Immediately I panic. It’s taken so many years to reach this point. So much heartache and rejection. I reread it once more. Oh no – I should have said I had a happy childhood. Why didn’t I tell her that? I don’t want her to think I’m jealous.

I check the time – 10.27 p.m. – still afternoon in Texas. I wonder when Helen will look at her emails?

From: jenlucas

To: helen

Sent: Wednesday 11 April 2007, 22:24 +0100

Subject: Mercia Lumsden

Dear Helen,

My name is Jenny Lucas and I was adopted at birth in 1948. After doing a lot of investigation, I believe you are my half-sister. Sorry for the complete shock, but there is no easy way of telling you.

I met Mercia in August 2003, when I was visiting the north-east for a family wedding. She was concerned that if anyone came I was not to say who I was. I have been looking for so very long to find the family that knows nothing about me.

I live in Kent. We moved back from Florida two years ago and now live in Tenterden. I would love to hear from you if you can come through the shock. My telephone number is ——————.

Jenny

Helen

I open my laptop before I go to bed. In moments, the screen lights up. There is just one email from an unknown contact.

Who’s Jen Lucas? Why does the subject line say my mother’s name?

I click on the header and begin to read. The first two sentences explode in my head, blasting shrapnel through my past. My eyes widen and my jaw locks. Over and over I read the words: ‘I believe you are my half-sister.’

I’m on the edge of the sofa in the semi-darkness; Dennis lies asleep in the bedroom. I begin to shake, slightly at first, and then great tremors start running through me. White noise deafens me as the blood charges through my brain.

I struggle to lower my shoulders and breathe slower, deeper. I read on, but I can’t take it in. Is this a scam? I go back to the beginning and reread the whole message. How has this woman traced me? She claims to have visited Mercia, my mother. Can this be true? Why didn’t my mother tell me?

I read the email through yet again, aloud this time, as calmly as I can. It sounds genuine. There is a hint of emotion, a deep feeling: ‘I have been looking for so very long . . . ’ That sounds authentic to me – I can identify with it in a way. This stranger thinks I’m her sister. I’ve always yearned for a sister. She wants me to call her, but what would I say? How could I begin to tell her?

CHAPTER 1

Helen

A Mystery Year

Fear is my earliest memory. Fear of being out there, alone. It was one of those dark winter evenings; the sleet slanted at me with a wind cold enough to sting my skin. I was sitting in my hand-me-down pram, strapped in with no blankets – just a loose waterproof cover on which a puddle had formed and was frosting over. I tried to lean forward and look out. The cover slipped and the icy water trickled down onto my bare legs. My damp clothes hung heavy around me and my bonnet’s fur trim, bedraggled in the sleet, clung to my cheeks like icy fingers. I felt numb, abandoned.

I yearned for her to come. I whimpered and cried as loud as I could, my frozen cheeks smarting from the warmth of my tears. Shadows loomed. A lone tree bent and clattered in the wind, an ogre’s arms stretching out to steal me away. I screamed. I don’t know how long I cried for. I stared at the house and willed her to come, to rescue me. I craned forward as far as I could, my eyes fixed on the front door and the warm glow through the window. But no one looked out. No one came. I wailed.
Why doesn’t she come and help me? Why doesn’t she come?

Finally, the door opened and yellow light spilled out across the wet path. But she just stood there, my mother, without even glancing in my direction. She stood on the front step, laughing and joking with my grandma inside, pulling her coat together in the arctic wind. They talked and talked until at last she shrugged, tied on her head scarf and ran down the path towards me. She took hold of the pram, her eyes fixed ahead, and pushed it at a run against the wind.

Why did she leave me outside for so long alone in the cold night? You don’t leave a baby, a toddler, out like that uncovered at that time of year, do you? I don’t think she even noticed what state I was in.

Years later, my husband said: ‘You can’t possibly remember all that! Nobody can remember before they were three.’

But I do. I must have been about eighteen months or so. I can still feel the fear now. My memory of that evening is indelible, locked inside. It’s a feeling that echoed throughout my childhood. It has haunted me down all the years.

The first year of my life is missing – it’s a mystery. Well, that’s what an older cousin told me. Some time before my birth in April 1950, my mother, Mercia, left Seghill without a word – left the mining village, the bustle of the close-knit family and everything she knew.

‘Mercia disappeared,’ explained Alice. ‘All of a sudden she wasn’t there any more. She was gone. Nobody knew where she was. And then, a year or so later, she came back with you and married to Tommy. No explanation.’ Of course, Alice was a child when that happened, so maybe she wasn’t told the real story.

My mother had been married before, in 1939: ‘A terrible man, he was, mind,’ she told me. ‘He used to beat me and never gave me enough housekeeping money.’

Her husband had joined up and gone to war, so she had gone back to live with Grandma. My half-brother George was born in 1940. Not long after that his father was captured and spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp. My mother left George with Grandma while she went to work twelve-hour night-shifts doing war-work at Vickers munitions factory on Scotswood Road in Newcastle, by the river.

They were dangerous times, with nightly bombings as Luftwaffe pilots strafed the ship yards and factories along the banks of the Tyne. I recently found out that during this time she had an affair with an American airman, among others. It would be harsh to blame her, really. Her husband was a prisoner of war. Like many others, she risked her own life every night for the war effort – I suppose they all had to find some escape from the drudgery, fear and chaos of those years.

When I was a child I asked my mother how she had met Tommy. She paused for a moment.

‘It was in Newcastle. I was working in Maynards, the tobacconist,’ she told me. ‘He came in for some cigarettes one day in his RAF uniform. He came back again the next day, and every day after that. He was a bonny lad, mind. Ciggies were rationed in those days, so I used to hide some extra under the counter for him.’

The address on my birth certificate is in Benwell, a notorious area of Newcastle. It’s only twenty minutes’ drive from Seghill, but in those days that was an hour-and-a-half’s bus-ride away – another country. I drove there recently and found the street in the west of the city, near the Tyne. I looked at that house for a long time – an anonymous brick building divided into flats. I wanted to explore the area, but it was a forbidding place – one of the roughest parts of Newcastle, with the spectre of hoodied gangs round every corner and a high crime rate. I felt safer in the car, so I sat there and just stared.

I asked my mother about my birth once, when I was growing up.

‘Tommy was at work when I went into labour. It was just me and George, so I sent him to call the midwife and gave him ninepence (4p) to go to the pictures. When he came back, there you were.’ George was ten years old then. I never thought to ask him about it. ‘What did I look like?’ I asked her another time, hoping to provoke some sort of reaction, if only nostalgia. That would be something.

‘You were little, six pounds, with blonde hair.’ Her face was fixed in neutral and her gaze was turned away from me.

Sitting in the car, I tried to imagine my thirty-year-old mother seeing the newborn me for the first time, perhaps studying my face, gently stroking my fingers. Surely she would have held me then? Cradled me in her arms? Maybe there was a whisper of a smile on her lips? Wouldn’t you think so? I craved a smile from my mother every day of my childhood, but I yearned in vain. I tried so hard to earn just one smile, but it was never any use. I shuddered as I sat gazing at my very first home, surrounded by seedy slums. I don’t suppose it was such a bad area back in those days; perhaps even faintly respectable.

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