My Secret Sister Read online

  Helen

  for my very dear husband Dennis and my

  much-loved son and daughter

  Jenny

  for my dearest husband Sam and my adored

  daughter and sons, Katie, Ben and Josh

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 Helen A Mystery Year

  2 Jenny Bumpy Down the Steps

  3 Helen Grandma

  4 Helen A Walking Heel

  5 Jenny Barefoot Summers

  6 Helen Ginger Wine

  7 Helen Talking to the Cows

  8 Jenny The Water Baby

  9 Helen Home Alone

  10 Helen The Madhouse

  11 Jenny Six Terrible Weeks

  12 Helen A Sunbeam for Jesus

  13 Jenny Swimming Along

  14 Helen My Hero

  15 Jenny A Shock Discovery

  16 Helen All Work and No Play

  17 Jenny Home on the Range

  18 Helen Life on the Balcony

  19 Helen An Education

  20 Helen Tales of the Unexpected

  21 Helen The Gun Chase

  22 Jenny The Eighteenth Hole

  23 Jenny A Professional Career

  24 Helen The World’s Not Wide Enough

  25 Jenny The Knife

  26 Jenny A Visit to Seghill

  27 Helen Three People in This Marriage

  28 Jenny All Change

  29 Helen Holding On

  30 Jenny The Illegal Immigrant

  31 Jenny Finding Mercia

  32 Helen The Time Machine

  33 Jenny Revelations

  34 Helen & Jenny Exploding the Past

  35 Helen & Jenny Reunion

  36 Helen & Jenny Too Many Coincidences

  37 Helen Making Memories

  38 Helen New Challenges

  39 Helen & Jenny One Regret

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  Jenny

  This could be the most important email I ever send. I go over it again, one last time. My finger hovers over the mouse. I hold my breath . . . Click!

  ‘Haaa!’ It’s gone.

  Immediately I panic. It’s taken so many years to reach this point. So much heartache and rejection. I reread it once more. Oh no – I should have said I had a happy childhood. Why didn’t I tell her that? I don’t want her to think I’m jealous.

  I check the time – 10.27 p.m. – still afternoon in Texas. I wonder when Helen will look at her emails?

  From: jenlucas

  To: helen

  Sent: Wednesday 11 April 2007, 22:24 +0100

  Subject: Mercia Lumsden

  Dear Helen,

  My name is Jenny Lucas and I was adopted at birth in 1948. After doing a lot of investigation, I believe you are my half-sister. Sorry for the complete shock, but there is no easy way of telling you.

  I met Mercia in August 2003, when I was visiting the north-east for a family wedding. She was concerned that if anyone came I was not to say who I was. I have been looking for so very long to find the family that knows nothing about me.

  I live in Kent. We moved back from Florida two years ago and now live in Tenterden. I would love to hear from you if you can come through the shock. My telephone number is ——————.

  Jenny

  Helen

  I open my laptop before I go to bed. In moments, the screen lights up. There is just one email from an unknown contact.

  Who’s Jen Lucas? Why does the subject line say my mother’s name?

  I click on the header and begin to read. The first two sentences explode in my head, blasting shrapnel through my past. My eyes widen and my jaw locks. Over and over I read the words: ‘I believe you are my half-sister.’

  I’m on the edge of the sofa in the semi-darkness; Dennis lies asleep in the bedroom. I begin to shake, slightly at first, and then great tremors start running through me. White noise deafens me as the blood charges through my brain.

  I struggle to lower my shoulders and breathe slower, deeper. I read on, but I can’t take it in. Is this a scam? I go back to the beginning and reread the whole message. How has this woman traced me? She claims to have visited Mercia, my mother. Can this be true? Why didn’t my mother tell me?

  I read the email through yet again, aloud this time, as calmly as I can. It sounds genuine. There is a hint of emotion, a deep feeling: ‘I have been looking for so very long . . . ’ That sounds authentic to me – I can identify with it in a way. This stranger thinks I’m her sister. I’ve always yearned for a sister. She wants me to call her, but what would I say? How could I begin to tell her?

  CHAPTER 1

  Helen

  A Mystery Year

  Fear is my earliest memory. Fear of being out there, alone. It was one of those dark winter evenings; the sleet slanted at me with a wind cold enough to sting my skin. I was sitting in my hand-me-down pram, strapped in with no blankets – just a loose waterproof cover on which a puddle had formed and was frosting over. I tried to lean forward and look out. The cover slipped and the icy water trickled down onto my bare legs. My damp clothes hung heavy around me and my bonnet’s fur trim, bedraggled in the sleet, clung to my cheeks like icy fingers. I felt numb, abandoned.

  I yearned for her to come. I whimpered and cried as loud as I could, my frozen cheeks smarting from the warmth of my tears. Shadows loomed. A lone tree bent and clattered in the wind, an ogre’s arms stretching out to steal me away. I screamed. I don’t know how long I cried for. I stared at the house and willed her to come, to rescue me. I craned forward as far as I could, my eyes fixed on the front door and the warm glow through the window. But no one looked out. No one came. I wailed. Why doesn’t she come and help me? Why doesn’t she come?

  Finally, the door opened and yellow light spilled out across the wet path. But she just stood there, my mother, without even glancing in my direction. She stood on the front step, laughing and joking with my grandma inside, pulling her coat together in the arctic wind. They talked and talked until at last she shrugged, tied on her head scarf and ran down the path towards me. She took hold of the pram, her eyes fixed ahead, and pushed it at a run against the wind.

  Why did she leave me outside for so long alone in the cold night? You don’t leave a baby, a toddler, out like that uncovered at that time of year, do you? I don’t think she even noticed what state I was in.

  Years later, my husband said: ‘You can’t possibly remember all that! Nobody can remember before they were three.’

  But I do. I must have been about eighteen months or so. I can still feel the fear now. My memory of that evening is indelible, locked inside. It’s a feeling that echoed throughout my childhood. It has haunted me down all the years.

  The first year of my life is missing – it’s a mystery. Well, that’s what an older cousin told me. Some time before my birth in April 1950, my mother, Mercia, left Seghill without a word – left the mining village, the bustle of the close-knit family and everything she knew.

  ‘Mercia disappeared,’ explained Alice. ‘All of a sudden she wasn’t there any more. She was gone. Nobody knew where she was. And then, a year or so later, she came back with you and married to Tommy. No explanation.’ Of course, Alice was a child when that happened, so maybe she wasn’t told the real story.

  My mother had been married before, in 1939: ‘A terrible man, he was, mind,’ she told me. ‘He used to beat me and never gave me enough housekeeping money.’

  Her husband had joined up and gone to war, so she had gone back to live with Grandma. My half-brother George was born in 1940. Not long after that his father was captured and spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp. My mother left George with Grandma while she went to work twelve-hour night-shi
fts doing war-work at Vickers munitions factory on Scotswood Road in Newcastle, by the river.

  They were dangerous times, with nightly bombings as Luftwaffe pilots strafed the ship yards and factories along the banks of the Tyne. I recently found out that during this time she had an affair with an American airman, among others. It would be harsh to blame her, really. Her husband was a prisoner of war. Like many others, she risked her own life every night for the war effort – I suppose they all had to find some escape from the drudgery, fear and chaos of those years.

  When I was a child I asked my mother how she had met Tommy. She paused for a moment.

  ‘It was in Newcastle. I was working in Maynards, the tobacconist,’ she told me. ‘He came in for some cigarettes one day in his RAF uniform. He came back again the next day, and every day after that. He was a bonny lad, mind. Ciggies were rationed in those days, so I used to hide some extra under the counter for him.’

  The address on my birth certificate is in Benwell, a notorious area of Newcastle. It’s only twenty minutes’ drive from Seghill, but in those days that was an hour-and-a-half’s bus-ride away – another country. I drove there recently and found the street in the west of the city, near the Tyne. I looked at that house for a long time – an anonymous brick building divided into flats. I wanted to explore the area, but it was a forbidding place – one of the roughest parts of Newcastle, with the spectre of hoodied gangs round every corner and a high crime rate. I felt safer in the car, so I sat there and just stared.

  I asked my mother about my birth once, when I was growing up.

  ‘Tommy was at work when I went into labour. It was just me and George, so I sent him to call the midwife and gave him ninepence (4p) to go to the pictures. When he came back, there you were.’ George was ten years old then. I never thought to ask him about it. ‘What did I look like?’ I asked her another time, hoping to provoke some sort of reaction, if only nostalgia. That would be something.

  ‘You were little, six pounds, with blonde hair.’ Her face was fixed in neutral and her gaze was turned away from me.

  Sitting in the car, I tried to imagine my thirty-year-old mother seeing the newborn me for the first time, perhaps studying my face, gently stroking my fingers. Surely she would have held me then? Cradled me in her arms? Maybe there was a whisper of a smile on her lips? Wouldn’t you think so? I craved a smile from my mother every day of my childhood, but I yearned in vain. I tried so hard to earn just one smile, but it was never any use. I shuddered as I sat gazing at my very first home, surrounded by seedy slums. I don’t suppose it was such a bad area back in those days; perhaps even faintly respectable.

  It was many years after my childhood before I began to discover some of what had happened in that missing year. My family guarded myriad secrets and lies; it was all a tangled web of deceit. Some of it I have recently unravelled; other strands I will never know – they are locked away for ever. My mother, the keeper of the keys, took them with her when she died, and her generation have all gone too, taking any remaining secrets with them to their graves.

  What I do know is that when I was a year old or so, we moved back to Seghill, the Northumberland pit village where my mother had grown up in a large mining family. Most of the men in Seghill were miners, and all the women knew each other and helped one another. Everyone watched. You couldn’t walk along the street in a new coat without the whole village knowing it.

  We lived in a plain grey-rendered house with a slate roof on the corner of Barrass Avenue; two up, two down, stained with soot and next to the miners’ social club. Downstairs we had the living room and kitchen, always called the scullery in our house. Next to that was a shivery-cold room with a basin and a bath – a luxury in Seghill. But the only toilet was outside at the back, freezing in winter, next to my father’s shed. Upstairs were two bedrooms.

  Seghill colliery, down the road, dominated the area with its vast buildings and giant machinery reaching to the sky. Wherever you stood in Seghill, the black pit-heaps rose up like mountains to blot out the morning and evening sunlight. They blocked our views of the surrounding farmland too. Some of the older boys used to lay planks up the sides of the heaps to climb up and slide down. Every now and then an accident happened and the horrified adults forbade us from going too close. But soon the planks came out again.

  The shrill pit whistle sounded across the village to mark the end of each shift. It was the same whistle that was used to broadcast pit disasters, though I don’t remember that happening while I lived there. I watched the men walk past with their long, weary strides, hands and faces as black as night from their day at the coalface. One or two would pause and wave at me in the window, their white teeth bright against the black.

  Inside our house we had a huge coal fire, just as everyone had in Seghill, since coal came free from the mine. The wagon would come trundling along the street to unload the sacks of coal, drawn by a great big shire horse with blinkers and feathery ankles, his head hung low. I had to count the sacks as the coalman emptied them into our coal-hole. Sometimes I lost count because I was so busy watching the horse, willing him on. Finally he would oblige with the longest pee I have ever seen pouring endlessly onto the stony road and into the gutter, the steam rising in the winter’s chill.

  I remember the acrid smell of smoke and the air thick with the coal dust that shrouded the village. It made for a lot of dusting.

  Grandma, aunties, uncles and cousins lived all around us. Some of them lived in the same street, others round the corner, but all within a hundred yards. My mother was the ninth of ten children. When she was little, everyone spoiled the baby that came after her, but she rarely had any attention. Even Grandma had little time or energy to lavish on Mercia. She had to fight to be noticed.

  The house we lived in was Auntie Minnie’s house. I don’t know why. It had been rented out, but now it was empty. She lived in another house down that street, so when we unexpectedly turned up in Seghill, Auntie Minnie said, ‘You can live in that house.’

  My father resented this arrangement. He had to be king of his castle and couldn’t bear having to take charity from his wife’s family. ‘It’s all your fault,’ he told me on many occasions. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But, remember,’ he would say, wagging his finger at me, his face reddening, ‘I am master in this house. You will do as I say.’

  I never dared move. I didn’t know why it was my fault, but from my earliest memories I just accepted it.

  I slept in with my parents for a long time when I was little. George slept in the other bedroom, the box room. When I was two or three, I remember the joy of tearing into his room early in the morning to jump on him while he was still asleep. He never moaned when I woke him up like that.

  ‘Come on, tiger,’ he’d say. Then we would do some tiger-wrestling – his tiger a great deal gentler than mine, of course. Having fun with George was my escape from the vagaries of life with my parents. He was my champion in that house. He always looked out for his ‘kid’ sister.

  After our tussle, George liked to do his exercises, starting with push-ups. He’d lie on his back. ‘Come on, kiddo.’

  I would stand on the palms of his hands and try to keep my balance as he lifted me up by the strength of his arms and held me there. I felt I was touching the sky when he raised me right up towards the ceiling.

  When I was still in my parents’ room, I used to be out of bed sleepwalking every night. One day they woke up at three in the morning to find me on the window sill trying to climb out. I was taken off to the doctor.

  ‘There’s only one thing for it,’ he advised them. ‘You’ll have to put bars over the window.’

  They put bars on all the upstairs windows after that and moved me into George’s room. I think my sleepwalking settled down once I was away from my parents. It was fun sharing with my big brother. We used to have riots in there.

  George tried many times to protect me, which only made things worse for him as he becam
e the brunt of my father’s abuse on those occasions, But his bravery rescued me from some of Tommy’s worse excesses. One of these was the cat-o’-nine-tails whip that my father kept hanging on a nail in the scullery. He would often take his anger out on me by thrashing my bare legs with it. That thing scared me rigid, hanging on the wall as an unspoken threat.

  One day it disappeared.

  As soon as Tommy noticed its absence, he turned on George. ‘What have you done with it?’ he shouted, the blood rushing to his face.

  ‘What makes you think it’s me?’ George said, standing as tall as he could.

  ‘I know it’s you!’ Tommy closed in on him. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You stole it, didn’t you?’ Tommy shrieked, pushing his face up close to George’s.

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘I know you did. And you’ll suffer for it.’

  So the interrogation unfolded in front of me. I put my hands over my ears, but I could still hear it all. I was torn between fear of my father and admiration for my big brother, but also anxiety for him, and for me too. They shouted at each other louder and louder, and Tommy dominated the argument.

  ‘You bloody well will tell me!’

  ‘I’m telling you – I didn’t steal it.’

  Tommy slapped George across the face. ‘I’m the master of this house!’

  It went on for what seemed like hours, and eventually I tried to get away, but my father saw me and barred my way.

  ‘You needn’t think you’re going to escape!’ He said. ‘You’re next. When I find that whip, I’ll need to make sure it’s working.’

  I was quaking, but while Tommy tried everything he could to intimidate George, my brother refused to reveal where it was. I was surprised when Tommy finally gave up. Thanks to George, I never saw that instrument of torture again.

  On the day of the Queen’s coronation when I was three, several of us gathered round to watch it on Uncle Marcus’s new TV. It was the first television I had ever seen. It had a tiny screen, but it seemed like magic to me. I think most of the family were there, and we squeezed in around the small room, with all the children sitting on the floor. To start with, I was sitting next to Patricia, who was some kind of second or third cousin (I never knew exactly). She was nearer George’s age than mine but I always liked her. Auntie Dorrie beckoned to me. ‘Come away, pet,’ she said as she moved me across to the other side of the room. I was always being moved about; I never knew why.