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

Afterwards we went straight back to the Davidsons and Pop left me there with a hug, saying that he was very busy with all the arrangements but he would see me soon. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral – children didn’t go to funerals in the early fifties. I stayed at the Davidsons until the formalities were out of the way, and all that time I didn’t shed a single tear. I was quiet but just got on with my schoolwork and playing with Donald and helping Mrs Davidson in the kitchen. It was only when Pop picked me up and brought me back to our house that I realised Mum really wasn’t there – she wasn’t in the sitting room, or in her bedroom, or in the kitchen – and I began to cry. In my nine-year-old’s mind I’d somehow thought she would be, even though I knew she was an angel now. I was all muddled up.

Pop pulled me onto his lap for a hug and said, ‘You mustn’t cry, Cherryanna. You’ve got to be a very brave girl for Daddy.’

He sounded so sad that I sniffed back my snot and wiped my tears on my sleeve, swallowing the sobs in my throat. I couldn’t bear to make Pop any sadder than he already was, so I zipped the emotions inside of me and locked them away, determined not to cry any more. The words ‘you mustn’t cry’ stuck in my head, and I thought of them if I ever felt like I was going to break down, repeating them over and over to myself. ‘You mustn’t cry, you mustn’t cry.’ Pop needed me to be strong, and that’s what I would be. I wanted to look after him and help him to cope. We would stick together, he and I, the two of us together, and we’d manage just fine.

Pop had other ideas, though. He couldn’t manage to do his job at the aerodrome and look after a nine-year-old girl at the same time, so first of all he sent me off to stay with my auntie Florrie and uncle Sid, who lived near Margate. I don’t know how long I was there but it was long enough for Auntie Florrie and me to make a knitted rabbit and stuff it full of stockings. One night I couldn’t help starting to cry in bed, no matter how hard I tried not to. When Florrie came in I didn’t want her to see I was upset so I squashed that rabbit hard against my face and told her to ‘go away’. After that I went to stay with some friends of Pop’s in Ramsgate. There was a woman living with them who had been mentally disabled since falling out of a window as a child, and she spent her days winding and unwinding cotton reels, so I used to help her.

Finally, after I don’t know how long, Pop picked me up and drove me back to the house on Heath Road in Salisbury where we had lived with Mum, and it felt terribly empty without her. We took flowers to her grave and arranged them in a little crackle-glaze vase. When I looked at the mound of earth, I never believed she was in there because I knew she was an angel in Heaven. All the same, I was very upset when frost cracked the vase one week in winter and all the water spilled out and the flowers died. It seemed important to keep it looking nice for Mum.

Pop hired a succession of housekeepers to look after us, but for some reason none of them worked out. There was a couple who came to live in for a while, and I think they did their best but they couldn’t compare with my mum. Nothing they did was right. For example, I liked to crunch on the raw stump in the middle of a cabbage – Mum had always given me that bit when she was making our tea. I told the housekeeper I liked it but she misunderstood and cooked the middle bit for me, boiling it till it was soft and mushy. I didn’t tell her what she had done wrong but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it like that. It was disgusting.

Then, on Coronation Day, 2 June 1953, there was a party in our street and everyone was getting dressed up. I had a blue-and-white-check gingham dress with a full circle skirt and red ric-rac braid round the hem that Mum had made for me before she died. I really felt the bee’s knees in that dress and decided that the patriotic colours were perfect for the party. I went to school that morning then when I got back I looked for the dress and found it had been washed but not ironed, so it was all crumpled. Our housekeeper wasn’t there; I was on my own in the house. I couldn’t face going to the party with it looking like that, so I pulled out the ironing board and climbed on a chair to plug the iron into the light socket, the way I’d seen Mum do it. When it had heated up enough, I began to iron my favourite dress, but the creases wouldn’t come out. I didn’t know that some fabrics have to be dampened before ironing. I tried for ages to make it smooth and neat but it wouldn’t work and I missed Mum more than ever. She would never have let me go out in a creased dress. With her looking after me, I was always impeccably turned out, but now there was no one to help. I went to the street party in my crumpled dress, but for me the day had a shadow cast over it and it was hard to join in the fun.

Housekeepers came and went and somehow Pop and I muddled through, but I knew he was sad. He used to get depressed when Mum was still alive, and I know they once went to the doctor to talk about it. He’d been through a lot, with our house being bombed and his having a very responsible job, but I once overheard Mum saying that he was a glass half-empty person. ‘All your family are like that,’ she told him. ‘You believe that if the worst can happen, then it will happen.’ I sort of knew what she meant, even back at that age. Now I could sense that his spirits were low again simply because he was very quiet. I was quiet too; it was a silent house.

And then one day Pop brought home a tall, scary-looking woman with carefully curled dark hair and a very posh accent, whom he introduced as Billie.

‘Billie’s been living in India,’ Pop told me. ‘And now she’s back here, she’s driving ambulances.’

I gazed at her.

‘Do you know anything about India?’ she asked.

‘Isn’t that where they have tigers?’ I blushed. That’s all I could think of.

‘What’s your dog’s name?’ she asked, and I told her it was Bunty. ‘I have a bitch called Floogie,’ she said. ‘She was a stray and we found her one day when we were out in the ambulance, so I snuck her back to base and kept her.’

‘Why did you call her Floogie?’

She smiled. ‘Don’t you know the song “Flat-footed Floogie with the Floy-floy”?’ She turned to Pop. ‘It was originally “Flat-footed Floozie”, but they had to change it so the radios would play it.’ They both chuckled.

I didn’t know what a floozie was, never mind a floogie or a floy-floy, and I felt a bit left out. She and Pop seemed very friendly with one another and I didn’t like it one bit. She was smiling at me and trying to appear kind, but there was something about her I didn’t trust right from the start. I think it was because her smile didn’t reach her eyes. Maybe I knew she was only pretending to be nice and didn’t really feel it.

Over tea I learned that Billie had been married to an officer in the Indian Army but they’d got divorced. And then Pop dropped the bombshell. ‘Billie and I have some very exciting news for you,’ he said. ‘We are planning to get married so that she will be like a new mummy for you. Isn’t that nice? What’s more, you can be the bridesmaid at our wedding.’

I grimaced. Billie was nothing like my mum and I made up my mind then and there that I would certainly never call her Mum. I didn’t mind being a bridesmaid because I’d never been one before, but I worried about what their being married might entail.

‘Does that mean you’ll come to live in our house?’ I asked, and I suppose my tone of voice didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

‘Don’t be rude,’ Pop said. ‘Of course she will. We’ll all be one happy family.’

It seemed to be no time at all after they broke the news that we were all trooping off to Salisbury Registry Office, me in a short flouncy dress that stuck out at the sides, and it became official: Pop and Billie were married. They took me with them for their honeymoon in Belgium, where we stayed with friends of theirs, and I felt utterly lost and alone in the world. Pop had been my only ally and now he was lavishing all his attention on this posh woman I hardly knew. We were in a strange country, with strange people speaking a different language, and I felt completely cut off. If only I had a brother or sister, I thought. At least we’d be in this together. We could have ganged up and played tricks on her, and kept each other company.

Billie was nice to me on the honeymoon, trying to play-act at being my new mum, but on the way home we stopped at a hotel in Dover, where she decided to cut my shoulder-length hair. ‘It’s far too much trouble to look after,’ she said by way of explanation. She had been a hairdresser herself before she got married the first time, and she wielded the scissors, giving me a short crop that made me look like a boy. I gazed at my reflection in the mirror, remembering all the care Mum had lavished on my hair, and I knew things were only going to get worse from here on in.

3

My Closest Friend, Grizelda the Goat

At first Billie’s influence was just felt in terms of strictness about the way she ran the household. She was constantly chiding me to speak ‘properly’ and adopt a posh accent like hers instead of the Wiltshire one of my schoolmates; I wasn’t allowed to mix with anyone she didn’t consider to be of ‘our class’; and at seven shillings a week she decided that my riding lessons were far too expensive and had to be stopped. I was distraught about this and begged her to reconsider, but she said things like ‘needs must’ and ‘don’t be a spoiled little girl’, which meant there was no room for discussion.

Before long I was constantly on edge, waiting to be told what I had done wrong, and Pop never intervened to support me; he was a gentle, go-with-the-flow person who was soon totally under Billie’s thumb. We hardly had any time alone together anymore because he was out at work during the day, and when he came home Billie was there. I remember once he took me to the airfield at Boscombe Down, and I was allowed to climb into the cockpit of Fairey Delta 2, a new plane that had just broken the world speed record. It had a long pointy nose and was very narrow. Inside, I sat in the pilot’s seat, holding onto the steering column and looking at the figures on all the dials; one of these dials had recorded the speed of 1,132 miles per hour that it had achieved to break the record. I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be in the pilot’s seat then as the world whizzed past. That was a pretty special treat.

After I showed an interest in Fairey Delta 2, Dad told me about the rickety little planes he used to work on in the First World War. ‘Like string bags made out of balsa wood and cloth treated with dope,’ he said, which made them terrible fire hazards. He’d been a Flight Sergeant with 56 Squadron and had fitted out planes in France, then when the war ended he’d gone on a goodwill flight to South Africa with dozens of stops along the way – he showed me them on the map. After that he went out to work on planes in India for a couple of years. I was in awe of this. It seemed terribly glamorous to be an aeroplane fitter back in the days when aviation was in its infancy.

Sometimes Pop would sneak into my bedroom and wake me in the middle of the night if there was a nightingale singing outside, or if there was a particularly dramatic thunderstorm he thought I’d like to watch. We were both fans of thunder and lightning. But otherwise Billie was always around and always criticising both of us.

With Pop, her main complaint was that he didn’t earn enough money to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed in India. Our Salisbury home was a perfectly nice semi-detached house with a beautiful garden, but Billie wanted something grander where she could be a lady of the manor. She persuaded Pop to buy Glebe House in West Lavington, a gorgeous old property which was actually three cottages knocked into one. It stood in three-quarters of an acre of garden with a trout stream running through it. I think this was a stretch for them to afford because Billie insisted that I paid for my own bedroom with the £200 Mum had left me in her will, which was in a building society account in my name.

I liked the West Lavington house, especially after Billie got a goat, which we kept in a shed in the garden. I became very close to that goat, who was named Grizelda. I never talked about my emotions to any human beings – I saw it as a sign of weakness now, something that could be used against me – but I always found solace in animals, and Grizelda was an exceptionally good listener. Every day, when I got home from school, I’d take out the vegetable peelings for her and sit telling her about my day: I’d talk about any girls who’d been mean to me, or teachers who were cross, or complain about the amount of homework we had. Grizelda would munch on her carrot tops, regarding me with a wise expression, then bend her head for me to scratch it. She genuinely was my best friend and confidante through those early teenage years.

I did try to make other friends. Someone told me about a youth club in West Lavington, something to do with the Methodist church, where you could play games and hang out with other kids the same age. Surely Billie would let me join that? It was local so I could walk there myself.

‘We will both go along together,’ she ruled when I told her about it. ‘I will judge whether or not it is suitable.’

I imagined her charging in, wearing her fur coat and full make-up, turning up her nose at the club, announcing that they were the ‘wrong sort of people’, while I tried to hide behind her in my embarrassment. Cringing, I said, ‘No, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll bother after all.’

I hadn’t forgotten my love of horses, and I found that if I turned up at the local stables every weekend to muck out, they let me have a ride every now and then. There was a field of horses very near our house and sometimes I would sneak out with a halter I’d made out of string and ride around on one of them. I was never happier than when I was out on horseback with the wind in my hair. When you’re out there on a horse, you have to be able to deal with whatever happens, and I was learning a lot about being self-sufficient. I was getting good at it.

After leaving Devizes Road Primary I attended Devizes Grammar School, a co-ed some distance away from home. Every morning I had to catch a bus then walk a mile and a half, which inevitably got me there late, doing the same on the way home. It was difficult to make friends since I lived so far from school and wasn’t allowed to invite anyone home, or to take part in after-school activities. Billie had other plans for me: unpaid housework. I did the washing, the ironing, the cleaning, fed the dogs, prepared the vegetables for dinner every evening and washed up afterwards. I guess she’d had servants to do all these things in India, and in West Lavington I became the substitute punkah-wallah.

Soon I began to rebel, and we clashed bitterly. I was distraught when I came home from school one day to find that Billie had retrieved my old doll’s house from the attic, driven a stake through it and turned it into a bird table in the garden.

‘What are you so upset about?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t play with it anymore.’

‘I wanted to keep it. It was my special thing that Pop made me. How could you destroy it?’

‘At least it’s doing some good now instead of just taking up space.’ She failed to understand its emotional significance, and when I told Pop that evening he just shrugged and sighed and opened his paper. He’d do anything to avoid a fight.

Billie didn’t ever beat me but she locked me in my bedroom as punishment for misdemeanours, not realising that I could slither through the bars at the window and jump down onto the roof of the goat shed below. I suppose in retrospect I was a bit of a rebel.

One flashpoint was clothes: whereas my mum had bought me a new coat and new shoes every year because I was a ‘growing girl’, Billie complained about the cost of things. She would never buy me the correct school uniform, instead sending me to school in a hotch-potch of garments, for which the teachers told me off. My out-of-school clothes were all frumpy hand-me-downs from Billie’s sister, which Billie insisted that I ‘make do with and mend’. When I complained, she retorted, ‘What do you want nice clothes for? You’ve got a face like a spade.’

One of our worst fights came after I got home from school one day to find that Grizelda was gone.

‘Where is she?’ I screamed. ‘What have you done with Grizelda?’

‘She got on my nerves, eating everything in the garden,’ Billie said, ‘so I gave her away to a farmer.’

‘Which farmer? Where is she?’ I wouldn’t stop my persistent questioning until Billie gave in and told me where Grizelda had been rehomed, then I charged out of the house and walked all the way there. When Grizelda saw me she got so excited she tried to leap over the fence. I hugged her and cried, but had no choice but to leave her there when it was time to go home again. I missed her terribly after that.

When I asked, in typical teenage fashion, ‘What about me? Don’t my feelings come into it?’ Billie replied, crushingly: ‘You? You’re less than a grain of sand in the universe.’

Only once did Pop stand up for me in a fight with Billie. We were in the car and I was begging her to buy me some summer stockings rather than the awful 60-denier nylon pair I was supposed to make last for an entire school year. ‘Who do you think you are? Lady Muck?’ Billie rebuked. ‘We’re not made of money, you know.’ Suddenly, Pop screeched the car to a halt and yelled, ‘You will not treat her like that. Get out of the car!’ There was a blazing row, but for once he stood his ground and made Billie walk the three miles home.

When I was around fourteen, Pop was made redundant from his job as representative of Fairey Aviation when they closed down that branch of the aircraft testing site at Boscombe Down. He could have retired at that stage, but Billie persuaded him that they wouldn’t have enough money to live on from his pension. She had very expensive tastes, particularly in home décor, constantly changing our carpets, curtains and upholstery for the latest shades and styles. She insisted that Pop went back to work in the aerodrome storeroom, which was a huge climb-down for someone who had been in charge, and I could tell he hated it. We downsized to a house in Amesbury, Wiltshire, and I moved to the South Wilts Grammar School for Girls for my third year onwards.

The overwhelming feeling in my teens was loneliness and isolation. My contemporaries in the late fifties and early sixties were listening to pop music, wearing the latest fashions and going to dances where live bands played, but I had no social life except accompanying Pop and Billie to evenings spent playing cards with their friends. Every day after school my classmates hung out in the Red Cockerel coffee shop, chatting to boys and having a laugh. I yearned to join them but my pocket money was all taken up paying for school lunches, and besides, I’d have been in big trouble if I missed the bus home. I sat in the window seat of the bus watching them all clustered round a table in the Red Cockerel and felt like an alien species. It was such a lonely feeling.

In the early years of their marriage they had talked, tantalisingly, about adopting a child because Billie couldn’t have any of her own, and she said she’d always wanted to have a son. They made enquiries but Billie found the adoption agency’s assessment procedures rude and intrusive.

‘These flipping people, they want to come and inspect our house and ask all sorts of personal questions about us, and they haven’t even let me see what kind of child they might have available. I’m not putting up with this!’ she exclaimed.

My chance of gaining an ally, someone I could be close to, were dashed. After that my only hope was escape, to start a life of my own somewhere I could make my own choices and determine my own fate.

4

A Hasty Marriage

I passed two A Levels in sixth form and hoped to study agriculture at college, to pursue my love of animals. Billie objected to this plan, though – ‘It’s no career for a young lady’ – and instead I was signed up to study horticulture at Nottingham, which she deemed more fitting. That summer Dad and Billie moved to Deal in Kent (he had finally retired completely from the aerodrome), and it was while we were living there that Billie decided to become a Jehovah’s Witness.

She had always had her religious fads: there was a spiritualism phase, then a faith-healing phase to help ease the arthritis she suffered from, but the Jehovah’s Witness phase was the worst of all. She was obsessive about reading The Watchtower and going out to try to convert our neighbours, which was a total embarrassment. She banged on about modesty and virtue, railing against drunkenness and promiscuity, gambling and tobacco, and it was like listening to a record with the needle stuck in a groove. I don’t know how Pop put up with it; all I could do was leave home.

It was a requirement of my horticulture course that I completed a year’s practical work, so I managed to get a job at Mount Nurseries in Canterbury where my life became fun for the first time since Mum died. I moved into digs, and soon I’d made loads of friends among the other staff at the nursery. We all went to the pub together in the evenings after work. There were a few boyfriends, nothing serious, and fun social events almost every night of the week. I felt as though I’d been let out of jail! I was skint most of the time because there was hardly anything left of my wages after the fifteen shillings a week I paid for board and lodgings, but I was having the time of my life.

At first I got the bus home every weekend to visit Billie and Pop, but the final straw in my relationship with my stepmother came over a cucumber sandwich, of all things. I’d travelled home and was hungry when I arrived, so I went into the kitchen to make said sandwich.

‘What do you think you are doing? You eat far too much!’ Billie snapped.

I looked at her, buttery knife poised in my hand in mid-air, and simply thought, ‘I don’t want this anymore.’ I’d been shoved down by her all through my teens, and now that I was starting to pull myself up I refused to be squashed any more.

I put down the knife, left the sandwich behind on the countertop, walked out the door and never went back to that house again. From then on, Pop had to travel to Canterbury to see me – and, bless him, he did come regularly, although he admitted that it made things ‘a bit tricky’ with Billie. (She later accused him of having an affair with my landlady simply because he put up a kitchen cupboard for her!)

Now that I was my own boss I decided not to study horticulture after all because going to university would have meant I’d still be partly financially dependent on Pop and Billie, and I didn’t want any further involvement with that woman. Instead, I looked for jobs in the newspaper and finally decided to apply to study radiography at Canterbury Hospital, where you could train in-house. I was lucky to be accepted by the lugubrious consultant radiologist Dr Johnson, even though I didn’t have A Level Maths, and I enjoyed hospital life straight away.

It was around this time that I was introduced by a mutual friend to a man named Eric. He was quite a bit older than me, had been a professional footballer and was now practising as a chiropodist in a surgery near my digs. I thought nothing of it when my friend introduced us, but soon I noticed that Eric always seemed to be standing outside when I walked past and would call me over for a chat. One day he invited me to accompany him to a cricket match in which he was playing, so I went along and somehow we just fell into being boyfriend and girlfriend.

There was no great romance. I felt a sense of security with him because he knew more than me about the way the world worked, he was qualified and had a good career, and he seemed to have his whole life planned out. I was still only nineteen years old and, although I didn’t regret the decision to stop having any contact with Billie, I felt very alone in the world, with no one to fall back on should things go wrong. That’s where Eric came in. I thought he would look after me, so two years later when he asked me if I wanted to get engaged, I just said yes. He bought me a diamond ring from an antique shop – quite a decent diamond, it was – which cost £21 (a substantial amount in those days).