The minute I saw him I fell in love with him all over again': Phillipa with Tony after they were reunited in 2009

In August 2004, that longed-for contact finally came. Philippa had joined the family-tree website Genes Reunited and noticed that someone had entered her details in their tree.
She fired off an email asking how they were related, and almost immediately a reply came back: ‘I think you know who I am.’  Philippa immediately burst into tears, shouting to Rick: ‘He’s found me! He’s found me!’
A flurry of emails followed before mother and son were reunited the following month, in Brentwood, near the home of Philippa’s son, who had been renamed Tony by his adoptive parents.

‘I followed him into the pub, and stood next to him at the bar. We looked at each other and there was a smile of recognition on both sides. In that instant I fell in love with him all over again,’ remembers Philippa.

'The minute I saw him I fell in love with him all over again': Phillipa with Tony after they were reunited in 2009

‘I was happy to learn he’d been brought up in a comfortable middle-class home with loving parents who had given him every advantage. He’d been well provided for, had gone to good schools and university, and was preparing to go to Canada to continue his studies.’
Like Philippa, he’d also been damaged by the adoption. ‘He told me there was never a time he hadn’t known he was adopted, but when he was younger he never liked it being mentioned because it reminded him that his natural mum had given him away.
‘He thought I hadn’t wanted him, and admits he’d always had this sense of not belonging and said he had never felt close to his adoptive parents. He’d felt that they had such high expectations of him but he’d always disappointed them.
‘It made my heart go out to him even more, as I told him I had wanted to keep him. I could have provided for him, sent him to a good school, taken him on holidays — I was just never given  the chance.’