My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (42 page)

Now I knew who my real father was, and I had a full sister, I felt as if I could at last lay the past to rest. But it wasn’t going to be quite as simple as that.

CHAPTER 38

Helen

New Challenges

The revelations about my mother’s secrets and lies, and the family’s concealment of the truth over all these years, began to eat away at me. I’ve had to learn from my earliest childhood that the only way for me to survive harm is to be strong, like an iceberg, with most of my emotion buried beneath the surface, internalized. Through all the years, each blow, physical or verbal, left a mark for ever, but I learned not to let them see how much they hurt me. It was safest that way. I got used to crying alone.

I had grown up feeling my mother owned me – that I was merely a piece of property. I was the baby she kept, but I paid the price for that. She expected me to be eternally grateful to her. I cared for her when she was ill, but who cares for the carers? Blame and disdain were her only responses.

Now I realized I had been betrayed by Mercia, and by all her family. My whole life was based on a lie. I was devastated, seared to the core, angry with everyone who had lied and kept my own story from me and kept my sister and me apart. I was even angry with George for a while. We were so close, and yet he kept the truth from me. I realize now that he didn’t dare say anything, like everyone else. But I could no longer stop my emotions from rising to the surface and impacting on everyone around me. Gradually I filled up with all that anger knotted up inside me, until one day I could hold it in no longer and it poured out over my family – all those I loved. Now I was clawing my way up a mountain, unaware that I was pushing my companions aside, but the summit rose further out of reach with every move I made.

The kids noticed it. ‘You need to move on, Mum,’ said Donna. ‘Try and put it all behind you and not dwell on it.’

‘I’m not dwelling on it,’ I said, indignant. ‘There’s a difference between dwelling on it and getting stuck in it, unable to escape.’

They were both impatient with me at that time. They didn’t seem to be able to understand how I’d become caught in this mire of anger and couldn’t find my way out. But then they didn’t know most of the worst things that had happened to me, or just how manipulative my mother had been. After all, she had looked after them daily as children far better than she had me, all positive and loving towards them, in contrast to her psychological manipulation of me as a child. Mercia was their grandma, and they didn’t deserve to have me mar their memories of her, so it wasn’t surprising that they felt I should buck up and get on with my life. I don’t blame them for that.

I was seriously floundering under the weight of all these revelations, though, and I knew it. But I couldn’t climb above this as I’d always managed to in the past. My mind was in turmoil and I felt I was beginning to drown.

I must have been impossible to live with. Dennis, who knew everything I had been through, was tremendously patient and supportive. It wasn’t easy for him. We had both had difficult issues to deal with on a daily basis even before all this came along, but in some ways that helped us to help each other. He has always been a great support to me and tried his best to help me through. Sam was great as well. Two fantastic guys.

But still I couldn’t break through this wall of resentment. What did I do to deserve it? What did Jenny do? She had come face to face with her demons as well, about her adoption. That was also my mother’s doing. Why had everything always been my fault? Perhaps it was. The guilt loaded onto me as a child was still there, but now it was finally wreaking its revenge, not on Mercia, but on me.

I withdrew into a bitter cloud, cut off from everyone. I wept for no apparent reason. I couldn’t sleep for long, always pacing around in the middle of the night. And when I did sleep, I had nightmares most nights. I was imprisoned in my own anger. It felt evil and destructive, but I couldn’t shed it. I couldn’t move on. I couldn’t get myself out of that ravenous fury, silently raging at my mother. It changed me. I became almost malicious towards them all – Mercia and her family. In my confusion I developed a hatred for them and what they had done.

I know I’m not a person who hates others no matter what. Now, looking back, I can see that this hatred was really about the dysfunctional childhood I had had, and not being loved or protected by them. It was about my lost childhood, and having to grow up too fast and deal with their issues. It was a mixture of hatred and fury that besieged me. I was usually such a calm person – self-controlled, laid back even. That was the usual me, not the monster I was turning into. As a trained therapist, I recognized what was happening and rang the doctor, who referred me to a counsellor.

It was quite funny the first time I went to see him. He’s a bit of a character, and I love eccentric people, so from the very beginning I couldn’t help smiling, which relaxed me, of course. He stood up to greet me, his trousers turned halfway up his legs and his socks rolled like sausages round his ankles. His cardigan was done up wrongly and he had a big cowlick in his hair. I thought: I really like you! I felt this was going to be all right.

He started by encouraging me to talk, about my childhood and the years since. About my family, finding Jenny and my hopes for the future. Gradually the rancour poured out, the rage that had recently enveloped me. I had so much to be glad about and to look forward to, so why could I not shed this terrible inner fury?

‘You’re justified in your anger,’ he said. ‘You’re feeling guilty because you’re angry, but you’re justified in that. You’re right. You
have
been betrayed and you
have
been lied to. It’s true. You
have
had a lousy childhood. It’s not you; it’s what happened to you.’

He affirmed my resentment as understandable. I felt encouraged that someone objective should see it like that. The greater the mandate he gave me for being angry, the more that inner rage ebbed away.

‘It seems to me that you’ve come out of it with remarkable strength of character,’ he continued. ‘Indeed, it was your strength that got you through it all. If you hadn’t been as strong a person as you are, if you’d been someone who buckled under at times of emotional stress, you may well not have survived. And I’m serious about that.’

The more I told him about the past, and about Jenny and me discovering each other, the more impressed he seemed to be.

‘You know, I hear a lot of people’s stories in this job. But I really think that your story, the story of you and Jenny, is an exceptional one.’

He gave me some relaxation techniques, which of course I knew from my own therapist training, but it helped me to focus on them. He also taught me various strategies for coping day by day. Walking the dogs was one of them – that’s a pleasure of course, and it worked. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, I became calmer again and life slipped back into its usual rhythms.

After six weeks, he said to me, ‘I don’t really think there is anything more I can do for you. You’re doing very well. So I’m going to discharge you. But if you need to come back, just give me a call.’

He was right, of course. I realized as he said it that in that short period I really had turned round. I had got myself out of that cloud of rancour, with his help, and now I was ready to shed my past and move forward.

On an early spring day recently, Dennis and I drove to Embleton to the beach Jenny and I both played on as children, and the golf course where Jenny grew up, where she first learned to play golf. We drove down the stone-walled country lanes, through tunnels of cherry blossom, past fields of shaggy sheep with their lambs and occasional swathes of daffodils on the grass banks. I was travelling the roads of my childhood again, the only really happy times, when we used to meet Uncle James, Auntie Gladys and my cousin Malcolm and go off for days out to the coast in our rickety old cars that as often as not broke down on the way.

Dennis and I arrived outside the Dunstanburgh Castle golf clubhouse at Embleton and parked the car just as a haar came in from the North Sea, sweeping its mist like a rolling carpet across the dune grasses towards us. We went inside to have a drink and let the mist disperse. I didn’t need to speak to anyone. I knew what I was looking for.

There was a glass cabinet in the bar full of grand silver cups, and a whole room decked out with trophies and plaques. I scanned them all, one by one, and blazed with pride every time I saw my sister’s name engraved or painted in gold. She had been part of this place, just as it was part of her. Now it was part of my story too.

The mist dispersed and the weak sun came out as we walked the path Jenny had walked so often before across the tufted dunes until we came to a primitive wooden bridge. No handrail; just wooden sleepers, blanched by the years of north-eastern weather, laid parallel across a meander of the stream. As I crossed the bridge, I felt like I was walking back in time across the links and down to the golden sands of our childhood. To the far right, on its headland, the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle rose eerily above the last vestiges of mist that wreathed its foundations. To the left were the Emblestones and the bank with the bungalows strewn across the top like jacks in the children’s game.

How many times did Jenny play with her friends nearby while I built my sandcastles? How often did I walk past her practising golf on the green outside her door? We’ll never know. But Jenny does remember one time, and recognized the photo I showed her as the image in her memory of me that day. We were both oblivious of our circumstances then, so close to each other without realizing. We each walked that path across the dunes separately before, but now we no longer need to walk separate paths. Our paths are no longer parallels, never to meet. Now they are linked together and we have built our own bridges to join them.

It would have been so much easier, of course, if someone had given us the information we needed from the start, or at least earlier, as we made our separate journeys. Mercia could have given us the keys. She had them in her hand, but she made the deliberate choice of concealing them, holding them out of our reach. Our families knew where the keys were, but she forbade them to tell us. Mercia was the keeper of the keys, the one person who had locked every possible access to our story.

Even without those keys, Jenny and I have eventually broken through and found each other. It has been a wonderful journey, our new life as sisters. We’re still learning about each other and making new memories together.

But like that rickety old wooden bridge with no handrails, there were still additional details to find to complete our narrative, and an important visit we needed to make.

CHAPTER 39

Helen & Jenny

One Regret

Helen

One evening, sitting at home with Dennis, I took out my mother’s ‘treasure box’ – a shoebox, full of old birthday cards, letters and other things she kept. I’ve been through it a million times since she died. As I picked my way through the box I came across an old black and white photo. I took it out and looked at it. I thought I recognized the child as another distant cousin. She has lived abroad for many years but we talk occasionally.

I turned the photo over to make sure, but all that was written on the back was the date – 1937. There was nothing to say if that was the date of the photograph or the date of the child’s birth. Knowing how much older than me she is, I worked out that her year of birth probably was 1937. I looked more closely at the child’s features. I felt sure it was her, but at that moment I was suddenly struck by her resemblance to my mother. Well of course, she is related, so it was not surprising that there should be a family likeness. But strange, I thought, that this cousin’s photo should be in Mercia’s treasure-box when she had so few photos in there.

I handed the photo across to Dennis. ‘Who do you think that is?’

His answer was immediate. ‘It’s your mother when she was young.’

‘No, it’s my cousin in America.’

‘Diana?’

‘Yes, Cousin Diana.’

He looked at the back of the photo. ‘How old was your mother in 1937?’

‘She was seventeen.’

He gave me a long look. I could tell he was thinking the same as me. In fact, I think he was ahead of me.

The next morning I told Jenny about this and she was almost speechless. Then I called Diana. She answered the phone and we talked about family things for a while. Finally I plucked up courage to say why I had really called her. I explained about finding her photo, the date on the back and some of my conversation with Dennis.

‘I’m not sure which photo it was,’ she said, ‘but my parents doted on me so much that they took a lot of photos of me. So it’s not really surprising that Mercia had one of them in her box.’

‘Well, it’s the only photo she had that wasn’t immediate family.’

She paused. ‘So what are you saying?’

‘Do you realize how much you look like my mother?’

‘It’s a family likeness.’

‘I think it might be closer than that. You know about Jenny and Patricia – do you think you could have been Mercia’s daughter, given to your parents to adopt?’

‘No, of course not. No way. That’s a crazy idea. In any case, I’m sure my parents would have told me if I was adopted. They never told lies. I completely believe everything they told me about my birth.’

She was indignant that I should even have thought such a thing. ‘In fact,’ she continued, ‘I’m so sure about this that I think we should have a DNA test to prove it.’

‘Really?’ I could hardly believe she had suggested the one thing I didn’t dare ask her, assuming she would refuse. ‘That’s a good idea. I could get it organized through the same people Jenny and I used, if you like.’

‘Yes, that would be fine. You organize it and I’ll do my bit. You’ll see. I’m sure it will prove you wrong.’

We all did the tests, Diana, Jenny and me. Weeks later, the results came back positive. Diana was definitely our half-sister, another half-sibling! I emailed the results page to Diana and to Jenny. Immediately I received a brief reply from Diana, convinced that the test was wrong.