My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (38 page)

Now she was real and I could talk to her properly at last. I wrote my reply and sent it.

From: helen

To: jenlucas

Sent: Thursday 12 April 2007, 5:37

Subject: Mercia Lumsden

Dear Jenny,

Your email came as a complete shock to me. I have not yet stopped shaking. I knew nothing about this. My head is spinning with questions, so far unanswered.

May I ask where you got my email address from and how you found me? Please tell me what information you have acquired from your investigations, and I will try to fll in the blanks. I just feel so very sad that I have never known you.

To discover, after all these years, that I may have a sister is overwhelming. That my mother had never told me of this is beyond belief.

Please write soon and hopefully by then I will have recovered a little and will be able to call you.

Helen

Jenny

As I logged on, I smiled, with relief . . . delight. Here was Helen’s reply. I noticed how early in the morning she’d sent it. I was amazed – just amazed. She must be keen . . . or was it a ‘don’t contact me again’ sort of reply, like Mercia’s letter had been? My shoulders were tense as I sat down and opened it. Phew! I relaxed as soon as I start to read it through. She was obviously shaken by the situation, but it was a positive reply.

Helen told me recently that she kept that first email from me and her reply. I was shocked . . . and touched.

After all these years, the door was now open and I started to write back again straightaway. First of all I answered Helen’s questions about how I found out about her and how I later came by her email address. To protect Melanie, I had to tell Helen a bit of a fib, saying that Sam had got it from a private detective. I hoped she’d understand. (Actually we did get some help from a detective guy that Sam knows, so it wasn’t far from the truth.) In the rest of the email I told Helen about myself and my life, especially my childhood. I didn’t want her to think I felt hard done by, or that I envied her the childhood she spent with our mother. None of that mattered now. I just wanted this to be the new start I’d been yearning for since I was fourteen, to build a relationship with one of my own birth family at last. I wondered what she was like, and hoped we’d get along with each other.

From: jenlucas

To: helen

Sent: Thursday 12 April 2007, 11:59 +0100

Subject: Mercia Lumsden

Dear Helen

I know all this must have come as a great shock and can understand how you are feeling. It seemed like every avenue I tried, I hit a brick wall. All the adoption lines, etc. I started going on the internet, every site imaginable. Nothing came back at all. Finally my husband sent for Mercia’s death certificate, and of course I found that her maiden name was Bradshaw.

When we met Mercia, she mentioned her daughter Helen. She told me you were a nurse and that you had worked at the Nuffield hospital in Newcastle. I have had your name fixed in my brain ever since.

I was brought up as an only child, always wishing for brothers and sisters. I found out at 14 that I was adopted and since that point have had this empty void in my life. Don’t get me wrong. I have had a very happy life. But it’s hard to explain. I have never felt I belonged anywhere. I had a fantastic childhood with really good parents. Later on I bought a house in Cramlington, only two miles from Seghill, where I was born. (I didn’t know this at the time.) I played golf for my living as Jenny Lee Smith (mainly in America, on the LPGA tour).

My dad died when I was 12. I was very close to my mum and out of respect to her did not want to start searching seriously until she passed away. My adoption was a taboo subject in the family and was never spoken about. A great shame really. Mercia gave me my name, Jennifer, and my parents kept it.

Getting back to how I found you, my husband Sam spoke to a private detective and he found out all the rest (including your email address – don’t ask me how!)

Like you, I feel very strange to find my family after all this time. But I would love to talk to you and maybe we can catch up on some of the lost time. I hope you are not in too much turmoil – I certainly am.

Jenny

Helen

It was wonderful receiving this second email so soon, and I was very glad to learn that Jenny had had a happy childhood. But what should I tell her about mine? It wouldn’t be fair to burden her with my experiences straightaway, not until we knew each other better. We had so much to learn and to share – I didn’t want to scare her off before we began. The time would come to talk about our mother. But not yet. I still hadn’t got used to the fact that Mercia was mother to both of us – perhaps a better mother to Jenny, in giving her away, than to me.

Why didn’t she tell me about Jenny? Did she think I’d never find out? How could she have done that to me? Mercia denied me this knowledge; denied us both. Why didn’t Grandma tell me? Why didn’t any of my aunts, uncles or older cousins say anything about it? They must have known. Did she persuade them to conspire with her in keeping such a huge secret from me? And what other secrets might there be?

This revelation of finding my half-sister and learning about her happy childhood brought back all the painful memories of my past. Things I hadn’t thought about for years. Memories I preferred to erase . . .

Over the next few days, emails flew to and fro between us, adding more and more details of our lives and families. It was a glorious awakening, like opening the curtains on a sunny morning, but better still. Out of the darkness came light.

Jenny told me about her search for her birth mother, our mother, and how she had found out about me. She told me she had had her children late because she had been a professional golfer. It was obvious that she had enjoyed a highly successful career in golf, though she was characteristically modest about it. Only when I looked her up on the internet did I discover she’d won all these prestigious championships. Mercia had always loved watching golf on the TV. I wondered if she ever knew.

But there was one big thing I kept to myself in those first few weeks: I didn’t tell Jenny about my upbringing. I needed to get to know her better before I could confront her with all that.

Jenny

We exchanged phone numbers, but I don’t remember if it was that day or the next that we first spoke to each other. We both recognized the enormity of the occasion, the importance of finding each other at last. An ending and a beginning. We were keen to catch up on lost time, To continue together the search for those missing pieces of our story, the hidden truths.

It was a special moment, hearing my half-sister’s voice at last. Though a little shaky at first, Helen’s voice sounded wonderfully warm and caring, and I was surprised by the calming effect it had on me. I could detect my own accent in her voice, unaffected by the years she had lived in Texas. Hearing this familiar Geordie twang really put me at my ease, but my excitement bubbled up again as I fired myriad questions at her and she asked me as many back, if not more. Within minutes we were both in full flow and laughing easily together. It felt amazing – what a thrill! Helen was definitely more matter-of-fact than I was that day, but I suppose she was still trying to work things out as we spoke. After all, I’d had years to prepare for this conversation, but she must have been still in shock.

She wanted to know more about my visit to Mercia that day with Sam and the children, so I explained about her welcome, her apologies, how she had talked us through the various photos on display and her concern that Helen might come home early.

‘She was so worried that you would come back and find us there. We had to promise not to let on who we were.’

‘If I had come back and seen you there with Mercia, I would have known,’ said Helen. ‘I’m sure I would have known. In the photos you emailed me, you look so like her.’

‘Mercia said you were working at the Nuffield Hospital and would be back any minute.’

‘But I wasn’t working there any more. I was just on a quick visit to the north-east from Texas and had gone out that afternoon. I wonder why she lied to you? But it’s true I could have come back at any moment. I wish I had.’

We exchanged information about our lives, our husbands, our children, even our dogs. We discovered we were both mad keen on dogs, and even had pets of the same breed.

I finally found out the identity of the mystery name on Mercia’s death certificate: ‘So the Donna who registered

Mercia’s death was your daughter?’

‘Yes,’ explained Helen. ‘Because I was on the way back from Texas when Mercia died.’

‘If it had been your name, I’d probably have found you even sooner,’ I said.

Helen

The first time I heard Jenny’s voice was eerie. She sounded just like my mother – it was my mother’s voice. We were both a bit tongue-tied to start with. All those years . . . where do you begin? But we soon got talking, and we haven’t stopped since! One of the things we discussed was Jenny’s research to find me. She told me about the Genes Reunited message that she received from Melanie.

‘So what did Melanie actually say?’

‘She told me that she was my cousin, our cousin, of course. And she said that I also had a brother called George and another sister called Patricia.’

‘Another sister?’ I gasped.

‘Yes. I assumed you knew about her.’

‘No. I had no idea. No idea at all. Who is she? Do you know anything about her?’

‘Only that her father was an American airman.’ She told me Patricia’s surname.

‘What?’ I couldn’t believe it. It was as if something had my stomach in a grip. I felt clammy and sick. This Patricia had been brought up as a distant cousin, a few years older than me. We grew up together. She was often there at family gatherings, but we were usually kept apart. I never thought it strange at the time, but now I realized why.

Once I’d recovered from this startling news, I couldn’t wait to find out more. From my home in Texas I started on some internet research of my own. It took me ages, but eventually I managed to track Patricia down through her marriages and the electoral roll. Nobody in the family seemed to know her address, but one cousin had a vague idea she was still in the north-east. That was enough for me to be fairly sure I had located the right person.

‘I’ve found Patricia,’ I told Jenny on the phone.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m all packed up to fly to Northumberland tomorrow anyway – I’m moving back – so I’ll go to the address and see her as soon as I can.’

‘Have you called her to check it’s OK?’

‘No. I don’t have her phone number – just an address.’

A couple of days after I arrived, I got in the car and drove to the address on the electoral roll. I turned up without any warning, so I was apprehensive about how she would react. I hadn’t seen her in years.

She answered the door and looked blankly at me. ‘Yes?’

‘Hello, Patricia,’ I said. ‘I’m Helen.’

She stepped forward and flung her arms around me. We both cried.

‘Come in.’

She made some tea and we talked – pleasantries at first.

Then I told her about Jenny, how she had searched for me and the first email.

‘I was so shocked,’ I said. ‘But it was a good shock.’

Then, when she seemed relaxed, I brought up the subject of how we were related. ‘I’ve known about this for five years,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I was astonished. ‘How did you find out?’

‘It was when I was looking into my adoption information. I wanted to know who my birth mother was, so I went to see the counsellor. She gave me my original birth certificate and there was Auntie Mercia’s name on it, Mercia Dick.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t know if you knew about it, so I thought it would be best to leave it where it was. I just continued with my life and went on as before.’

‘So Mercia was your birth mother, I’m your half-sister and George was your brother. Is that all you know?’

‘My half-brother, I think. And what you’ve just told me about Jenny. Yes, that’s all.’

‘So your father wasn’t Mercia’s husband?’

‘No, George Dick was a prisoner of war in Germany. I have no idea who my father was.’

‘Well, would you like me to tell you?’ I asked her.

‘Do you know?’

‘Yes, Melanie told Jenny. He was an American airman billeted in Seghill during the war.’

She was shocked, just as I had been when I had first heard from Jenny. It was one of those struck-dumb moments.

Now that I knew where Patricia lived and she gave me her phone number, I could put her in touch with other cousins she hadn’t seen for twenty years or more.

I rang Jenny that afternoon and told her all about my meeting with Patricia.

‘Was she pleased to see you?’

‘Yes. She seemed to be. She was all hugs and smiles.’

‘So do you think she’d be happy to meet me too?’

‘Yes, I told her about you; how you tracked me down and everything.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘Wait and see!’ I smiled. ‘You’ll have to come up and meet all the family.’

Soon after that, I called Melanie. She answered the phone and immediately started to cry.

‘What are you crying for?’ I asked her gently.

‘I feel terrible. I’ve done . . . all this . . . and I shouldn’t have . . . I’m sorry, I know I’ve made trouble . . . it was a secret . . . I thought you knew . . .’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, trying to calm her down. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong.’