Cornwell’s family reunion

Having sold 20 million books, Bernard Cornwell is the world’s most successful historical novelist. He is also a smoker, a drinker and an atheist – which makes sense, given his past, says Frances Hardy in the Daily Mail. The product of a wartime liaison, he was adopted as a baby by the Wigginses, a couple from Essex who were members of a Protestant fundamentalist sect called The Peculiar People. Family life was bleak, and brutal. “The list of prohibitions was endless,” he says. “Alcohol, tobacco, TV and cinema, for a start. Military service was also prohibited, though Joe [Wiggins] was very harsh. He was a man drunk on God, and the Bible said: ‘Beat your children’, which he did, very brutally, with a 4ft cane.” Yet he bears no malice towards Joe; it was his hate-filled mother who made his life hell. Once he reached adulthood, he never spoke to her again.

But he did know he was adopted, and 15 years ago, he found his biological father – a Canadian former airman – and flew to Vancouver to meet him, and his half-siblings. “They welcomed us generously and instantly. We were family... It was more moving than I expected. A pleasure. I liked these people who snorted when they laughed, as I did; who had the same gait.” A year later, he was reunited with his birth mother, at her flat in Basingstoke. “And what struck me was that it was absolutely crammed with historical novels.” She too had married and had a family – but she told him she had thought about him all the time, and worried. “She remembered the Wigginses standing at her bedside in the maternity home. ‘I knew they weren’t cuddly,’ she said, and how right she was.”