My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (36 page)

‘Yes, it’s been ages, hasn’t it?’ continued Sam. He has a way of keeping situations like this going. It was interesting to watch.

‘Aye, I suppose so,’ she agreed, still uncertain.

I breathed a sigh of relief that at least she hadn’t slammed the door in his face, but of course she didn’t know who we were yet.

‘There is someone here who wants to meet you.’ Sam turned and beckoned me forward. ‘Jennifer.’

It was like a shutter on a camera. Suddenly she was all smiles, her arms outstretched. She knew who I was. That was the moment I knew it was going to be fine.

She took me in her arms, hugged me and kissed me.

‘Ee, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. So sorry I gave you away.’ She kept repeating it. ‘You must understand how hard it was. You have to forgive me.’

I was astonished at this reception after those previous rejections, but I didn’t dwell on that, just took her at face value now. She accepted me that day. It was all that mattered.

‘There’s no need for an apology,’ I said.

‘But I am so sorry.’

‘Please don’t keep saying sorry. And you don’t have to ask for forgiveness. I understand. It’s all right. I’ve had a happy life – great parents, a lovely marriage and three wonderful children.’

As she gave me another warm hug, the relief and joy after all those years flooded through me. I was stunned by the turnaround.

‘Well, come in,’ she said, with a furtive look around to see if anyone was watching. ‘Come inside.’ She almost pulled us in and hugged us all in turn, then back to me again. It was as if she couldn’t quite believe I was there, and I felt the same. After fifty-five years, we were finally reunited and I couldn’t believe it was real.

I was on a roller coaster that afternoon – my emotions were up and down all over the place. We couldn’t stop looking at each other, Mercia and I. How strange to write that phrase, Mercia and I. And I shed a lot of tears, but there wasn’t a single tear from Mercia, and although she was welcoming, she seemed very apprehensive about something and kept looking at her watch.

There were so many questions, so much I wanted to find out, but when I began to ask, she was reticent to give anything away. ‘There’s something I really want to know,’ I started.

‘You can’t stay long,’ she interrupted with an anxious look. ‘But here, sit down and look at these photos.’ She got down all the family photos on display and told me who they were. ‘This is ma husband, Tommy, who died in South Africa. And this photo is of my two bairns when they were young and we lived in Seghill.’

‘I was born before you married Tommy, wasn’t I?’

‘Aye, that’s right.’ She looked uncomfortable that I had raised this subject and wary of what else I might say. I noticed that her hands were fidgeting together.

‘So who—’

‘Shhh.’ She stood up and listened, then sat down again. ‘I thought that was someone at the door.’

I wanted so much to know who my father was, but I realized she didn’t want to tell me. She seemed almost scared. I couldn’t press it, as I was afraid of turning her against me once more. I sensed the whole scenario was fragile, so I trod carefully.

Mercia’s television had been on when we arrived and of course she’d switched it off, so I asked her what she liked to watch.

‘Ee, there’s not much on in the day, unless there’s some tennis or golf. I like watching the golf – that’s my favourite.’

‘Did you know that Jenny was a champion golfer?’ asked Sam.

‘No . . .’ She looked perplexed.

‘Yes, you’ve probably seen her on the TV, a few years ago. She played at all the major championships, mostly in America.’

‘Did she now?’ Her expression changed to one akin to pride. ‘Well, I probably might have seen her then.’

Sam kept the conversation going with his bright banter as she showed us photos of her two grandchildren, my children’s cousins. She gave no names and I wanted to ask more, but I didn’t dare. Sam kept things light-hearted with his jokes, so I was crying and laughing by turns, and Mercia enjoyed the banter too, but I sensed her increasing uneasiness. She was on edge about something, and soon we discovered what it was.

‘My daughter Helen is staying here at the moment. She’s a nurse at the Nuffield hospital. She may come home at any moment. Please don’t say who you are,’ Mercia pleaded. ‘She doesn’t know anything about you.’

‘No,’ I promised. ‘We won’t say anything.’

It was a strange meeting, and a situation that seemed almost unreal. At times I felt somehow detached from it all, as if looking down from above. Here was the woman who had given birth to me, and probably held me in those first precious moments of my life, yet I didn’t know her. I felt dizzy with all the new names I’d heard, and the photo faces seemed to blur together as Mercia talked on about all these people who were my relations that I didn’t have a clue about.

She looked happy to meet her grandchildren, and we took photos of all of us with her. I still have those photos. A couple of years later, I learned that the jeans draped to dry over Mercia’s radiator in the background of one of the photos were Helen’s jeans.

‘Helen will be on her way home. Please go before she comes,’ she told us three or four times, very restless. We kept trying to reassure her, but eventually we felt she’d had enough and it was time to go. So one last hug and I walked away from my birth mother with very few answers, but at least we had met and made up, I thought.

We left with no sign of Helen, but her name was engraved on my brain. I should have been elated, but instead I felt drained, with a distinct sense that I’d been short-changed and that Mercia had got the better of me.

‘What did you think of her?’ I asked Sam as we were driving away from Mercia’s house. He always tries to lighten any emotional situation by making a joke of some kind, so I should have known not to bother asking him for a serious answer.

Sam turned to me with his head to one side. ‘Now I know what you’ll look like when you’re eighty-four!’

When I got back home, I remembered what Mercia had said about Helen being a theatre nurse at the Nuffield and I rang them to help me trace her, but of course they couldn’t, because the name I gave was Helen Lumsden. I knew nothing about Helen. She had probably married, and, if so, I didn’t know her full name. I’d had several operations at the Nuffield myself over the years, so it was quite a coincidence and I wondered if perhaps we’d met, though when I thought a bit more about it I realized there must have been hundreds of nurses working there, so it would have been a real long shot. I had to accept I’d hit a dead-end.

CHAPTER 32

Helen

The Time Machine

After the divorce, it took me some time to adjust. I had never lived alone before and, at the age of fifty-two I felt a strange mixture of apprehension and anticipation. I was excited to be mistress of my own destiny, but where did I go from here? What would my future hold?

Simon and I sold our family home, and I took a flat high up in a Victorian building on the seafront at Tynemouth with a wonderful seascape view. I loved my new flat and my freedom there. I ate my breakfast by the bay window, with its wide, open outlook, and as I watched the early sun cast its light across the bay, it filled me with optimism for my new life.

Forced to give up nursing because of my back, I had trained and qualified as a hypnotherapist and psychotherapist. As part of the training, I had to be counselled myself, which I felt very wary of. I didn’t know how I would take it, with my background, since I usually preferred not to mull over the past.

Throughout the sessions I was told I seemed a pretty capable person who coped very well with things. In one way I was surprised – but I was also relieved. I knew my determination and positive attitude had always helped me through, and I was well aware that everyone has issues in their life, so I knew I wasn’t the only one in the world with problems. I found it difficult at first to talk about the things that had happened, but it felt easier, somehow, with a stranger. I’ve never talked about my childhood much with my children. That’s different, isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to upset them.

I took up my new career as a therapist over the next two years and found it very rewarding to see people getting better when I helped them to recognize their psychological difficulties.

After George died, his widow Joan was so lonely that she went to live in Fort Worth, Texas to be near her children and their families. We had always been close, and we were especially so now. I went over to visit her whenever I could.

On one visit to see Joan, I met Dennis. He was a Vietnam war veteran, badly affected both physically and mentally by his experiences in Vietnam, and he’d been awarded an honourable discharge. Once he was a civilian again, he spent twenty years working as an educational diagnostician with special needs children, during which time he continued to battle with his own post-traumatic stress disorder. He had finally come out of that tunnel just before we met. We got to know one another and our friendship quickly developed into a relationship, which over the course of a few months blossomed into marriage. We didn’t see the point in waiting around for life to pass us by.

While preparing to go and live in America, I talked with the children quite a lot. I think the idea of my moving over there was hard for them at first, although they were very supportive at the time. I felt guilty that first their parents had divorced, and now their mam was going to live in a different country. It was a difficult thing to do, to leave them behind like that, but I knew they were both secure in their own lives, in their relationships and their own homes.

I said to them both, ‘Pick up the phone and I’ll be back on the next flight.’

Scott nodded and Donna, being very stubborn at the time, said, ‘Well, I can’t imagine anything that we would need you for!’

Finally I broke the news to my mother, prepared to counter her pleading and recriminations. But her response was very strange and against all my expectations.

‘How exciting,’ she smiled. ‘That will be a lovely move for you. Just what you need – a new start. When are you going? I bet you can’t wait.’

This knocked me off balance. I didn’t know how to take it. I found myself almost resentful, wondering if she actually wanted me out of the way for some reason. I couldn’t believe it would be this easy, but it was.

So it was all arranged. This was my break. Here, finally, was the opportunity to have a new life of my own, unsullied by my mother’s presence.

I moved over to Texas, where we built a beautiful house on a golf course and I opened an antique shop, a growing interest of ours. I enjoyed my work and had a happy marriage. This was a good life.

By now my mother had been moved into a purpose-built ground-floor flat in a modern building in Whitley Bay, with her own front door opening onto the street. I remember her amusement when she first realized she now lived on the site where the laundry had been, where she had injured her leg all those years before.

I think she felt more independent than in her previous place. She didn’t go out much, but she did make a few friends amongst her neighbours. Both Scott and Donna visited their grandma regularly and made sure she was all right. I travelled back several times to see them all. I always stayed at my mother’s flat, where I slept on her sofa.

I remember arriving home one day, late in the afternoon, to find her rather more pleased than usual to see me. I noticed she’d had the photographs out. She seemed nervous, on edge, and I thought this was curious.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked her. ‘Did you have a good day?’

‘So-so,’ was all she said.

I did my usual thing of falling asleep on the sofa as I watched TV that evening. When I awoke, my mother was standing next to me. She was looking intently at my face, staring, as if searching for something in my features or expression. She was startled when I opened my eyes and caught her gaze. It seems odd to say it, but I felt as if she had drained me of something. I was unnerved. She recovered her detached expression and went out to the kitchen. I puzzled over this for a while, but couldn’t think of any reason for her strange behaviour. She never did explain.

Sometimes Dennis came back with me to visit my family. Of course I’d told him about my mother and what she had been like with me as a child, but he took her as he saw her, ‘a nice old lady’ who brought him cups of tea and biscuits. He used to tease her a lot, and she always enjoyed being the centre of attention, so she liked him. Sometimes he really took the mickey out of her and she loved that.

In between my visits back to see her, I called her regularly, though our conversations were often hard work.

‘Hello, it’s me. How are you getting on?’

‘I’m all right.’ Silence.

She never initiated any part of the dialogue, so talking to her felt like pushing a car stuck in mud.

In the summer of 2004 I came back to England for my daughter Donna’s wedding. As usual, I slept on my mother’s sofa. I stayed for a few weeks to keep her company and catch up with friends.

A few days after I’d returned to Texas, Mercia came down with pneumonia. She didn’t see a doctor when she was first unwell, so by the time she was admitted to hospital she was seriously ill. If I had stayed longer, I’d have noticed and called the doctor straightaway, so I felt it was my fault because I hadn’t been there. I hadn’t been there when my father died, and now I was guilty of not being with my mother when she needed me. I was a trained nurse, so I knew what pneumonia could mean at her age.

Scott and Donna updated me daily.

‘We visited her today. She was sitting up and pleased to see us.’

‘Did she ask for me?’

‘No.’

‘She’s probably cross with me.’

‘The nurse said she’s doing well.’

‘OK. Let me know if there’s any change. If she’s recovering well, I’ll wait to come over when she comes out of hospital so I can nurse her. If she gets any worse, let me know and I’ll catch the next flight.’

Suddenly, her condition deteriorated. I left Houston at seven in the evening on a plane that was due to arrive in London at seven-thirty the next morning, and for the duration of the flight I could neither settle nor sleep, unable to shake off the melancholy that embraced me.