33 Learning to Be Sisters in Our Seventies
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
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