He lived at theFoundlingHospital, an orphanage on Sixth Avenue, until he was three, when he moved into the Mitchel Houses, in the South Bronx, with his new parents, George and Genevieve Rogers.
The book takes you on a journey with Hetty from her life with a foster family in the countryside and back to theFoundlingHospital where she was left as a baby, in search of her real mother.
So I invented a very fierce and feisty little girl who would fight back against all the rules and be very rude and cheeky to the matron and be absolutely determined she would get out of thefoundlinghospital one day and find her mother.
Coram's Fields was part of an 18th-century foundlinghospital, while Tooting Bec Common was reputedly a transit camp for soldiers heading off to the Napoleonic Wars.