The spy who loved the mother he never knew
John de St Jorre’s earliest memory is of a young, blonde woman in a half- open blouse, standing in a large, tile-floored room as snow fell outside on Thirties London.
‘ Smoke curled upwards from her cigarette,’ he remembers. ‘She looked at me, threw back her head and laughed. I looked down and saw that cigarette ash had fallen into the cleavage between her breasts.’
The memory was a happy one, and de St Jorre grew up hoping that the ‘familiar’ blonde was his mother, although he had no further recollection of her.
his father George and stepmother Edith never spoke of her, so he grew up without knowing her name or seeing a photograph.
When people asked, he would say his mother had died, or run off with a younger man, but really, he had no idea what happened to her. ‘It was as if she had been swallowed by one of London’s fogs, never to be seen again.’ It wasn’t until he applied for a job with her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service in 1959 that he began to uncover the sad secrets his own family had kept hidden for decades.
When he told his father he needed to answer some official questions concerning his mother, all he got was her maiden name — Grace Rose Isley — but it was enough to start him on an extraordinary search for the truth, recounted in a memoir that unspools with the elegance of a vintage detective novel.
De St Jorre didn’t stay with MI6 for long, leaving the service in the Sixties to become a foreign correspondent for The observer, exposing events in Kenya, Biafra, Vietnam and Iran while gnawing away at the mystery of his origins in suburban England.
he gives a nuanced, period melancholy to his portraits of the people his father employed to mind him and his brother, Maurice, in the years before George settled down with Edith. It brings back a post-war England of lonely women rolling up their sleeves to fill enamel baths and remote men tending their allotments in silence.
The boys were later shunted into the care of cold-hearted Irish nuns, whose ‘punitive instruments’ included a leather strap, rubber truncheon and bamboo cane.
Sallow Sister Agnes ordered them to write a weekly letter home to ‘Dear Mammy and Daddy’, then told seven-year-old de St Jorre that ‘it’s about time you knew that you don’t have a Mammy’ and tore his letter into four neat pieces.
Infrequently, their father appeared in his trilby hat. he was a kind father, when present, leaning down for a heartfelt hug
and a kiss: ‘a moment of bliss’. But he had a vengeful streak, too. When the adult de St Jorre tries to trace his mother, he discovers his father has burned almost every document and photograph. Her name is missing from hospital records.
Grace de St Jorre’s story only comes to light through a series of coincidences, which I won’t spoil here.
‘The past,’ says her son, ‘seemed to be stirring even though I had done nothing to stir it.’
It transpires that she had a mental breakdown — probably triggered by post- natal depression — after Maurice’s birth, from which she never fully recovered.
The ‘treatment’ she received included being locked on wards with violent patients, electroconvulsive therapy and, most brutally, a lobotomy. Along with the separation from her ‘darling’ babies, these medical interventions almost certainly worsened her condition.
The awful tale of a bright and loving young mother’s rapid descent into total madness feels agonisingly avoidable from a 21st-century perspective.
Miraculously, Grace was still alive when her son finally traced her in 1975.
De St Jorre found the initial meeting depressing. The laughing blonde of his childhood was now a zombified old woman in a stained dress, rumpled stockings and blue velvet slippers: ‘sweet and childish, sad and unforgettable’.
But, against all the odds, her condition improves after meeting him, and they develop a loving relationship in which he becomes her darling ‘baby-man’.
Grace de St Jorre died of a stroke in 1979. Her son, always travelling and based in America, missed her funeral, but tried to find her one last time, in Kensal Green Cemetery in 2009. Despite intense searching, he could not locate her grave.
‘Sorry, mate,’ says his guide. ‘ But do you know what? I believe some people don’t want to be found.’