he is newborn and four decades later one of her paintings helps him to track her down.
Meet 6’ 4” Luke Husted, father of two and CEO of his own event production company, and it’s easy to forget that he was once someone’s ‘little boy’.
Meet Mary Husted, his birth mother, and the thin line between now and 1963 when Luke was put up for adoption, becomes almost transparent; more than forty-five years may have passed but Mary still has the euphoric glow of a new mother who can’t help but want to pinch herself.
Today they meet at Murray Edwards College, a women's college of the University of Cambridge where several of Mary’s paintings are on permanent display in the college’s New Hall Collection. One work, Dreams, Oracles, Icons, hangs in a bright, airy corridor and is a mixed media collage; part abstract, part photo transfer, part figurative painting.
It is this painting which, incredibly, helped Mary and Luke to be reunited. He saw the image and knew that the artist was his mother.
Mary Vivienne Husted
Their story starts with Mary falling pregnant at 17 by a ‘beautiful, romantic, Persian student with whom I had fallen head over heels in love’. This was in the early sixties when, for middle class England, a daughter’s teenage pregnancy remained deeply shameful. ‘By then girls were no longer chaperoned but they weren’t told anything either that would protect them,’ Mary says. ‘It was assumed ignorance would protect them.’
Mary was sent away from her home in the South Downs and her family dutifully created, and perpetuated, the myth that she had gone travelling to the Continent.
‘My parents even got me to send Christmas cards to all my friends, from Germany, and sent them to Germany to be mailed from there,’ she recalls.
In reality, Mary had moved to Reading, to a family friend ‘who was absolutely wonderful’. This woman cared for her during the pregnancy and remained by Mary’s side throughout the birth.
‘Afterwards I had Luke for ten days in a private nursing home,’ Mary remembers. ‘I did around a half a dozen drawings of him. I had no camera, so I did these tiny pencil sketches. They were small because I only had a tiny sketch book, but to me there is something intimate about being small, so these were intimate, tiny drawings, for me. They were all I was going to have.’
She had been strongly persuaded to give the baby up for adoption – for both their sakes. ‘Because I’d had a child that was illegitimate, I was told that the best thing I could do for that child was to make sure he could be brought up in a proper family and be legitimate. I think, considering the times, it was probably the right thing, although it was very hard.’
Wryly she adds, ‘And that way I paid my debt to society.’
First, to add a touch of authenticity to the myth, her family sent her to Germany as part of her recuperation. ‘I was told to go away and pretend it never happened. Even the professionals said that to me.’ She then returned to England where she decided not to continue her studies but took up work with Lufthansa in London instead.
‘The truth is, having a baby changed everything, it changed my mental landscape hugely. I think it does for everyone who has a baby. It was a really traumatic experience, and I hadn’t wanted to part with him. I always found it difficult. I buried it. I did bury it. No, I tried to bury it, but every birthday, obviously, I’d remember. Every pram I’d go past, I had a little look. Then you’re looking in pushchairs, and then you’re looking at school gates and on buses, wondering Will I know him?’
Eventually Mary married, had three children, and divorced when the children were still small. She remarried and had a fourth child. During this time all thoughts of being an artist vanished. ‘I was so busy, you can imagine. So it wasn’t really until the two older ones went off to university that I actually started to draw again.’
A couple of years earlier, in 1980, Luke had turned 18 and had become legally entitled to find out his birth mother’s maiden name; a milestone that had reawakened in Mary the question of whether he would come looking for her. ‘I had no idea if Luke knew he’d been adopted, and I had no idea if he was alive, even. You just don’t know. You don’t know if he was brought up in ignorance or if he’d been told that you, his natural mother, didn’t want him. What if he’d had a terrible, unhappy childhood?’...
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