More than just Coincidence
The remarkable story of how a mother and daughter were reunited in one astonishing twist of fate
Julie Wassmer
Copyright
Harper NonFiction
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperTrue 2010
© Julie Wassmer 2010
Julie Wassmer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
‘It’s Your Thing’, words and music by O’Kelly Isley, Ronald Isley and Rudolph Isley © 1969, reproduced by permission of EMI Blackwood/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W8 5SW
‘Days’, words and music by Ray Davis © 1968 DAVRAY MUSIC LTD & CARLIN MUSIC CORP, London NW1 8BD—all rights reserved—used by permission
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book.
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Source ISBN: 9780007354313
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007354320
Version: 2017-05-04
For my family
Margie and Bill
Sara
Caden and Tallulah
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I
took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
‘The Road Not Taken’
Robert Frost
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One Black Plimsolls Tied With Ribbon
Chapter Two The Number 8 Bus
Chapter Three By Hope, By Work, By Faith
Chapter Four Rebel Without a Cause
Chapter Five Keeping Secrets
Chapter Six Ten Short Days
Chapter Seven Afterbirth
Chapter Eight The Road Out
Chapter Nine Into the Westy
Chapter Ten A Clock Stops Ticking
Chapter Eleven Tramontana
Chapter Twelve A New Tack
Chapter Thirteen 18 Jermyn Street
Chapter Fourteen Three O’Clock at the Pagoda
Chapter Fifteen Emotional Journeys
Chapter Sixteen Full Circle
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
Prologue
Close to the sea, near my home, I have a small wooden beach hut, where I spend long summer days with my husband, daughter and grandchildren. It is also the place where I write. Sometimes there is little more to distract me than the cry of seagulls and the turning of the tide. Sitting on the verandah, looking out at the horizon, I have a sense of completeness and calm, of everything being just as it should be. It is a feeling that eluded me for so long. Wherever I went, and however happy I was, I knew that within me there was an empty space. I was sure that one day the missing piece would be restored, but until then my heart would never be quite whole.
As a television scriptwriter I have countless plotlines to my credit but still none so extraordinary as the drama I experienced in my own life almost twenty years ago: an apparent coincidence so remarkable that many people have been compelled to search for more complex explanations as to how it could have happened.
Certainly it is hard to believe that mere coincidence could have brought together the disparate strands of my life in such an astonishing way, or provided me with the signposts that led me, at a precise time, on a precise day—5 November 1990—to a door on a busy street near London’s Piccadilly. Even then I could so easily have turned away. But I didn’t. And by crossing its threshold I came face to face with my long-lost daughter—without either of us knowing who the other was.
Two decades have now passed since that meeting. The fireworks that followed when the truth was revealed are long over but the emotions that overwhelmed me then are still just as poignant as they continue to reverberate through my life. How can I possibly describe what it feels like to abandon a child to strangers in a blind leap of faith, believing that they would be better parents than I could ever be? How can I explain the profound sense of loss; the absence so great that it becomes a haunting presence? How can I define the lasting joy brought by a reunion that seemed so random and yet so well timed?
Some have attributed this event to synchronicity, some to serendipity; others have seen it as fate. On a hot summer’s day in 2010, as I gaze out from the verandah of my beach hut at my daughter, playing with her own two children at the water’s edge, I know, as sure as my beating heart, that what drew me to her that day was more than just coincidence.
It is time to share my story.
Chapter One
Black Plimsolls Tied With Ribbon
I was an only child and likely to stay that way. My mother often remarked that, while she loved me dearly, she would have been just as happy with a litter of puppies. It was a sentiment that shocked friends and neighbours but I understood it completely: there were animal people and there were children people. My mother belonged in the first camp. For that matter, so did I.
At four years old I mothered my own ‘family’—hamster, tortoise and a tabby cat unimaginatively named Tiddles (I never knew an East End cat called anything else) who allowed me to dress him up in dolls’ clothes. I also trained our hen, Ada, to pick up washing in her beak from the laundry basket for me to peg on to the clothes line and rescued many a tiny sparrow, setting them carefully into cardboard boxes lined with cotton wool. Human babies, however, held no more fascination for me than they did for my mum.
While other mothers cooed over babies in prams, mine sat with me in the Rex picture house in Roman Road market, sobbing over the death of Shep or Old Yeller. When my father returned from work one evening to find us yet again red-eyed with grief (this time over Bambi’s mum), he insisted that enough was enough. From then on there would be only happy endings.
My mum, Margaret Mary Exley, always known as Margie, had had a tough childhood in London’s East End. One of five children whose father, a docker, had died of TB as a young man, she had left school at fourteen to help support her family. To her, work was not only a question of economic necessity but the key to self-reliance. She had given birth to me at the age of thirty-three—unusually late, in the 1950s, for a woman to be having her first child—and a schoolfriend once commented to me how different she seemed from the other mums, most of whom had jobs in factories but dreamed of having enough money coming in to be able to stay at home with their children. My mum, on the other hand, had to be persuaded by my father to give up full-time employment to take care of me. She did so until I was four, but she
couldn’t wait to get back to work once I started infant school.
It was not as if she were a high-flying businesswoman with a fulfilling career. She worked as a waitress, on her feet all day, in a busy Kardomah coffee house on Kingsway in Holborn. But having known severe poverty growing up, she was in constant fear of sinking back into the kind of hand-to-mouth existence governed by pawnshops and tallymen. She seemed to live in a state of heightened reality, nerves strung taut, like a meerkat perpetually alert to danger. Yet at the same time she had a keen and tireless curiosity about other people, places and lifestyles that she could only glimpse in Hollywood films, and the coffee house, like the cinema, offered an escape from the daily grind of the East End. Every evening, she would come back with stale but exotic confections: sandwiches in rye bread, fruit croissants and Danish pastries—delicacies never found at that time among the custard tarts and pork pies of an East End bakery.
Many of her customers worked nearby at Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC World Service, and she would proudly bring home autographed photographs of 1960s ‘celebrities’ like the debonair newsreader Reggie Bosanquet, the actor Sam Kydd and even, rather surprisingly, strip-club owner Paul Raymond, the so-called ‘King of Soho’.
Years later, one night in 1978, the television news was headlined by the mysterious death of the Bulgarian dissident novelist and playwright Georgi Markov, believed to have been murdered with the tip of a poisoned umbrella. My mother was distraught. Markov, who had worked for the BBC World Service since being granted political asylum in 1969, had been not only her customer but also her friend, chatting with her every day over coffee and always leaving a good tip. She knew him as ‘my Georgie’. It’s a wonder MI5 didn’t take her in for background questioning.
My mother had been working at the Royal Mint at Tower Hill, swinging heavy bags of metal on to trucks, when she met my father, Bill Wassmer, a coiner who struck metal into money. Born in 1917, my dad was the eldest son of a soldier who had settled on Civvy Street as a baker. A dyed-in-the-wool trade union man, he was intelligent but for the most part self-educated. He became the long-term shop steward at the Mint, arguing his causes with considerable adversarial skill.
When they married in 1950 my parents put their names on the council housing list and moved into two upstairs rooms sublet to them by my father’s uncle and aunt while they waited for a home of their own. In my mind’s eye I can picture my father carrying their few possessions into their temporary accommodation at Lefevre Road whistling ‘If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake’, the cheery song popularised that year by Eileen Barton and Gracie Fields. Nearly twenty years later Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin supplied a grittier soundtrack to the times—and my parents were still waiting to be rehoused.
They had already been at 25 Lefevre Road for three years when I came along on 5 January 1953, and there we would remain until 1969. The house was a Victorian terrace with a bay window flanked by tall pillars. In the 1950s and 1960s it was impossible to imagine that such decrepit slums would be sought after and gentrified by Thatcher’s generation. They had leaking roofs and so much subsidence that the upper ceilings sagged alarmingly. Landlords never did repairs so, whenever there was heavy rain or snow, buckets had to be positioned at strategic points around the floors. We had a living room with a tiny kitchenette leading off it through an open doorway, one bedroom, an outside toilet and a rusting tin bath which hung on the garden wall—but no hot water. From time to time, mice scratched and scuttled in the wainscot. Occasionally they’d be sucked up by the Hoover, not a pleasant experience for us or for them. As I never had a bedroom of my own—I slept in the same room as my parents when I was small and graduated to the living-room sofa when I was older—I had no territory that was exclusively mine, no private place or space to keep my personal things, but as I knew nothing else I didn’t feel deprived until I came to see how other people lived.
My parents were not so much a couple as two soulmates with their own individual interests—in my mother’s case the pictures and her beloved Kardomah coffee house, and darts and the Hackney Wick dog track in my dad’s. They were opposites, owl and fowl—she was a night person; he rose early. He was easygoing while she did most of the worrying. Television adverts warning of body odour or bad breath provoked paranoia in my mum since she had been born without a sense of smell. As a result she moved around in a cloud of cheap perfume, forever checking gas taps to make sure they weren’t left on.
Although her education had been brief, my mother was bright and intuitive. An instinctive judge of character and situations, she seemed to understand what made people tick. She would instantly pick up on the importance of what remained unsaid in a conversation and at the Rex she always grasped the subtext of a film. My father often remarked that she was psychic. She certainly appeared to be able to read his mind and invariably knew exactly what he was about to say. Around him, she was never timid. Sensitive to the scars of her childhood privations, Dad had long ago assumed the role of her protector. Mum had been schooled by Irish nuns, and the Catholic guilt they instilled in her had been reinforced at home. After her father’s early death, one of her elder brothers had taken on the role of the head of the family and when she was fourteen he had given her a good beating after catching her talking to a boy in the street. She never forgot the lesson acquired so painfully: we may be poor, but heaven help you if you bring shame on this family. Thereafter even bare arms were taboo. I can’t recall her ever once wearing short sleeves, even during the occasional week we might spend at the Pontin’s holiday camp in Pakefield, near Lowestoft.
My father, on the other hand, was a staunch Protestant and had no time for Catholicism. He was fond of making speeches about the need for clear, rational thought, unclouded by religious doctrine. It was impossible, he would say, for anyone to get a proper education at the hands of priests or nuns because they failed to teach children to think for themselves. He was a big fan of Oliver Cromwell, who stood against Charles I’s assertion of the divine right of kings, and Martin Luther, who dared to rebel against the Pope.
At the age of four, safe from the clutches of priests and nuns, I started at the local infant school in Roman Road, opposite Kelly’s eel and pie shop. I ate pie and mash, covered in the thick green parsley sauce known to East Enders as ‘liquor’, almost every lunchtime. Outside the shop, on the stall, slate-grey eels writhed in metal trays before being grabbed, chopped and stuffed into bags, the individual chunks still squirming as housewives carried them home to boil or steam.
Many of the children already knew each other from nursery. Being an only child as well as a newcomer, at first I was painfully shy. I was luckier than some of my classmates in that my mother had already taught me to read. In the afternoons our teacher would tell us stories and encourage us to tell our own, something in which we could all participate. I remember listening intently to one little girl’s tale about a beautiful child called Ella who cleared the cinders from the grates for her ugly sisters. ‘And so,’ my classmate concluded triumphantly, ‘they called her Cinder…Ella!’ Oh, the wonderful logic of it! I was hooked.
‘Does anyone else have a story for us?’ asked the teacher.
In spite of my shyness, I felt my arm creep into the air almost involuntarily. I had a story to tell. I just hadn’t thought it up yet.
Slowly and carefully, I constructed my contribution as I went along. My classmates co-operated kindly, listening with apparent fascination to a rambling tale about a tortoise. My love of storytelling had been born.
At home, I finished reading a whole book and was spellbound by it. It was the story of Joan of Arc. I related it to my dad, who was so impressed that when a man knocked on our door promising education for the price of a simple instalment plan, he immediately signed on the dotted line. And so The Book of Knowledge entered my life, a set of leather-bound encyclopaedias with gold embossed lettering on their spines.
As an only child I was already a kind of mini-adult, sandwic
hed somewhere between the two grown-ups I called Mum and Dad and their separate lives and passions. I amused myself by drawing pictures, writing stories and burying myself in The Book of Knowledge. Opening any one of the volumes could transform a dull, rainy afternoon. Hours sped by as new worlds sprang to life. I could learn about ‘Our Giant Sun and its Gigantic Tasks’, or take in ‘The Story of Wheat’. In a section entitled ‘The Mistress of the Adriatic’, I read how Venetian prisoners would pass beneath the graceful Bridge of Sighs on their way to torture and death. Among photographic plates of amazing feats of engineering, or strange animals and insects like the Duck-Billed Platypus or the Bird-Eating Spider, were illustrated poems: ‘From a Railway Carriage’ by Robert Louis Stevenson I read aloud to myself, fascinated by its compelling steam-train tempo. Paintings featuring children, such as Velazquez’s portrait of the Infanta Margaret Maria, were mesmerising even in black and white. A stunning drawing of a bespectacled Gulliver towing a captive fleet to Lilliput led me on to the public library, where a lender’s card finally introduced me to a whole universe of characters and adventure. My head teeming with myriad stories drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, I allowed myself to dream: would I be as beautiful as the face that launched a thousand ships? As brave as Ajax? As wise as Minerva? I was venturing beyond the bounds of my childhood experience, and sometimes it could be scary. Was that a lorry that just passed, shaking our subsiding house, or the first rumblings of an earthquake like the one that destroyed Pompeii?
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