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

‘Which farmer? Where is she?’ I wouldn’t stop my persistent questioning until Billie gave in and told me where Grizelda had been rehomed, then I charged out of the house and walked all the way there. When Grizelda saw me she got so excited she tried to leap over the fence. I hugged her and cried, but had no choice but to leave her there when it was time to go home again. I missed her terribly after that.

When I asked, in typical teenage fashion, ‘What about me? Don’t my feelings come into it?’ Billie replied, crushingly: ‘You? You’re less than a grain of sand in the universe.’

Only once did Pop stand up for me in a fight with Billie. We were in the car and I was begging her to buy me some summer stockings rather than the awful 60-denier nylon pair I was supposed to make last for an entire school year. ‘Who do you think you are? Lady Muck?’ Billie rebuked. ‘We’re not made of money, you know.’ Suddenly, Pop screeched the car to a halt and yelled, ‘You will not treat her like that. Get out of the car!’ There was a blazing row, but for once he stood his ground and made Billie walk the three miles home.

When I was around fourteen, Pop was made redundant from his job as representative of Fairey Aviation when they closed down that branch of the aircraft testing site at Boscombe Down. He could have retired at that stage, but Billie persuaded him that they wouldn’t have enough money to live on from his pension. She had very expensive tastes, particularly in home décor, constantly changing our carpets, curtains and upholstery for the latest shades and styles. She insisted that Pop went back to work in the aerodrome storeroom, which was a huge climb-down for someone who had been in charge, and I could tell he hated it. We downsized to a house in Amesbury, Wiltshire, and I moved to the South Wilts Grammar School for Girls for my third year onwards.

The overwhelming feeling in my teens was loneliness and isolation. My contemporaries in the late fifties and early sixties were listening to pop music, wearing the latest fashions and going to dances where live bands played, but I had no social life except accompanying Pop and Billie to evenings spent playing cards with their friends. Every day after school my classmates hung out in the Red Cockerel coffee shop, chatting to boys and having a laugh. I yearned to join them but my pocket money was all taken up paying for school lunches, and besides, I’d have been in big trouble if I missed the bus home. I sat in the window seat of the bus watching them all clustered round a table in the Red Cockerel and felt like an alien species. It was such a lonely feeling.

In the early years of their marriage they had talked, tantalisingly, about adopting a child because Billie couldn’t have any of her own, and she said she’d always wanted to have a son. They made enquiries but Billie found the adoption agency’s assessment procedures rude and intrusive.

‘These flipping people, they want to come and inspect our house and ask all sorts of personal questions about us, and they haven’t even let me see what kind of child they might have available. I’m not putting up with this!’ she exclaimed.

My chance of gaining an ally, someone I could be close to, were dashed. After that my only hope was escape, to start a life of my own somewhere I could make my own choices and determine my own fate.

I passed two A Levels in sixth form and hoped to study agriculture at college, to pursue my love of animals. Billie objected to this plan, though – ‘It’s no career for a young lady’ – and instead I was signed up to study horticulture at Nottingham, which she deemed more fitting. That summer Dad and Billie moved to Deal in Kent (he had finally retired completely from the aerodrome), and it was while we were living there that Billie decided to become a Jehovah’s Witness.

She had always had her religious fads: there was a spiritualism phase, then a faith-healing phase to help ease the arthritis she suffered from, but the Jehovah’s Witness phase was the worst of all. She was obsessive about reading The Watchtower and going out to try to convert our neighbours, which was a total embarrassment. She banged on about modesty and virtue, railing against drunkenness and promiscuity, gambling and tobacco, and it was like listening to a record with the needle stuck in a groove. I don’t know how Pop put up with it; all I could do was leave home.

It was a requirement of my horticulture course that I completed a year’s practical work, so I managed to get a job at Mount Nurseries in Canterbury where my life became fun for the first time since Mum died. I moved into digs, and soon I’d made loads of friends among the other staff at the nursery. We all went to the pub together in the evenings after work. There were a few boyfriends, nothing serious, and fun social events almost every night of the week. I felt as though I’d been let out of jail! I was skint most of the time because there was hardly anything left of my wages after the fifteen shillings a week I paid for board and lodgings, but I was having the time of my life.

At first I got the bus home every weekend to visit Billie and Pop, but the final straw in my relationship with my stepmother came over a cucumber sandwich, of all things. I’d travelled home and was hungry when I arrived, so I went into the kitchen to make said sandwich.

‘What do you think you are doing? You eat far too much!’ Billie snapped.

I looked at her, buttery knife poised in my hand in mid-air, and simply thought, ‘I don’t want this anymore.’ I’d been shoved down by her all through my teens, and now that I was starting to pull myself up I refused to be squashed any more.

I put down the knife, left the sandwich behind on the countertop, walked out the door and never went back to that house again. From then on, Pop had to travel to Canterbury to see me – and, bless him, he did come regularly, although he admitted that it made things ‘a bit tricky’ with Billie. (She later accused him of having an affair with my landlady simply because he put up a kitchen cupboard for her!)

Now that I was my own boss I decided not to study horticulture after all because going to university would have meant I’d still be partly financially dependent on Pop and Billie, and I didn’t want any further involvement with that woman. Instead, I looked for jobs in the newspaper and finally decided to apply to study radiography at Canterbury Hospital, where you could train in-house. I was lucky to be accepted by the lugubrious consultant radiologist Dr Johnson, even though I didn’t have A Level Maths, and I enjoyed hospital life straight away.

It was around this time that I was introduced by a mutual friend to a man named Eric. He was quite a bit older than me, had been a professional footballer and was now practising as a chiropodist in a surgery near my digs. I thought nothing of it when my friend introduced us, but soon I noticed that Eric always seemed to be standing outside when I walked past and would call me over for a chat. One day he invited me to accompany him to a cricket match in which he was playing, so I went along and somehow we just fell into being boyfriend and girlfriend.

There was no great romance. I felt a sense of security with him because he knew more than me about the way the world worked, he was qualified and had a good career, and he seemed to have his whole life planned out. I was still only nineteen years old and, although I didn’t regret the decision to stop having any contact with Billie, I felt very alone in the world, with no one to fall back on should things go wrong. That’s where Eric came in. I thought he would look after me, so two years later when he asked me if I wanted to get engaged, I just said yes. He bought me a diamond ring from an antique shop – quite a decent diamond, it was – which cost £21 (a substantial amount in those days).