Family matters
Bestselling author Lesley Pearse is still unravelling the threads of her troubled childhood because of a cruel decision made on her behalf
Fact is often stranger than fiction. My family story certainly is. In January 1948, when I was three years old, my mother died of septicaemia following a miscarriage. She lay dead for three days before anyone realised something was amiss – my dad was away, and it wasn’t until a neighbour spotted me and my five-year-old brother Michael in the snow with no coats on that the alarm was raised.
Dad, a sergeant in the Royal Marines, couldn’t look after us on his own and tried to get a housekeeper to help at our home in Rochester, Kent, but that didn’t work. The Catholic Church stepped in and, in their wisdom, separated us, sending Michael to an orphanage in Gloucester and me to one in London.
Dad was determined to get us back and so married Hilda, an ex-Army nurse, in 1951, a marriage of convenience, so that Michael and I could be brought home. There was also Selina, Hilda’s nine-year-old foster child, and not long afterwards, Paul was adopted. We three older kids were a little team, and we all adored our baby brother.
Needing answers
But Hilda was a cold mother. She was in charge and we didn’t see much of Dad, who’d left the Marines but worked long hours at the Post Office.
I remember the moment I had my first pang of curiosity about my mother and my past. It was Coronation Day in June 1953. I was eight years old and we were watching the ceremony at a neighbour’s house. A woman there made a comment about how tragic it was that my mother’s family from Ireland had not attended her funeral or tried to help us poor kids. I asked my stepmother about what I’d heard but she just snorted. I had the distinct impression I shouldn’t ask again. But in private, I often wondered about my Irish roots and my mother. All I knew was that she came from a large Catholic family in Roscommon, and that she had a sister named Anne.
It wasn’t until I was 17 that I plucked up the courage to ask my father for Anne’s address. It was the first time I’d thought to ask and he gave it to me happily enough. I was nervous but I wrote to her asking if I could visit – and she said yes. I was thrilled. Michael was at university so I went by myself. My relatives gave me a lovely time but, being an awkward teenager, I didn’t ask them anything about my family history and left knowing nothing more than when I’d arrived.
Soon after that I got a job working as a live-in nanny. I became estranged from my
