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‘There was still a little dent in his carrycot where his head had been’
As a young single mother struggling to support her baby son, novelist LESLEY PEARSE made the heart-wrenching decision to have him adopted. It would be 57 years before they were reunited
wo years ago novelist Lesley Pearse stood in the lobby of the Haymarket Hotel in London, heart hammering, as a middle-aged man approached her. ‘The concierge saw me hugging the man, then crying,’ recalls Pearse, 79. ‘Later he asked, “What was going on?” I said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow.” But the next day he wasn’t on duty.’ She chuckles. ‘He’s probably still waiting to find out.’
What the concierge witnessed was more extraordinary than any plot twist in Pearse’s novels, which have sold more than ten million copies worldwide. The man was Pearse’s long-lost son, whom she’d last seen as a baby 57 years previously. Aged 19, she’d given birth to him, having been abandoned by the (married) man who had seduced her when she was a virgin.
Estranged from her family, Pearse was living in a motherand-baby home in North London. With no one to help with childcare so she could work, Pearse had been warned that raising a baby would be impossible. Yet she was determined to keep her son, whom she named Warren. For the first three months, she became a live-in housekeeper for an elderly couple, but they treated her cruelly, accused her of being a ‘whore’, refused to pay her wages and eventually threw her out. She was taken in by a friend but, as she was receiving only £4 a week of social security money, couldn’t offer anything towards rent. After a month, she approached an adoption society to give her son to a family who could provide for him.
Within weeks, Pearse was told a family had been found. She was given no further information. Later, she’d learn it was a military family.
‘The short time we had left together was like the days before an execution; I couldn’t stop crying,’ she says. ‘I was still breastfeeding. I had to get him
T
on to a bottle fast, but he didn’t like it and screamed continuously.’
On the day, Warren was whisked away by a social worker at the adoption society offices. The door was shut in Pearse’s face, as she kicked and screamed at it. ‘I went home to the carrycot with the little dent where his head had been, and his hairs were still on the sheet. I was in torment.’
She rapidly met and married a kind man, got pregnant again, lost that baby and walked out on her husband afterwards. ‘Under different circumstances that marriage might have lasted, but I was too screwed up,’ she says.
Pearse married and divorced twice more, had three daughters (and later two grandchildren), and worked in every sort of job from telesales to Playboy Bunny. ‘I’ve had more fun at a bus stop,’ she says of the latter, which turned out to involve waiting not on film stars but on ‘northern businessmen in London on a jolly’.
Yet she never stopped thinking about Warren, marking his every birthday with tears. ‘That was always a day I had to get through,’ she says. ‘His 18th was the worst. As he’d been adopted by an army family, I worried that he’d join up and be sent to Northern Ireland. I just hoped one day he’d try to find me.’
Pearse is talking to me from her colourful home in Torquay, Devon. She’s contentedly single, hugely positive, and clearly reluctant to dwell on those many tough times documented in her recently published memoir
The Long and Winding Road.
‘People always said, “You should write your life story”, but I didn’t want it to be a misery memoir; I despise those,’ she says. ‘I was always a fan of Catherine Cookson, but then I read her autobiography about her mother’s drunkenness. I thought, “Oh, come on! You ended up in a nice house and as one of the most successful writers in the world. Let’s get beyond that!”’
Pearse was born in Rochester, Kent. When she was three years old, her mother died of septicaemia following a miscarriage. Pearse’s Royal
Marine father was away and the mother lay dead for three days before neighbours spotted Pearse and her brother Michael, five, in the snow with no coats. ‘I always think how alone my mother must have felt. She was a nurse, she would have realised how serious things were, but in those days we had no phone. We must have been so hungry and cold with no heating.’
With their father unable to quit work, she and Michael were placed in separate Catholic orphanages: hers was in London, Michael’s was in Gloucestershire. The nuns were mainly kind to Pearse (older girls were treated much more harshly) but she still remembers the terrible cold and atrocious food. ‘We’d have to stay in the refectory until we had eaten every last scrap. Even if it was congealed on the plate.’
After three years, their father remarried and the children came home. Pearse was thrilled but their stepmother was an unaffectionate, unkind woman, so she left home at 16 and from then barely communicated with her family. ‘For years I was very hung up about my issues with my stepmother. She had this harsh attitude that you check out of home when you’re 16 and fend for yourself. But I’ve long got that out of my system. I’ve realised she was responsible for me turning out as I am,’ she says with characteristic positivity.
Pearse prefers to dwell on happy times, especially her life in London in the swinging 60s after her first marriage ended. ‘It was the summer of love and we were part-time hippies. At the weekend, we’d paint flowers on our faces and go out with bare feet.’
Her second husband John Pritchard (‘a tortured soul’) was a trumpet player who performed with Steve Marriott from the Small Faces and toured with an up-and-coming musician called David Bowie. ‘David was so fun. I remember him coming round once with two pineapples up his pink jumper because
I was pregnant and had a craving for them.’
After marrying husband number three, lorry driver Nigel, Pearse started writing. She realised she had a talent for it because she had won prizes for sending funny letters to women’s magazines. She finished her first novel, Georgia, over several years, while her children played around her feet and while running a gift shop in Bristol. She then spent another seven years finding a publisher.
Just as Georgia came out in 1993, Pearse’s shop collapsed financially, leaving her bankrupt and suffering from depression. She divorced Nigel and moved into a ‘grim’ flat in Bristol with her youngest daughter Jo, then aged 12. Still, she forced herself to keep writing. Success wasn’t overnight, but her third novel, Charity – about a woman giving up her son for adoption – was a 1995 bestseller. She has gone on to publish 31 books.
Pearse spent decades searching fruitlessly for Warren. (In 2010 she even wrote a piece in the Daily Mail about her quest to find him.) In 2022, while she was finishing her memoir, Pearse visited some cousins in Ireland. They told her Warren had contacted them after an online DNA test had revealed to him they were related. He wanted to meet his mother.
‘The day before I’d told my cousin I didn’t believe in God any more, but I turned to her then and said, “I believe in Him now!” I was so excited I could have flown home without a plane.’
Pearse found her son had been renamed Martin and was a marine engineer, who’d settled in Houston, Texas, for work. They spoke on the phone and shortly afterwards met in London. ‘He still had exactly that same baby face. We couldn’t stop giggling. I had so many questions about his life, but you couldn’t ask them all, so we just sat there and looked at each other and grinned.’ She discovered she had three more grandchildren and a greatgrandchild, all living – amazingly – in Kent, near Pearse’s birthplace.
She has since visited Martin (‘it was hard to call him that to start with!’) and his partner in the US and they call each other often. But Pearse knows better than to be too heavy handed.
‘Every time you speak you try to cram in as much as you can, but you can’t possibly fill in all the missing years. I’m content to know he turned into a fine man, a son to be proud of.’
‘THE TIME WE HAD LEFT TOGETHER WAS LIKE THE DAYS BEFORE AN EXECUTION’
Lesley’s autobiography The Long and Winding Road is published by Michael Joseph, £22*