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

Cherry’s story appeared on the TV Show Long Lost Family , produced in the UK by Wall to Wall Media Ltd. This book does not reflect the views or opinions of either the makers of Long Lost Family or the broadcaster.

HarperElement

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First published by HarperElement 2015

SECOND EDITION

© Cherry Durbin 2015

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Cover photographs © Rosmari Wirz/Getty Images (girl, posed by model); © Shutterstock.com (background)

Cherry Durbin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008133078

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008133085

Version: 2018-07-05

For John, my Essex boy, my soulmate, who accepted me as I was and didn’t try to change me. I carry you in my heart into this new phase of my life.

For Mum and Pop, who gave me love and stability for the first eight years to build the rest of my life on.

And for my kids, Helen and Graham, who’ve had to put up with me since they were born. I love you and I’m so proud of you.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1 Mum Looks Like a Chinaman

2 The New Woman in Our Lives

3 My Closest Friend, Grizelda the Goat

4 A Hasty Marriage

5 Learning to Be a Mum

6 Breaking Out of Domesticity

7 Searching for My Birth Father

8 Losing My Real Father

9 My Half-sister Sue

10 On the Trail in Jersey

11 Tea with the Renoufs

12 A Disintegrating Marriage

13 Making a Move

14 A Larger-than-life Character

15 Getting in Touch with Daisy

16 The Boxing Day Meeting

17 Daisy’s Story

18 Meeting the Bartons

19 A Wedding and a Funeral

20 Looking for Sheila

21 Making Peace with Billie

22 Going Bust and Climbing Back Up Again

23 Shadows Blot Out the Sun

24 The Email

25 The Professionals Take Over

26 The Visit

27 The Meeting at High Wycombe

28 The Families Get Together

29 My Jersey Family’s Wartime History

30 Learning more about My Birth Mother

31 September in Spain

32 Bonding by the Pool

33 Learning to Be Sisters in Our Seventies

Acknowledgements

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

About the Publisher

One evening in May 2011, I was slumped on the sofa with my collies, Bear and Max, beside me, half-reading a book and half-dozing. It had been a long, busy day. I’m a very early riser because I’ve got two horses, Kali and Raz, in a stable down the road and they need to be rubbed down, mucked out, fed and taken to their field at the crack of dawn. Horses don’t like to hang around waiting while humans have a lie-in, so that’s the first thing I do in the morning, come rain, snow, hail or sunshine. Next there are the dogs to walk, and they’re big, energetic dogs who like a good, long run around. I help out at the local kennels and in exchange they let me leave Bear and Max with them if I have to go away somewhere. And I also pop in to look after some elderly folks in the area, including one lady with dementia. So for a 68-year-old I had a pretty full life. It did mean I wasn’t fit for much come the evening (by which time I’d got the horses and dogs back indoors, rubbed down, fed and so forth).

I don’t really watch much telly, but it’s sometimes turned on as background noise, just as company really because I live alone now. My set is only a tiny, portable one that I got third-hand from my daughter Helen, so it’s easy to ignore, but that evening I suddenly remembered that Long Lost Family , a programme that reunited estranged families, was on. I found the show fascinating because I had been searching for my own family for almost thirty years and knew what a difficult emotional journey it could be. I’d missed the beginning of the programme but on the screen a pretty, dark-haired woman was talking about her search for the mother who’d given her up for adoption back in the sixties.

‘I had a really happy childhood with my adoptive family,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’ve always felt different from them. They don’t look like me … I want there to be someone out there who looks a bit like me, who is a bit like me.’

Now, I knew that feeling of not entirely fitting in because I had been adopted by parents who didn’t particularly look like me, with whom I didn’t share any genetic features. Mum and Pop were a wonderful couple and I’d loved them to pieces, but both had passed away long ago.

On screen, the girl was saying she was anxious that if they tracked down her birth mother, the woman might not want to know her. I could identify with her anxiety because I’d been in that exact same situation. The more I’d probed into my own past, the more I’d hit brick walls and dead ends. I’d had some success – just enough to find out that I had a sister, Sheila, somewhere, but I had no idea where. I was determined to find her one day because I needed answers to all kinds of mysteries from my past, things that simply didn’t add up. I was a widow, with two wonderful children and four grandchildren of my own, but I had no family roots, no one of my generation or older to help me understand where I came from and to make me feel there was a family I belonged to. Basically, I was lonely, and I’d been lonely for much of my life since Mum had died. I’d been a lonely teenager, I’d had a lonely and difficult first marriage, and now at the age of sixty-eight I was on my own again.

On screen the presenter, Davina McCall, told the girl that they had finally found her birth mother, and I found my eyes filling with tears. It was odd, because I’m not the crying type. I’m so well practised at bottling up my emotions that they rarely see the light of day. I suppose this girl’s story touched a nerve for me because it was so close to my own.

The girl and her birth mother met in a park and gave each other a huge hug. The mum was murmuring, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ and I could tell they were both lovely, friendly people. They seemed very similar, and you could definitely see a family likeness. I hoped it would work out for them and that they’d find what they were looking for in each other.

The team did two searches in each programme and they succeeded in reuniting the family members in the other story as well. They always did. I’d run out of ideas, having tried everything I could possibly think of to find my missing sister.

And then at the end of the programme there was an announcement: ‘If you have a long-lost family member and would like to take part in the next series, please email us at this address.’ I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and scribbled it down. Fortunately, I always have paper and a pen lying around to write notes to remind myself of things I would otherwise forget.