MUMMY WAS ASLEEP… SHE’D BEEN ASLEEP FOR A LONG TIME
Lesley Pearse and her brother Michael were just three and five when their mother died suddenly, leaving them alone in a freezing house for days. After a spell in care, their father remarried to give them a new home and family. The bestselling novelist shares the impossibly poignant story in an extract from her new memoir
IT WAS only years later when I finally saw my mother’s death certificate that I discovered she had died from septicaemia following a miscarriage. It was January 1948 and my father, Arthur Sargent, had been away at sea at the time. I was born in Rochester, Kent, in February 1945, just as Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were winding up their talks on the future of Europe after the expected defeat of Nazi Germany.
This took place in Yalta, Crimea. Apparently, Stalin wanted to meet in Moscow but Churchill said it was too damn cold in February.Two months later Roosevelt died and, despite their agreement, Stalin took over a huge amount of Europe.
Of course, I wasn’t aware of any of that but as a child I certainly felt it was a curse to be born in freezing February. My birthday always fell at half-term, too, and I’d be shoved out to play in the snow. I still prefer looking at snow through a window from a warm room!
My mother, Marie Glynn, was an Irish nurse from Roscommon and my father was a sergeant in the Royal Marines, stationed in Chatham. My brother, Michael, was two when I was born, a very pretty little boy with a mop of blond curls, while I resembled Winston Churchill.
Our house in Grafton Avenue was typical of the late 1930s terraced houses, with a keyhole-style front porch and a large back garden.
I assume as the address was on my birth certificate that my parents must have bought it in 1937 or 1938 when they got married and Dad was seconded to the New Zealand Navy. He was there until the Second World War broke out when his ship sailed away to fight. He was still away in January of 1948 but, death certificate aside, the next part of my story is mostly hearsay. I could never get an adult to verify what happened.
Apparently, Michael and I were seen out in the garden in the snow with no coats on. When Michael was asked by our neighbour where our coats were, he said he couldn’t reach them and Mummy was asleep. She’d been asleep for a long time.
She had been dead, it seems, for a few days. Michael was five, I was three but, if my brother remembered anything about that time, he never shared it with me.
It doesn’t bear thinking about today; two small children alone in the house for so long with no heating or food and thick snow outside. I think it was possible Michael attempted to light the gas to get us warm or try to cook something for us but we were afraid of the popping sound the Ascot water heater made when it was turned on.
To this day, I have an absolute hatred of gas cookers. Yet I don’t recall anything of this, and I didn’t discover what our mother had died of until I got married at 20 and had to show her death certificate.
There it was in black ink. The truth.
WE HAD been told various stories over the years – one was that our mother tripped over our toys on the stairs. What sort of person puts the blame for a mother’s death on her children?
On Coronation Day in June 1953, when we were crowded round a neighbour’s television to watch, I heard some old lady ask if we were the “Tragic Children”.
But back in 1948, Michael and I were too young to be aware of all that.
I believe my father came home on leave shortly afterwards and employed a housekeeper for a while, but she turned out to be
‘When we were watching the Coronation, I heard some old lady ask if we were the Tragic Children’
useless – or maybe Michael and I were too difficult because we were traumatised?
Uncle Jim, Dad’s brother, and his wife, Auntie Sybil, wanted to take me in apparently but they had a son, Malcolm, and couldn’t manage both of us.
Dad didn’t want us split up. Our mother had a huge family in Ireland and her sister Anne lived on a farm and had no children of her own. People forget that there was no help for single fathers in those days, so the Catholic Church stepped in and put us into orphanages run by nuns.
And despite Dad’s wish that we were to be kept together, Michael was sent somewhere in Gloucestershire and I went to Grove Park in South London, so we didn’t even have the comfort of one another.
My father came to see me a couple of times. He couldn’t come more often and he never managed to visit Michael as it took six hours by train to reach Gloucester.
I would go down to the gate to wait for him, and my excitement at seeing my tall handsome daddy in his uniform was off the scale.The moment he stepped inside the gate all the other girls would swarm out and surround him. He was a kind, gentle man, even though he was a sergeant and people imagined him to be super-tough, but he’d hug and talk to all of the children.
I can remember standing back and thinking, “But that’s my daddy”, and really that distance between us was never breached, even years after I’d left there.
We all talked about leaving St Joseph’s and the dream for most of the girls was that someone would come and take them away to foster or adopt them.
It rarely happened, I believe, and when the girls were 15, the orphans were sent to some menial live-in job.
But I had a father, so I put all my trust in him.
Quite rightly, as it turned out. I was to learn, years later, that Dad was so desperate to get Michael and me back that he signed up at a marriage bureau – the original dating agency.
There he was introduced to 47-year-old Hilda Cant, who had recently left Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps where she had worked on hospital ships and in military hospitals in Egypt, India, Africa and many other places.
Her finest hour was at Dunkirk where she hauled the wounded men on to a hastily converted cross-Channel ferry, which stood in for a real hospital ship.
When she put her name down with the marriage bureau she was working as a school nurse in Catford, south-east London, and was foster mother to Selina, aged nine, whom she wanted to adopt.
Hilda said she gave her requirements for a husband as “a man who is preferably officer class but I’ll settle for an NCO. He must have his own house, at least two children and be artistic”. Dad ticked every box.
APPARENTLY they got married at St Mildred’s Church near Grove Park, a whisper away from where I was, just a couple of months after their first meeting. The wedding took place on December 6, 1951, so that they could have us home in time for Christmas.
Years later Hilda, who I soon called Mum, told me Michael had been treated very badly at the place he had been sent to. He weighed half of what an eight-year-old should and had worms, weeping sores on his legs and terrible nightmares.
He was very pale, and had been made to wear boots several sizes too small so his toes were all scrunched up. He never talked about it, but then none of us three kids spoke of “before”. I suppose we were just happy to be together and safe.
We bonded very quickly. Dad painted sea-scapes with sailing ships on the walls of the front room, and that became our playroom. Mum had a wind-up portable record player she’d taken all around the world with her, and Selina and I would dance to The Legend Of The Glass Mountain.
Well, Selina danced – she was graceful. I was more like a hippopotamus.
That first Christmas, just a couple of weeks after I’d left St Joseph’s, was far more than I had dared dream of.
My first ever stocking, with a tangerine at the toe, a sugar mouse, and we each had boxes of pencils with our names printed on them. Mum had made me a knitted doll, which I loved.
But best of all, Selina and I were given matching red coats with hoods.To be dressed the same as my new big sister was the best thing in the whole world.
●Edited extract by Matt Nixson from The Long And Winding Road by Lesley Pearse (Michael Joseph, £22).Visit expressbook shop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25