EastEnders plot made mother confess how she was jailed for snatching a baby
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It was a dark secret that Annette Edwards had kept to herself for more than four decades.
But as she watched the harrowing scenes in the controversial baby-swap story in EastEnders, she knew it was time to tell her family the shocking truth.
More than 6,000 angry viewers complained that the plot was offensive, after watching Ronnie Branning, played by Samantha Womack, swap her dead baby son for barmaid Kat Moon’s new-born boy.
But for Annette, the scenes were a terrible reminder of how the overwhelming grief of suffering a miscarriage as a teenager led to her going to jail for snatching another woman’s baby.
“When I saw Ronnie lift Kat’s baby out of the cot and hold him, I remembered just how I had felt when I picked up the baby I took,” says Annette, 59.
“I was watching the episode with my husband Rob, who I’ve been with for 20 years and yet had never told what I’d done. I was so upset.
“I’ve raised 10 children of my own and so I know how precious they are. And I know what it’s like to lose a child, as my son Liam was killed at the age of 32 in a car accident four years ago. So what I did to the mum of the baby I took is not something I will ever forget.
“It’s something I buried because I have never been able to understand why I did it. My mum and my nan, who have both since died, knew because I lived with them at the time, as did my first husband.
“But it’s always haunted me that I’d die without being able to tell Rob and my children what happened and that they’d find out and never hear my version of events.
“The EastEnders story was life-changing. It made me confront my past.”
Annette was 16 and going out with her first boyfriend Neil, a 20-year-old car salesman, when she became pregnant in 1967. They decided to get married but a month before the ceremony, Annette suffered a miscarriage.
“Neil and I loved each other and were looking forward to the baby,” she says. “We’d rented a house together and had bought the cot and bedding. I was four months pregnant when I miscarried. I was so devastated I decided not to tell anyone. When my bump started to go down, I stuffed a rolled-up jumper under my dress.
“I didn’t think about what I was doing. In the 60s, post-natal depression wasn’t really recognised as a psychiatric condition as it is now.”
The trauma had such an impact on her mental state that she continued buying baby clothes. She even stuffed a jumper under her suit to say her wedding vows.
At the time they lived on the outskirts of Birmingham, and one day she went out for a walk. “There was a clinic on the corner where mums used to take their babies to be weighed and I saw about five prams outside,” she says. “In those days, it wasn’t unusual to see babies left in their prams.
“There was a new-born baby in one I looked in. I don’t remember even noticing whether it was a boy or a girl but I just lifted it up in a blanket and hugged it.
So for those who said that the storyline is sick and unrealistic, here you go.
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