Cherry Durbin - Secret Sister - From Nazi-occupied Jersey to wartime London, one woman’s search for the truth

I picked up the phone and rang my daughter Helen. ‘Were you just watching telly?’ I asked. She was, but a different programme, so I explained to her what I’d seen.

‘That’s funny!’ Helen said. ‘You were telling me just the other day that you must do something about finding Sheila. It’s as if this is a sign.’

I felt the same way myself. ‘Will you email them for me?’ I asked. I had a computer but it hadn’t been working for ages and I felt no pressing need to get it fixed. I was more of an outdoorsy person than a desk type. ‘You know all about my story.’

‘OK, Mum. I’ll do it tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they could find Sheila? I’d have a new auntie!’

‘Oh, I don’t think they will,’ I said. ‘It’s all too late and too long ago. But it would be interesting to let them try. They might have methods I haven’t thought of …’

‘Yeah, like using the internet,’ Helen said with a sarcastic edge to her voice.

‘You never know. I’ll call you tomorrow, Nell.’

As I got into bed, I couldn’t help picturing myself on the programme at that moment when you meet your family member against a beautiful backdrop. It would be so wonderful if they found Sheila. I’d always wanted a sibling, and I’d been searching for her for almost thirty years now. It nagged away at me, something I couldn’t let go of, a piece of unfinished business.

But then I told myself sternly not to get my hopes up. The television company must get hundreds of requests and they can only take on a few; and I simply didn’t believe they’d be able to find Sheila. It was safer not to have any expectations so that I wasn’t disappointed later. And that’s all I had time to think before I fell into a sound sleep.

I was a war baby, who used to scream when woken by the wail of the air-raid sirens and the middle-of-the-night dash for cover. Dad told me that he and Mum normally huddled under the stairs until the all-clear sounded, but one night, for some reason, he decided that we should all go to the neighbourhood shelter – and it was just as well he did because that night our house took a direct hit and the stairwell was destroyed. The top of the shelter we were in collapsed and rubble showered down on us, but no one inside was hurt. If it hadn’t been for Dad’s last-minute decision my story, which began with my birth in March 1943, would have been a brief one.

We’d been living in Hayes, Middlesex, but after the bombing the Red Cross billeted us with a family in Uxbridge, next to the railway line. We had the back scullery and front bedroom, and my earliest memory is of standing up in a makeshift cot, looking out the window at the lights of the trains trundling past. It must have been tough for my parents; they’d salvaged any possessions they could from the wreck of our house, but like many other families at the time they’d lost most of their furniture, kitchenware, clothes and prized personal possessions. Dad retrieved all the scrap wood he could to make new furniture, but many things simply couldn’t be replaced. Meanwhile, Mum had me to take care of. She said I was a greedy baby and she struggled to get extra rations of national dried milk to feed me; I also scratched incessantly if there was wool next to my skin, but it didn’t prove easy to find substitute fabrics for vests in wartime.

The war influenced us all in another way as well: I was only being brought up by my mum and dad, Dorothy and Ernest Vousden, because the woman who had given birth to me was unable to look after me. Mum said that the first time they went to see me I was in a grubby little cot wearing a dirty nightie. She and Dad couldn’t have any children of their own and desperately wanted me, so they took me to live with them when I was just a few weeks old then adopted me in a court of law. This was explained right from the start, and it never bothered me in the slightest. On the contrary, I felt lucky because I had two wonderful loving parents who doted on me.

‘Where is my real mum, then?’ I asked Dad sometimes, and he always replied, ‘In the land where the tigers grow.’ That sounded reasonable to me.

We moved to Salisbury, Wiltshire, which is where I started school at Devizes Road Primary. Dad got a good job as the representative of a leading aviation company, Fairey Aviation, at RAF Boscombe Down, where top-secret experimental aircraft were tested, and Mum was a stay-at-home mother who cooked wonderful meals, baked cakes, knitted, sewed, crocheted and generally took the best of care of us. She made most of my clothes by hand and taught me how to knit and crochet myself. Once a week she washed my hair in rainwater to make it shine, and used a product called Curly Top in a futile attempt to give me curls. Her own hair was worn in what was known as a ‘victory roll’, sweeping off the forehead into two lavish loops on top. She was a statuesque lady who always dressed smartly, in hat and gloves, when we went out somewhere, and she made sure I looked spick and span as well.

Mum was very musical and she’d be singing as she sharpened the knives on our back doorstep, scrubbed the sheets on Monday wash day, or sewed new outfits for me on her Singer sewing machine. She taught me all the old wartime music-hall songs: ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’ and ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’. She played the piano beautifully, and at bedtime, after Dad had read me a story, Mum would play a song on the piano to lull me to sleep. My favourite was one called ‘Rendezvous’. I loved to drift off with the sound of the piano floating up from downstairs.

From my earliest years, I simply loved animals. We had a Corgi called Bunty and a cat called Dinky, who stood in as my playmates since I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Horses were always my favourite, though. I used to pretend that I was riding a horse in the porch at home, and I made a beeline for any horses and donkeys I spotted when we were out. Finally, when I was eight years old, Mum let me start riding lessons at the local stables and I was overwhelmed with excitement. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me in a life that was pretty good already, and I took to the saddle like a duck to water. I wasn’t spoiled, mind – I’d be swiped on the back of the legs with a hairbrush if I was misbehaving – but I was very, very loved.

Although I was christened Paulette, Dad called me his little ‘Cherryanna’ and the name stuck. Soon it was only teachers who called me Paulette and to everyone else I was ‘Cherry’. I called him ‘Pop’, and I was definitely a daddy’s girl, who cherished the time I spent with him. Each morning before breakfast we’d go out into the garden and walk round, inspecting the pond, deadheading the flowers and checking to see what had ripened in the vegetable patch. He’d pull up some carrots, wipe one on his hankie and hand it to me, saying, ‘Eat that, Cherryanna!’ In autumn he’d stretch up and pluck me a rosy apple from the tree, polishing it on his sleeve till it shone. When we went back indoors for breakfast, he’d sit on the stairs and carefully clean the mud from my shoes for me. Then on Sunday mornings, when he wasn’t in a rush to get to work, I’d climb into their bed and Pop would bring up tea and chocolate biscuits and play ‘camels’, with me sitting on his knees and riding up and down.

He was a talented carpenter, and one of my most prized possessions was an elaborate doll’s house he made me, a bungalow with a garden around it, and when you took the roof off you could see all the furniture inside. It was so detailed that there was even a little sundial in the garden, just as we had in our own garden.