Hanna

Sam Potter

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781848427020
• eBook ISBN: 9781788500005
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

'The only words are to do with adoption. But that's not what happened to us. What happened to us was something quite different.'

Being a young mum is supposed to be hard – but for Hanna, the only thing she's ever been brilliant at is raising her beloved daughter, Ellie. Until a DNA test reveals staggering news. Ellie is not Hanna's child. And now her 'real' parents want to meet.

How can an accidental mix-up in an overstretched maternity ward be explained to a three-year-old? Is Hanna supposed to let these strangers into her daughter's life? Forced to question what being a parent really means, Hanna makes a drastic decision that will change all their lives.

This funny, heartfelt and compelling one-woman play Hanna asks what family means in a modern society, delicately weaving in questions of racial identity, economic privilege, and the lottery of birth. It was premiered by Papatango at the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2018.

PART ONE

HANNA, aged twenty-one

When I tell people what happened, they always seem to think that it would have made such a big difference if we’d known sooner… If we’d known when she was a month or six months or a year… before she was walking and talking at least but I think that’s nonsense. She was a person long before that. I was bound to her long before that… The thing I find most odd now is that it took such a long time for us to find out. She was three years old by the time we had the test. Three; I felt so stupid about that. Like I’d really let her down. Felt like a right idiot.

It’s funny, isn’t it? How having children, becoming a parent… It’s one of the hardest things you ever do, I don’t mean it’s not great as well, of course it is, but it’s tough, you know? You need to know all this stuff immediately and no one tells you anything. They don’t cover it in school and all the people who have kids already are too exhausted to tell you what they know, so there’s just this big gap of information and the next thing you know; there you are, looking after it twenty-four hours a day and it’s not like it is low stakes or anything. Mess up and they die basically. That’s what you’re dealing with so, well, it’s just kind of a big deal.

Isn’t it insane how much time they take up? All they do is eat and sleep and wee and laugh. That’s it, but somehow that takes every second of every moment of every day, including the whole of the night. How can eating and sleeping and weeing and laughing be so time-consuming?

I couldn’t believe it the night she was born. They just left me with her. Like I knew what to do or something: ‘Come back!’ I felt like yelling. ‘I don’t know how to work this thing!’

I’ve never been very good at speaking up for myself. I’m not exactly shy but, actually that’s not true, I am quite shy but it’s not because of that. It’s just… I hate conflict. Avoid it at any cost. I say yes when I’m thinking no and I keep quiet when I want to shout. In a way it’s a good thing. I think it is really because, well, I have friends, which is, you know… and I think I’m a pretty nice person to be around, at least I hope so.

Where we live, it’s nice… it’s not posh or anything but, you know, it’s not rough, it’s just normal. Like we are, I suppose. A normal house on a normal estate.

You never really realise that other people live differently to you, do you? I mean, you know people do in theory but on a day-to-day basis, you don’t really think about it…

You think everyone is just like you are or most people are anyway… at least that’s how I think.

That’s why I call my house normal because it is… how we live is the normal way to live but other people do live differently to us. I know that now. People live in a way that I would think of… that most people would think of as… well, I guess privileged is the correct word, isn’t it? Privileged compared to the rest of us plebs anyway.

That’s how they lived.

I’ve often wondered how long it would take someone who didn’t like children to completely fall in love with one if they had to look after it because I genuinely think they would. Like if you got some businessman who only cared about work and who worked in like the world’s shittiest bank or something and voted UKIP and, like he’s not a nice person, that’s the picture I’m trying to paint here but I bet if he had to look after, let’s say a five-year-old for a month, night and day, day and night, on his own… I mean, unless he was a total psycho or whatever, like unless there was something actually wrong with him, then I bet you anything that by the end of the month he’d be completely in love with that child. He just would be. There is something about the simple act of looking after them that makes you fall in love with them. I know it’s probably all biological and to do with the continuation of the human race and stuff like that but it doesn’t mean you don’t feel it just as strongly.

I hadn’t planned on getting pregnant when I did. That wasn’t what I was planning to do at all. Had a place at uni, was going to study tourism and then maybe work abroad for a couple of years. I speak three languages, so it seemed like the obvious thing to do, and fun, you know? Not that I regret it… I wouldn’t change a thing, I really wouldn’t. Sometimes in life, staying still is the most exciting thing you can do. I’m sure if I had worked abroad and done all that stuff it would have been an adventure but it wouldn’t have changed me; whereas having Ellie, well that turned me upside down and inside out.

There was quite a big hoo-ha when people found out. You wouldn’t think it’d be all that shocking these days would you but apparently it still is. Caused a huge stir at first and then, well then, basically, everyone realised that me being pregnant meant there would be a baby in the family and after they realised that no one minded so much any more. Well, my mum did but she came round eventually. Not by the time I gave birth. Not a chance. No way, José. But by the time Ellie was six months old… she’d calmed down by then at any road.

We haven’t had a child in our family for quite a while so I knew it’d be spoiled rotten from the moment it was born…

I shouldn’t keep calling her ‘it’, should I? It’s sort of my sense of humour, you know? ‘Where is it? I’m sure I put it down around here somewhere,’ but other people don’t seem to find that sort of thing quite as funny as I do…

I can be a bit weird sometimes.

Don’t you think it’s funny that when you’re a kid, you have all these ideas about what you’re going to be when you grow up, but when you grow up you wouldn’t dream of doing any of them? I was going to run an ice-cream parlour for ages… one of those diner-style ones you see in the old American movies… had a real thing for making ice-cream sundaes for people for some reason… I am pretty amazing at it, mind… make a mean choc-nut deluxe. And then, of course, I was going to be a ski instructor. There’s this brilliant indoor ski slope near where we live and I used to work there Saturdays for a while. Really got into it and thought, yes this is it, this is me but the way life changes under your feet means… well, it has always felt to me like we’re not driving, if you know what I mean?

I didn’t have the best labour. Young mums don’t apparently. Don’t know why that is. Thirty-six hours and then I didn’t even manage to get her out myself after all that heaving… had to have a forceps delivery. So, when they handed her to me, all mucky and blueish with her big cone head from the forceps, I didn’t feel anything… just, oh great, that’s over, can I please go to sleep now? I wasn’t depressed or anything. Not at all, I was fine. Freaked my midwife out a bit though I think because I wasn’t all oohing and aahing and wanting to gaze into her eyes for hours on end, but I was fine, honestly; I was just really, really fucking tired.

Pete was exhausted too. He’d been up with me for two days (and been white as a sheet for most of that), so he went home to get some sleep and then he said, he was so knackered that he slept right through until eleven o’clock the next day. Hadn’t meant to but that’s why he wasn’t there until the afternoon.

And Mum wasn’t there, of course… still wasn’t talking to me at that point. Perhaps if she had been, things might have been different… I do think that sometimes. Not that I blame her… I understood why she was upset with me, well I sort of did… She thought I was throwing my life away but I never saw it like that.

Having a baby, being a mum, I mean you’re lucky if you get to do all that, aren’t you? Not everybody does. Not by a long shot. All those people who want children, but can’t, or think they’ll just wait a bit longer because they’ve got some super-cool job and then they realise they’ve gone and missed the boat. I would much rather be a young mum than one of those people.

Hospitals always turn me into a proper good girl. I fall immediately into being o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Original Production
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Notes on the Text
• Hanna
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information