'I was beaten and nearly drowned by a teacher as a child at Foundling Hospital'

mirror.co.uk:

When a teenage Justine Cowan saw her mother Eileen scrawling the name “Dorothy Soames” over and over on a piece of paper, she was baffled.

It took 20 years for Justine to realise it was a crucial clue to a secret that her mother had kept about herself. Now, Justine has found out that Dorothy was her late mother’s real name – changed after she was abandoned at the Foundling Hospital, where a lifelong trauma began on Dorothy’s first day there, aged five. “She was lying in bed and called for a chamber pot, not because she needed it – she wanted to know if she was being cared for,” says Justine. “The nurse came over and my mother was unable to use the pot, so the nurse punched her in the stomach.” Her mother died in 2012 and Justine has written