Zephany Nurse’s fate, to be stolen at birth, is a real-life version of an archetypal myth, writes Sue de Groot for the Sunday Times
“Your story is a fairytale,” Judge John Hlophe said on Thursday to the woman found guilty of kidnapping, fraud and contravening the Children’s Act.
Hlophe meant this contemptuously, but in many ways the story of Zephany Nurse, abducted at birth from Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in 1997 and restored to her biological family 18 years later, does resemble a fairytale.
Fairytales are full of stolen children. In 1889, Irish poet William Butler Yeats published “The Stolen Child”, which has this chilling chorus:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Yeats’s poem was based on Celtic legends about fairies that stole human babies and left their own infants – changelings – in the cradle. So powerful a hold did these fictions exert that hideous punishments were visited on people accused of being changelings because they became ill or acted strangely.
The Celts were not the only ones who told such stories. Japanese and Persian folk tales are similarly populated by baby-stealing fairies. In India, tigers were said to swap human babies for tiger cubs. In Scandinavian mythology, infants had to be guarded from lonely trolls on the prowl for children to take home to their caves.
In southern African folklore there is the story of a moonchild born to the previously barren second wife of chieftain Bulane. His jealous head wife tried to cast the child out and kill it, but it was rescued by a mouse and eventually restored to its rightful place in the family.
Persistent themes in myth and legend have their basis in humankind’s deepest fears and most wishful dreams. The fascination with stolen children, lost children, orphans, foundlings and changelings is rooted in our collective imagination.
The thought of someone stealing her baby is of paralysing terror to a mother. At the same time, the child in us is strangely drawn to the idea of a parallel life, of who we might have been had we been someone else, someone more interesting.
The intense public interest in the Zephany Nurse case is bound up in both these impulses.
The archetype of the orphan or foundling that discovers its noble heritage is a dominant theme in literature. Twelfth-century poet Robert de Boron told the tale of young Arthur, who grew up neglected and taunted for being illegitimate, but when he pulled the sword Excalibur from the stone in which it was lodged, he revealed his birthright – to be the true king of England.
In many myths, lost or stolen babies are rescued from death and nurtured by kindly beings. A huntsman is ordered to kill Snow White who instead leaves her in the forest, where she is cared for by dwarfs before discovering she is a princess.
In Roman mythology, the twins Romulus and Remus are abandoned by the man tasked with their murder. They are found and suckled by a she-wolf and as adults they establish the city of Rome.
The Hebrews had Moses, who before he became their leader was set afloat in a basket because it was safer for him to be raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter than by his own family.
Charles Dickens’s 19th-century novels are full of orphans – Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Pip from Great Expectations – who suffer great hardship but are, for the most part, rewarded with love and happiness.
In Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale, the child Perdita is adopted and raised by a shepherd and through a series of coincidences discovers that her biological parents are royalty.
As part of a series of “retellings” commissioned by The Hogarth Press, novelist Jeanette Winterson has just published a modernised version of The Winter’s Tale. In Winterson’s tale, The Gap in Time, Perdita is raised by a working-class family in the US and finds out at the age of 18 that her birth parents are wealthy Europeans.
Winterson delves into Perdita’s emotional state in a way Shakespeare did not. The girl questions the concept of “real” family, saying: “Is a parent the person who provides you with the raw materials of life or the person who raises you?”
This is the question Zephany Nurse is now asking. Her story is no fairytale. Zephany – raised under another name which has not been disclosed to protect her – was not rescued from a murderous stepmother. She was not stolen from kings or raised by wolves. Nor was she an abused Dickensian orphan.
Zephany lived an ordinary life in the same community of Lavender Hill, just a few blocks from where she would have lived that other life, the one she will now never live. She has been fed, clothed and educated. She has, as far as we know, been loved and protected.
She had no idea she was adopted, or stolen, until her biological sister, attending the same school, so closely resembled her that their father started investigating. This culminated in Zephany being told in February last year she could no longer see the woman she thought was her mother for 18 years, and that she is now the child of strangers who share her DNA.
There can be no exoneration and little mercy for the woman who steals a three-day-old baby from its mother, but there is more than one theft in this story. The life she would have lived, the identity she would have had, were stolen from Zephany. And now, the life she has lived, the reality that has shaped her through her formative years, have also been stolen. Even her name has been lost. She cannot cut off the love she feels for the only mother she has known, but knowing that she was stolen from her birth parents will be a lengthy truth to process.
“It takes so little time to change a lifetime and it takes a lifetime to understand the change,” writes Winterson in The Gap in Time.
In a statement last week by her lawyer, Ann Skelton, Zephany asked for privacy, saying: “How would your daughter or son feel when their skin feels ripped off their face?”
There is a story in the first book of Kings in the Old Testament in which two women ask King Solomon to solve a dispute. One of their babies has died and one is alive. Both claim the living child is theirs. Solomon’s solution is to cut the baby in half and share it between the two. One woman does not flinch. The other is horrified. She says she would rather give up her child than have it suffer harm. Solomon performs no DNA test; he gives the baby to the woman who would not see it harmed.
For Zephany, it is too late for the wisdom of Solomon.
She has already been torn in two.
Follow Sue de Groot on Twitter @deGrootS1
Book details
- The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson
EAN: 9781781090305
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- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
EAN: 9781853260124
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- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
EAN: 9781853260247
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- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
EAN: 9781853260049
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