My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (40 page)

Jenny was born in 1948 from a different relationship. Neither Jenny nor I had any idea who her father was. This was something we would need to try and extricate from the family’s vault of secrets, if it wasn’t too late. All Mercia’s siblings had already gone to their graves, and none of the cousins would tell us when we asked. They just gave out euphemisms like, ‘Oh, that was a long time ago,’ or ‘It’s water under the bridge.’

I was born in April 1950. I remember discovering from those papers I found in my mother’s bureau when I was about twelve that I was born before Mercia and Tommy were married, which horrified me. It was still quite a stigma to be illegitimate in those post-war years.

Our initial hypothesis was that we three girls and George were all from different fathers. This said a lot about Mercia, of course.

Patricia lived a lot closer to me than Jenny did, with me in Northumberland and Jenny in Kent. I met up with Patricia every now and then at first, and we got on well, so I was surprised when she suddenly stopped calling me and didn’t answer the phone any more. When I spoke to Jenny, she said she hadn’t heard from Patricia either, until she received one short letter from her.

Jenny

Quite out of the blue one day, I opened our mailbox to find an unfamiliar handwritten envelope. I set the bills aside and opened it. Inside was a letter from Patricia, a few brief sentences, in which she explained that she was beset by anger about the family’s deceits over the circumstances of her birth. She wrote that she would prefer to have her life back ‘as it was’, before she found out about being Mercia’s child. There was to be no more contact between us.

I called Helen straightaway and read it out to her.

‘That’s very sad, isn’t it?’ said Helen.

‘I don’t know what she means about having her life back as it was.’

‘Well, I suppose she wants to pretend it didn’t happen.’

‘But she can’t just put it all back in a box and shut the lid.’

‘No. Once you know something like this, you can’t go back.’

‘It’s a shame we can’t talk that through with her.’

‘I know, but it sounds like she doesn’t even want to think about it.’

‘It’s sad that she has cut herself off from us.’

‘Yes, it’s a loss to all of us, especially to her.’

‘I’m so glad you didn’t reject me like that when I first wrote to you,’ I said. ‘I feared you would.’

‘It never occurred to me – you are the sister I’ve always wanted,’ said Helen.

‘Me too.’

‘We have such a strong bond now. I could never go back on that. I wouldn’t want to. Maybe Patricia will change her mind one day.’

‘Yes. She knows where we are.’

I tucked the letter away with a photo we had taken of the three of us together. It was an important link in our story. Patricia would always be our half-sister.

Helen

I was deeply upset by Patricia’s letter, but I understood her reasons for feeling the way she did. She had to make the decision that felt best for her. We agreed not to try and make her change her mind.

Jenny and I continued to keep in touch regularly. By now, this was more or less daily and sometimes more than once a day. The more we talked, the more we came to realize how alike we are. Not just in appearance, but in our likes and dislikes, hobbies and interests, and, of course, our love of animals, especially dogs.

All of this would be joy enough, but when we started to compare notes about our health, we discovered we also shared a number of physical conditions. We both sleepwalked as children, we are both allergic to wool, we have both had serious back problems, we both suffer from chronic sinusitis and chest infections, we both have arthritis in our hands and both have crooked right index fingers, Reynaud’s syndrome and cramps in our legs. That’s not all. When we were little we were both investigated as a child at the Newcastle Royal Victoria Infirmary at about the same time for the same peculiar symptoms of fainting and blacking out. Jenny had a suspected heart problem, whilst I had a suspected brain tumour. Happily, both conditions were ruled out fairly quickly.

If we’d been the same age, we would have suspected we could be twins. It was strange how alike we were when we’d never even heard of each other over all those years.

The more information we shared with each other, the greater the coincidences became. There were circumstantial similarities too. One of these was Embleton. Jenny had virtually lived there throughout her childhood, whereas I had often visited the beach on summer weekend days when my parents met up with Uncle James and we all drove to the coast. In fact, when I showed Jenny my photos, they included one of me sitting in the shallow water on the beach at Embleton. I remember that day quite clearly, as Tommy was trying to coax my mother to come into the picture with me. She agreed with great reluctance and refused to come any closer to me than she had to. This was nothing unusual, so I don’t know why I remember it, except that it was such a beautiful day. As I played happily in the water, I noticed a group of children at the top of the bank, where there were some wooden bungalows. There was one girl standing near the edge and looking down at me. I thought she looked about the same age as me, or not much older.

Jenny gasped when she saw that photo. It seemed to bring back a memory of her own. She looked at it very intently.

‘That’s Mercia, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. My father insisted she come into the photo, but she didn’t really want to.’

‘I remember watching you that day. I was standing at the top, looking down onto the beach.’

‘I saw some children there. I think I saw you. Were you standing near the edge, and then you ran away?’

‘Yes. Isn’t that amazing?’

There were other coincidences in where we’d lived and places we’d been. Our brother George lived in Cramlington at the same time as Jenny. When I used to visit George in Florida, he lived very close to where Jenny lived with her family at that time. If only we’d known about each other then!

The most remarkable link of all was that we had actually met and had probably spoken to one another without realizing it. Jenny had a series of surgical operations on her back following a golfing injury. Rather than have those operations in America, she had come home to Northumberland to consult David Stainsby, the renowned orthopaedic surgeon with whom I’d worked as theatre nurse.

I assisted in hundreds of his operations over the period when I worked at the Newcastle Nuffield Hospital, where Jenny had her operations during that time. We are both certain that I was present in at least one of Jenny’s operations, and possibly all of them. Sometimes I used to be scrub nurse in the operation itself, whilst other days I would talk to the patient in the anteroom to the operating theatre, calming them and inserting their cannula to begin the anaesthetic procedure, or in recovery as they came out of the anaesthetic. It is very likely that I was in all of those roles for Jenny over the different operations she had. And we had no idea at the time, of course. Indeed, if we’d known then that we were sisters, I wouldn’t have been allowed to assist in her operations.

Our many physical coincidences in particular began to make us wonder. Then we worked out that there were only seven months between Jenny’s birth and my conception. This seemed almost too close. I looked out the box of papers I had kept when I cleared out my mother’s house and extricated the document I was looking for, along with a couple of others. As I read, my eyes opened wider and wider. Why hadn’t I noticed this before?

I got straight on the phone to Jenny.

‘I’ve just been looking at three documents I found. I only discovered the main one after my mother died, when I cleared her house. There was so much to do that I only gave it a cursory glance. I read it properly today for the first time, and the obvious stared me in the face!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘OK. The first document is my birth certificate. It says my name and birth date and Tommy’s name is written in the “father” column. The address is in Newcastle. I went there one day to see what it was like. They lived there in that period when Mercia went missing. Her mystery year, the family called it. She only turned up in Seghill again a year later.’

‘Maybe she went there because they didn’t approve of Tommy,’ suggested Jenny.

‘They didn’t know Tommy until he came back with Mercia and me. Anyway, the next document is their marriage certificate.’

‘So they definitely were married.’

‘Yes, but rather late. In fact they were married a whole year after I was born.’

‘Wow. That was unusual in those days.’

‘Yes. I discovered this document when I was about twelve, when I was alone in the house and rifled through my mother’s bureau to see what she hid in there. I remember being appalled when I noticed the discrepancy in the dates. Even at that age, I knew what that meant.’

‘You said there were three documents?’

‘Yes. The third one is the one I had never seen before until I found it in Mum’s flat when I was clearing it out. It’s Mercia’s divorce decree from her first husband, George Dick. That was George’s father, the one who was a prisoner of war for years.’

‘Well, you knew about that, didn’t you?’

‘I knew they were divorced. But I didn’t know when. It was in June 1950, two months after I was born, ten months before Mercia and Tommy were married.’

‘So do you think maybe this George Dick was really your father?’

‘I hadn’t even thought of that. But I’m pretty sure not. From what my cousins told me, she had nothing to do with him when he came back after the war. No, the really interesting thing on this divorce decree is that it gives the name of a co-respondent.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Wilfred Harrison.’

‘So what does that mean?’

‘It means that her first husband knew Mercia was having a relationship with Wilfred Harrison in the period leading up to the divorce.’ I paused for Jenny to take that in. ‘I’m wondering whether this Wilfred Harrison could have been your father, since you were born only sixteen months before me and eighteen months before the divorce decree. That means that she must have been going out with him before Tommy.’

Jenny was silent at the other end of the phone. I guessed it was quite a shock for her to hear a possible name at last. Now that I came to think about it, I remembered that name.

‘When my mother was elderly, I used to take her out for drives sometimes on Sunday afternoons,’ I said. ‘She usually wanted to go to this one place, The Avenue, a straight, tree-lined road that used to be the driveway to Seaton Delaval Hall. As we drove down it, she always told me the same story. “This is where I used to go for walks with Wilfie Harrison, when we were courting. He was a handsome man.”’

‘Wow!’

‘It sounds as if she went out with him for quite a long while. She always sounded quite smitten with him. At the time I didn’t take much notice, but now it all fits into place, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s spooky! You didn’t realize it, but you had the one document that could be the answer to my main question – who was my father? That’s amazing!’

‘I don’t know why I never thought of it before.’

‘Never mind. This is my best lead yet. Now we’re on a roll.’

‘Maybe we should do some research into this Wilfred Harrison,’ I suggested. ‘It seems unlikely, but it’s just possible that he might still be alive.’

‘No, he’s not,’ sighed Jenny.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because when I went to speak to Mercia’s sister Dorrie that day, she told me quite clearly that my birth father was dead. She said he was a bad bugger and that he was long gone, six foot under.’

‘Really?’ I paused.

‘You’ve got me wondering now,’ said Jenny. ‘Do you think maybe she wasn’t telling the truth, to put me off the scent?’

‘Well, after finally finding out all the lies I’ve been told, I’m questioning everything now!’

‘I just assumed all these years that I’d never find him, never even find out who he was. Now I have a name, on top of which there’s a chance he’s still alive after all!’

I could almost hear Jenny smile, but my thoughts were already racing on. ‘I’ve just thought of something else. We know there were only seven months between your birth and when Mercia became pregnant with me.’

‘And if Wilfred Harrison was my father,’ continued Jenny, ‘and your mother’s family didn’t know anything about Tommy until after Mercia reappeared in 1951 . . .’

‘Hold on a minute. Tommy was on my birth certificate, so Mercia must have been with him then.’

‘Yes, but maybe he knew you weren’t his?’

I couldn’t speak for a few seconds and Jenny waited to let me take in this new possibility.

‘Well that’s a revelation! Why has it never occurred to me before?’ I said. ‘If that were true, it would explain a lot, like why she often said, “She’s mine” when they argued about me. It could be why he always told me everything was my fault. He would think that if I wasn’t his daughter and I was in the way of his relationship with Mercia. Or maybe it was the reason why he felt he couldn’t leave us, or something. Or maybe he even knew this Wilfred Harrison, saw him around in Seghill every day and resented what he knew, resented him . . .’ I could hardly believe it. ‘But that could mean . . .’

‘So you’re thinking what I’m thinking?’ asked Jenny.

‘Yes!’

We both paused. Then a great idea flashed into my head. ‘Would you do a sibling test?’

‘DNA?’

‘Yes. That’s the only way to find out for certain.’

‘Let’s do it!’

So we both did the saliva tests and sent them off to the DNA lab. Now we would have to wait the longest weeks of our lives to find out the result.

CHAPTER 37

Helen

Making Memories

Dennis retired, sorted out his affairs and moved over to join me in our new home in Northumberland. The first time he met Jenny and Sam was when Sam got some theatre tickets. He took the phone from Jenny and said to me, ‘Will you and Dennis come down and see
Oliver
with us?

‘Oh, absolutely!’ I knew Dennis would enjoy that.