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Secret Sister: From Nazi-occupied Jersey to wartime London, one woman’s search for the truth
Cherry Durbin
The true story of a woman who uncovered the dramatic stories of her mother and sisters with the help of the award-winning television programme, Long Lost Family.Adopted at a young age, Cherry Durbin had spent over twenty years searching for traces of her natural mother with no success. She had given up until one day, watching the drama unfold on the television programme, Long Lost Family, her daughter suggested that maybe this was the only way she would ever find her mother.What she didn’t expect to uncover was a story of a pregnant mother fleeing Nazi-invaded Jersey, a sister left behind to survive the deprivations of the German-controlled island and a family torn apart in a time when war left so many alone. Cherry’s story, pieced together by a team of researchers, would bring her unimaginable sadness and joy, and answers where she had given up.
(#u86f8dd10-bbde-5163-b86a-7bfaa87f2712)
Copyright (#u86f8dd10-bbde-5163-b86a-7bfaa87f2712)
Cherry’s story appeared on the TV Show Long Lost Family, produced in the UK by Wall to Wall Media Ltd. This book does not reflect the views or opinions of either the makers of Long Lost Family or the broadcaster.
HarperElement
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London SE1 9GF
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First published by HarperElement 2015
SECOND EDITION
© Cherry Durbin 2015
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover photographs © Rosmari Wirz/Getty Images (girl, posed by model); © Shutterstock.com (background)
Cherry Durbin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008133078
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008133085
Version: 2018-07-05
Dedication (#u86f8dd10-bbde-5163-b86a-7bfaa87f2712)
For John, my Essex boy, my soulmate, who accepted me as I was and didn’t try to change me. I carry you in my heart into this new phase of my life.
For Mum and Pop, who gave me love and stability for the first eight years to build the rest of my life on.
And for my kids, Helen and Graham, who’ve had to put up with me since they were born. I love you and I’m so proud of you.
Contents
Cover (#ub5a91f92-f698-5830-9f88-44823989d1bd)
Title Page (#u3ba29676-db59-5b3a-b01d-b2cf60bf67c2)
Copyright (#ud09ed354-2ccf-54c6-a903-1eb8b848116f)
Dedication (#u1208cf9a-ae6b-5c12-927a-65c914414493)
Prologue (#u8ed40345-fdc8-5086-806c-a25f4b0fbe1c)
1 Mum Looks Like a Chinaman (#u188f7d31-f861-5283-8385-71e157cf86ed)
2 The New Woman in Our Lives (#u644e2785-cedd-5aaf-858e-80ff896e62ec)
3 My Closest Friend, Grizelda the Goat (#u0c0c0129-b460-5813-b112-7055dd831787)
4 A Hasty Marriage (#udab543af-4a1f-5ff7-9a92-b1f96fe27ae1)
5 Learning to Be a Mum (#u271dee2e-3256-5b14-afed-f79d11665e8a)
6 Breaking Out of Domesticity (#u295bee01-81d7-5fd1-9d9f-5fcc43350355)
7 Searching for My Birth Father (#ud6083686-571d-5c7e-8c1d-13a548e0297f)
8 Losing My Real Father (#litres_trial_promo)
9 My Half-sister Sue (#litres_trial_promo)
10 On the Trail in Jersey (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Tea with the Renoufs (#litres_trial_promo)
12 A Disintegrating Marriage (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Making a Move (#litres_trial_promo)
14 A Larger-than-life Character (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Getting in Touch with Daisy (#litres_trial_promo)
16 The Boxing Day Meeting (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Daisy’s Story (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Meeting the Bartons (#litres_trial_promo)
19 A Wedding and a Funeral (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Looking for Sheila (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Making Peace with Billie (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Going Bust and Climbing Back Up Again (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Shadows Blot Out the Sun (#litres_trial_promo)
24 The Email (#litres_trial_promo)
25 The Professionals Take Over (#litres_trial_promo)
26 The Visit (#litres_trial_promo)
27 The Meeting at High Wycombe (#litres_trial_promo)
28 The Families Get Together (#litres_trial_promo)
29 My Jersey Family’s Wartime History (#litres_trial_promo)
30 Learning more about My Birth Mother (#litres_trial_promo)
31 September in Spain (#litres_trial_promo)
32 Bonding by the Pool (#litres_trial_promo)
33 Learning to Be Sisters in Our Seventies (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Moving Memoirs eNewsletter (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#u86f8dd10-bbde-5163-b86a-7bfaa87f2712)
One evening in May 2011, I was slumped on the sofa with my collies, Bear and Max, beside me, half-reading a book and half-dozing. It had been a long, busy day. I’m a very early riser because I’ve got two horses, Kali and Raz, in a stable down the road and they need to be rubbed down, mucked out, fed and taken to their field at the crack of dawn. Horses don’t like to hang around waiting while humans have a lie-in, so that’s the first thing I do in the morning, come rain, snow, hail or sunshine. Next there are the dogs to walk, and they’re big, energetic dogs who like a good, long run around. I help out at the local kennels and in exchange they let me leave Bear and Max with them if I have to go away somewhere. And I also pop in to look after some elderly folks in the area, including one lady with dementia. So for a 68-year-old I had a pretty full life. It did mean I wasn’t fit for much come the evening (by which time I’d got the horses and dogs back indoors, rubbed down, fed and so forth).
I don’t really watch much telly, but it’s sometimes turned on as background noise, just as company really because I live alone now. My set is only a tiny, portable one that I got third-hand from my daughter Helen, so it’s easy to ignore, but that evening I suddenly remembered that Long Lost Family, a programme that reunited estranged families, was on. I found the show fascinating because I had been searching for my own family for almost thirty years and knew what a difficult emotional journey it could be. I’d missed the beginning of the programme but on the screen a pretty, dark-haired woman was talking about her search for the mother who’d given her up for adoption back in the sixties.
‘I had a really happy childhood with my adoptive family,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’ve always felt different from them. They don’t look like me … I want there to be someone out there who looks a bit like me, who is a bit like me.’
Now, I knew that feeling of not entirely fitting in because I had been adopted by parents who didn’t particularly look like me, with whom I didn’t share any genetic features. Mum and Pop were a wonderful couple and I’d loved them to pieces, but both had passed away long ago.
On screen, the girl was saying she was anxious that if they tracked down her birth mother, the woman might not want to know her. I could identify with her anxiety because I’d been in that exact same situation. The more I’d probed into my own past, the more I’d hit brick walls and dead ends. I’d had some success – just enough to find out that I had a sister, Sheila, somewhere, but I had no idea where. I was determined to find her one day because I needed answers to all kinds of mysteries from my past, things that simply didn’t add up. I was a widow, with two wonderful children and four grandchildren of my own, but I had no family roots, no one of my generation or older to help me understand where I came from and to make me feel there was a family I belonged to. Basically, I was lonely, and I’d been lonely for much of my life since Mum had died. I’d been a lonely teenager, I’d had a lonely and difficult first marriage, and now at the age of sixty-eight I was on my own again.
On screen the presenter, Davina McCall, told the girl that they had finally found her birth mother, and I found my eyes filling with tears. It was odd, because I’m not the crying type. I’m so well practised at bottling up my emotions that they rarely see the light of day. I suppose this girl’s story touched a nerve for me because it was so close to my own.
The girl and her birth mother met in a park and gave each other a huge hug. The mum was murmuring, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ and I could tell they were both lovely, friendly people. They seemed very similar, and you could definitely see a family likeness. I hoped it would work out for them and that they’d find what they were looking for in each other.
The team did two searches in each programme and they succeeded in reuniting the family members in the other story as well. They always did. I’d run out of ideas, having tried everything I could possibly think of to find my missing sister.
And then at the end of the programme there was an announcement: ‘If you have a long-lost family member and would like to take part in the next series, please email us at this address.’ I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and scribbled it down. Fortunately, I always have paper and a pen lying around to write notes to remind myself of things I would otherwise forget.
I picked up the phone and rang my daughter Helen. ‘Were you just watching telly?’ I asked. She was, but a different programme, so I explained to her what I’d seen.
‘That’s funny!’ Helen said. ‘You were telling me just the other day that you must do something about finding Sheila. It’s as if this is a sign.’
I felt the same way myself. ‘Will you email them for me?’ I asked. I had a computer but it hadn’t been working for ages and I felt no pressing need to get it fixed. I was more of an outdoorsy person than a desk type. ‘You know all about my story.’
‘OK, Mum. I’ll do it tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they could find Sheila? I’d have a new auntie!’
‘Oh, I don’t think they will,’ I said. ‘It’s all too late and too long ago. But it would be interesting to let them try. They might have methods I haven’t thought of …’
‘Yeah, like using the internet,’ Helen said with a sarcastic edge to her voice.
‘You never know. I’ll call you tomorrow, Nell.’
As I got into bed, I couldn’t help picturing myself on the programme at that moment when you meet your family member against a beautiful backdrop. It would be so wonderful if they found Sheila. I’d always wanted a sibling, and I’d been searching for her for almost thirty years now. It nagged away at me, something I couldn’t let go of, a piece of unfinished business.
But then I told myself sternly not to get my hopes up. The television company must get hundreds of requests and they can only take on a few; and I simply didn’t believe they’d be able to find Sheila. It was safer not to have any expectations so that I wasn’t disappointed later. And that’s all I had time to think before I fell into a sound sleep.
1
Mum Looks Like a Chinaman (#u86f8dd10-bbde-5163-b86a-7bfaa87f2712)
I was a war baby, who used to scream when woken by the wail of the air-raid sirens and the middle-of-the-night dash for cover. Dad told me that he and Mum normally huddled under the stairs until the all-clear sounded, but one night, for some reason, he decided that we should all go to the neighbourhood shelter – and it was just as well he did because that night our house took a direct hit and the stairwell was destroyed. The top of the shelter we were in collapsed and rubble showered down on us, but no one inside was hurt. If it hadn’t been for Dad’s last-minute decision my story, which began with my birth in March 1943, would have been a brief one.
We’d been living in Hayes, Middlesex, but after the bombing the Red Cross billeted us with a family in Uxbridge, next to the railway line. We had the back scullery and front bedroom, and my earliest memory is of standing up in a makeshift cot, looking out the window at the lights of the trains trundling past. It must have been tough for my parents; they’d salvaged any possessions they could from the wreck of our house, but like many other families at the time they’d lost most of their furniture, kitchenware, clothes and prized personal possessions. Dad retrieved all the scrap wood he could to make new furniture, but many things simply couldn’t be replaced. Meanwhile, Mum had me to take care of. She said I was a greedy baby and she struggled to get extra rations of national dried milk to feed me; I also scratched incessantly if there was wool next to my skin, but it didn’t prove easy to find substitute fabrics for vests in wartime.
The war influenced us all in another way as well: I was only being brought up by my mum and dad, Dorothy and Ernest Vousden, because the woman who had given birth to me was unable to look after me. Mum said that the first time they went to see me I was in a grubby little cot wearing a dirty nightie. She and Dad couldn’t have any children of their own and desperately wanted me, so they took me to live with them when I was just a few weeks old then adopted me in a court of law. This was explained right from the start, and it never bothered me in the slightest. On the contrary, I felt lucky because I had two wonderful loving parents who doted on me.
‘Where is my real mum, then?’ I asked Dad sometimes, and he always replied, ‘In the land where the tigers grow.’ That sounded reasonable to me.
We moved to Salisbury, Wiltshire, which is where I started school at Devizes Road Primary. Dad got a good job as the representative of a leading aviation company, Fairey Aviation, at RAF Boscombe Down, where top-secret experimental aircraft were tested, and Mum was a stay-at-home mother who cooked wonderful meals, baked cakes, knitted, sewed, crocheted and generally took the best of care of us. She made most of my clothes by hand and taught me how to knit and crochet myself. Once a week she washed my hair in rainwater to make it shine, and used a product called Curly Top in a futile attempt to give me curls. Her own hair was worn in what was known as a ‘victory roll’, sweeping off the forehead into two lavish loops on top. She was a statuesque lady who always dressed smartly, in hat and gloves, when we went out somewhere, and she made sure I looked spick and span as well.
Mum was very musical and she’d be singing as she sharpened the knives on our back doorstep, scrubbed the sheets on Monday wash day, or sewed new outfits for me on her Singer sewing machine. She taught me all the old wartime music-hall songs: ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ and ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’. She played the piano beautifully, and at bedtime, after Dad had read me a story, Mum would play a song on the piano to lull me to sleep. My favourite was one called ‘Rendezvous’. I loved to drift off with the sound of the piano floating up from downstairs.
From my earliest years, I simply loved animals. We had a Corgi called Bunty and a cat called Dinky, who stood in as my playmates since I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Horses were always my favourite, though. I used to pretend that I was riding a horse in the porch at home, and I made a beeline for any horses and donkeys I spotted when we were out. Finally, when I was eight years old, Mum let me start riding lessons at the local stables and I was overwhelmed with excitement. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me in a life that was pretty good already, and I took to the saddle like a duck to water. I wasn’t spoiled, mind – I’d be swiped on the back of the legs with a hairbrush if I was misbehaving – but I was very, very loved.
Although I was christened Paulette, Dad called me his little ‘Cherryanna’ and the name stuck. Soon it was only teachers who called me Paulette and to everyone else I was ‘Cherry’. I called him ‘Pop’, and I was definitely a daddy’s girl, who cherished the time I spent with him. Each morning before breakfast we’d go out into the garden and walk round, inspecting the pond, deadheading the flowers and checking to see what had ripened in the vegetable patch. He’d pull up some carrots, wipe one on his hankie and hand it to me, saying, ‘Eat that, Cherryanna!’ In autumn he’d stretch up and pluck me a rosy apple from the tree, polishing it on his sleeve till it shone. When we went back indoors for breakfast, he’d sit on the stairs and carefully clean the mud from my shoes for me. Then on Sunday mornings, when he wasn’t in a rush to get to work, I’d climb into their bed and Pop would bring up tea and chocolate biscuits and play ‘camels’, with me sitting on his knees and riding up and down.
He was a talented carpenter, and one of my most prized possessions was an elaborate doll’s house he made me, a bungalow with a garden around it, and when you took the roof off you could see all the furniture inside. It was so detailed that there was even a little sundial in the garden, just as we had in our own garden.
I’m a visual person and all these memories are vivid pictures I carry around in my head, pictures that bring a sense of warmth and happiness and belonging. I also have a clear picture from the age of eight of a time when Mum and I were out sitting by the pond in the garden. I noticed her skin was all yellow and I said, ‘Mum, you look like a Chinaman.’* (#ulink_3ee19ba6-7315-50ba-9c67-056850c3a9fb) Later I overheard her repeating my comment to Pop and both of them laughing, but I couldn’t understand why it was funny. No one ever mentioned the words ‘liver cancer’ to me, not till I was much older, and I wouldn’t have known what they meant anyway.
