My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (33 page)

All the time we were on holiday, every day was a worry as George insisted on going everywhere with us, even on a long day’s trip to Sea World. He couldn’t disguise his fatigue and, barely able to walk, soon exhausted himself with the effort.

That night my brave brother said to me, ‘I can’t believe this kiddo. I thought I was invincible.’

The day we left Florida, I had a last chat with Joan. ‘If you need anything, Joan, if you want to talk, or think I should come, I’ll be on the next plane.’

She nodded as she choked back her tears, unable to speak as we hugged goodbye.

It was only a few short weeks later when the call came. ‘George is very ill. Can you come?’

I was on the next flight.

From the moment I arrived, Joan and I between us spent every minute of the day and night with my beloved brother. He was desperately ill, on maximum medication for his pain, and suffering badly. We took turns to have short naps, but he always had one of us awake with him, ready to soothe and care for him.

One morning, after I’d had a bit of sleep, I walked into his bedroom to see his face contorted with pain. He was semi-delirious.

‘Get out of here!’ he screamed. ‘Get out. I don’t want you here. I don’t want to see your face. It brings all the bad memories back.’

I ran from the room in tears. I knew it was not really him talking – it was the medication – but I was distraught.

Joan soothed him and stroked him, at the same time telling him off. ‘You shouldn’t speak to Helen like that. She has flown a long way to be here for you. She loves you dearly.’

I composed myself as well as I could, went back into the bedroom and walked over to George’s side.

He looked up at me with tears in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart.’

In spite of having the best care we could give him, George’s condition deteriorated daily. At this point we arranged for some hospice nurses to come in to take on the bulk of his nursing care and give us a break. Overwrought with emotion, we needed to have some rest so that we could be there for him whenever he was awake. One afternoon, in between nurses, I sat with him, holding him while he cried with the pain.

I stroked his forehead with the slightest touch. ‘George, if I could take your pain for just one day, I would.’

‘I know.’ His expression took on an eerie determination. ‘Go and get my gun.’

‘No, George. I can’t do that.’

Defeated by everything, he slumped back and began to give up.

For his fifty-fifth birthday, three days before he died, his children, Barry and Ross, brought him a huge bunch of balloons. He loved them. We tied the whole bunch to the end of his bed so he could see them.

Over the next two days, Joan and I held vigil with him in the final stages of his illness. One of the nurses beckoned me out of the room at one point. I motioned to Joan to come and join us.

‘The doctors are arranging to take him into hospital,’ said the nurse. ‘They want to put him on a ventilator to make his breathing easier, and they will put in an intravenous line to feed him.’

‘Oh no,’ gasped Joan. ‘Can’t he stay here? Let him die here.’

‘Surely it will not prolong his life more than a few days, at most?’ I added. ‘He wants to die in his own home, to die with dignity.’

‘I’ll tell them when I go back. I’m not sure what they’ll say.’

When the nurse had gone, we agreed to put this new threat out of our thoughts and focus our attention on George. Thankfully, we didn’t need to worry about fighting with the medics. George died peacefully in his own bed that night, at midnight, just as a Florida storm swept in.

After a few minutes of weeping together, comforting each other, Joan and I took his balloons out onto the windswept verandah. We loosened the ribbon and released them. ‘We’re letting him go,’ Joan shouted, against the noise of the storm.

Whipped away by the gale, we watched them as they rose, buffeted by the squalls, up into the night sky. We stood together, arm in arm, his wife and his ‘kid sister’, and gazed into the darkness until long after they had disappeared into the void. Then the winds changed direction and started blowing straight at us, so we turned and went back into the house.

Next morning, I woke early. All was quiet. The storm had passed and Joan was still asleep. Overcome with grief, I went out for a solitary walk around the garden in the sunshine. At first, deep in my own thoughts, I didn’t really take in my surroundings . . . until I turned the corner of the house. There, in front of me, were George’s balloons, all of them, their ribbons tangled round a shrub under his bedroom window; the bedroom where he had passed away just a few hours before. I bent down to pick them up, pulled the ribbons apart, walked onto the open lawn and let the balloons go again. I can’t describe the lurch inside me when they hovered in front of my face, motionless. I pushed them away. Still they did not move.

I felt a tug on my arm and looked down. The ribbons had wrapped themselves several times around my forearm. It felt as if he was holding on. Then I saw that there was a plastic clip that held them together. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? I loosened the clip and said, ‘You have to go now, George. We are all OK.’

Was it my imagination? As I let them go they seemed to bob in the air as if nodding a goodbye to me. Slowly, silently, the balloons drifted away, one by one, into the wide blue sky. I watched until the last one disappeared from sight. My brother was gone.

I still have the clip that held those balloons. I shall never part with it.

When I went back into the house, Joan was just getting up. I turned the clip over and over in my hands.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

I told her what had happened. ‘This is the clip that was holding the balloons. It stopped them from flying free.’

‘There was something between you and George,’ she said, giving me a quizzical look. ‘Something that neither Simon nor I can penetrate. You two were
so
close.’ She paused, tears running down her cheeks. ‘You know, he was always protective of you. I think he came back for you. To check you would be all right.’

We wept together.

As I returned home to England and slipped back into my life with Simon, there was an empty space in my heart. George and I had, for much of our lives, lived on different continents, but he’d always been there for me and his love had always comforted me. Now I had no sisters or brothers to share my triumphs or my troubles with. My mother was a permanent fixture in the midst of my marriage and, despite having my family around me, I felt more alone than ever.

Forced to retire from my job with serious back problems, I was often at home now, but my mother still came every day and sat around in our living room, a cuckoo in our nest. No amount of hinting sank in. She chose not to hear. We were so oppressed by her perpetual presence that we often had to resort to our timeworn method and get in the car and go out for a drive, just to get away from her. When we arrived home again some hours later, she was always still there.

The damage was insidious over many years. The children grew up and left home, each to places of their own. By this time, Simon and I were like two old friends – a pair of worn-out slippers, faded and frayed. I was wrung out. There was nothing left any more. We just padded along, day after day.

With the children gone, we both began to realize we had been unhappy for a very long time. And once the realization hit, there didn’t seem any point in pretending.

One evening I said, ‘We can’t continue like this. We’re not doing each other any good.’

And that was the way it happened – a mutual decision. There was a lot of sadness and turmoil for both of us. Deep down, I was very emotional about it all, but I’d spent so many years not showing my emotions that I kept a calm front, as usual. I feel that maybe Simon was more reluctant than I was. I think it’s sometimes more difficult for a man in his early fifties to start again. Women are more independent in that way. For him, it was a bit of a culture shock having to start looking after himself, but he didn’t resist the split. And I knew it was the right thing to do.

After thirty-two years of marriage, we went through an amicable divorce. It is a wonder to me that we survived under such extreme pressures for so long. Scott and Donna were stunned. They were both unhappy about it, but by now Scott was thirty-one and Donna was twenty-eight – they had left home and had their own lives, which lessened the hurt. When I told my mother we were going to be divorced, however, she didn’t take it well.

‘How could you do this to me?’ she ranted. ‘You’ve brought shame on me.’

I could not speak to her for quite some time after that.

We put our house up for sale and began to plan our separate lives, uncertain what lay ahead.

CHAPTER 30

Jenny

The Illegal Immigrant

Just as everything settled down into a comfortable routine, with the children thriving, us newly married and our house fitted out, Sam began to feel restless. I understood how he felt. Here we were, blessed with our lovely home and family, while there were so many in less fortunate circumstances. Sam had a yearning to do something, to redress that balance. We talked about it, of course, and agreed that he should look around for a project to take on.

By chance, he met my gynaecologist. Sam knew that he had some charity involvement in Romania, teaching young doctors over there, so he broached the subject with him.

‘I’d like to do some charity work, or help with a building project. Any ideas?’

‘Sam, I’ve got just the thing for you.’ He knew Sam had a construction company. ‘I’m off to Romania next week. If you like, I’ll put you in touch with some of the guys out there. Maybe you could refurbish a hospital or something like that.’

It was all agreed, and Sam went over to Romania to see what was needed. A charity worker picked him up from the airport and took him to a town called Brasov, where there was a dilapidated building with barred windows, crumbling plaster and virtually no plumbing. This place had been ignored by the authorities for longer than anyone knew. It was in fact an institution for the incarceration of innocent children who had been abandoned there, often with a minor illness, and forgotten. They were living out their childhoods in the most appalling conditions. Most of the staff were unskilled locals, on minimal wages, often not paid at all.

Sam phoned me that first evening in tears. I’d never seen him cry, and to hear him sob as he spoke, unable to hug him, was heart-wrenching. He tried to tell me about what he had seen in the hospital.

‘It’s unbelievable,’ he began. ‘As parents of young children . . . just to see these kids, you can’t believe how upsetting it is. They have nothing. No medicines, no toys, no attention, no facilities, no hope. They are all in an awful state.

‘They are two or three to an iron cot, up to three years old. Not walking or standing, just rocking backwards and forwards, all day long.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got to help them. We could do so much here. Renovate the building, do the place up, put in hot water and everything. We could beg toys and games, clothes and furnishings to take over . . .’

By now, tears were falling down my cheeks, tears of sorrow and tears of guilt. Our beloved children had everything, and the children at Brasov had nothing. Above all, it seemed they had no love.

‘When I get back home,’ he continued, ‘ I’ll ring round all my suppliers and get them to donate the things we need – the paints, shower-trays, plumbing, electric cables, light-fittings, tools, everything. We’ll have to try and get hold of the right medicines too.’

And that’s what he did. When he told the story of what he had seen, everyone wanted to help. He filled the first lorry with £100,000 worth of donated goods and equipment and drove it over there, at our expense. Even our own daughter, Katie, donated her tricycle to give to a child in the Brasov hospital. We helped her to load it onto the lorry herself, along with other toys donated by friends.

Of course I wanted to go with Sam this time; I needed to support him and to see for myself, so I arranged care for the children and we flew out together. A charity worker met us at the airport and drove us to Brasov just in time to see our lorry arrive.

There were several more trips over the following months, but this was the visit that changed our lives.

When we arrived, Sam took me straight into the hospital. My eyes took a moment to adjust from the sudden contrast of the bright April sunlight to the dark interior, but then I began to notice the condensation running down the walls and the worst stench you can imagine. I shuddered. I can still smell it now – it will never leave me when I think of that place. I fought to control the nausea that welled up inside.

As my eyes accustomed to the gloom, I began to see the squalor all around. Even though I knew from Sam what to expect, I could not have been prepared for this – the echoing wails of neglected babies, the filth and degradation everywhere. Cockroaches ran across the floor, around our feet, in the babies’ cots, crowding the kitchens and bathrooms. There were five hundred patients in the hospital, but only six bathrooms and six toilets. All of these were beyond cleaning.

As I went into the rooms where the youngest children were kept, I could see their stained faces, hollow from lack of nourishment, their legs skinny from lack of muscle. As Sam had described, their eyes were empty. A rare carer sped in and out again as quickly as possible, with no eye contact, not showing any care or compassion. Certainly no love. The toddlers, who had no stimulation and were unable to bond with an adult, swayed rhythmically in a trance, just as Sam had described.

I looked at these destitute infants and thought of my own two healthy children at home. Suddenly overcome with it all, I ran through the hallway and out into the clean air and sunshine, where I sat on the kerb and sobbed. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t speak – just cried and cried. It was all so unfair, so unthinkable that children should be left to suffer like this, day after day, year after year. I was overwhelmed with the knowledge that whatever we did, we couldn’t help them all. This was just one place. There must be loads of others like it.