- guardian.co.uk, Saturday July 12 2008 00.06 BST
- The Guardian, Saturday July 12 2008
In the winter of 1942, a pretty woman in her mid-20s holding her six-week-old baby boarded a train at the Victorian garrison town of Aldershot; travelling with her was her younger sister carrying a bundle of the baby's clothing. Their plan was simple and momentous, as well as illegal. They would travel half an hour or so to the town of Reading and there on the platform, as arranged, give the child away, along with a falsely made-out birth certificate, to a man and woman, total strangers. We know that the sisters, overwhelmed by grief, returned straight home. At this remove, moral judgments are irrelevant. The young mother was attempting to resolve what must have seemed an intractable problem and, in the most limited terms, she succeeded: nothing was heard from this baby boy for another 60 years.
Her name was Rose Wort, and the son she abandoned to his fate is my older brother, David. To understand fully this singular, painful event would require the resources of an omniscient god. The full story is beyond our reach. In that moment, when the baby was passed across to a young woman, also called Rose, and her husband Percy Sharp, there was concentrated a dense network of forces and causes, some global, others so private they were never spoken of again. The precise nature of Rose Wort's emotional turmoil in 1942 can only be guessed at. What we do know is that a catastrophic world war, whose outcome was still uncertain, had altered and was dominating all lives. It had removed from Rose her husband Ernest, the father of her two children, and transformed him into an infantryman fighting in the North Africa campaign. It had brought into Rose's life a 25-year-old, straight-backed sergeant major, David McEwan, whose own life had been radically changed; he had been injured in the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 and had spent six months in Alder Hey hospital. He was a sergeant, an instructor, but no longer considered combat fit. Ultimately the war was to remove Ernest from Rose's life altogether - he was fatally injured in action at Nijmegen in 1944. She and David McEwan married in 1947, and I was born the following year, not long before Rose went back into hospital for a hysterectomy.
Clearly, the lovers believed they had to conceal for ever the living proof of their affair. Rose may have been hard up, and at times she and the two children were "on the parish" - the pre-welfare state equivalent of social security benefit. She often spoke of how Ernest would disappear for long periods without explanation, leaving her without support. It's possible that in her affair with my father there was an element of tit for tat or entitlement. Certainly her remarks to me many years later suggested that this was so. For all that, she was a respectable young woman, and the closely knit village of Ash, just two miles from Aldershot, would have been outraged to see her bear another man's child when her husband was away at war. Rose would have faced the severest form of ostracism. Her love affair would have been seen as a deeply unpatriotic act. She would have dreaded Ernest's return and the inevitable terrible confrontation. Her child would have been stigmatised - "born out of wedlock", "illegitimate", "bastard" - in a mere two generations these terms have lost their significance, and it is hard now for younger people to imagine their brutal, accusatory power. Total secrecy and complicated arrangements would have been necessary in order to keep knowledge of the pregnancy and the baby's existence from neighbours and family, and, more importantly, from the children, Jim and Margy, then aged seven and five. For that reason they were sent away - Jim to spend the rest of his childhood with Ernest's mother, and Margy eventually to a harsh institution for servicemen's daughters where she almost died from an untreated illness. One way or another, all of us, all of Rose's four children, were sent away, and much of this had to do with my father.
He was a professional soldier, Glasgow born, a handsome, muscular man with neat, Brylcreemed hair and a sergeant major's trim toothbrush moustache. As an unemployed 17-year-old, he had lied about his age to join the Highland Light Infantry in the early 1930s. Now he was in the newly formed REME, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. Off-duty he was convivial and liked to tell a good story and sing in the sergeants' mess. Domineering by nature, with a military taste for order and efficiency, he was feared by the men he trained. By his own account to me many years later, he found intimacy difficult, and was sexually innocent when he met our mother, and I have no reason not to believe him. To have a child by a woman whose husband was on active service overseas could have meant the ruin of Sergeant McEwan's army career - one more reason to do something quickly. That Ernest, the betrayed, died fighting for his country and the liberation of Europe while my father remained in barracks must have compounded the guilt and secrecy of later years.
Perhaps he was the one who forced the solution. Certainly, Rose would not have had the strength of character to stand in his way, and a woman of her class and generation would have had to go against the grain to pit her will against a man's. Or perhaps they were in it deeply together. Or again, just possibly, it may have been my mother, as the more vulnerable in the situation, who demanded drastic action. Whatever it was, the actual plan they settled on has much of my father about it. The advertisement in a local paper that offered a baby to any takers was ruthlessly terse. "Complete surrender" carries a military echo - he may have hesitated to write "unconditional". The birth certificate that accompanied my brother to Reading railway station named Ernest Wort as the father. Was it a lingering paternal love, or vanity, or a little of both that prompted a father to give his baby the parting present of his own Christian name, David, as well as that of his own favourite brother, Stewart?
In the years since 2002 when I learned of my brother's existence, Margy, Jim (also known as Roy) and I have had time to reflect on the consequences this tightly held secret had for our family. Certainly, the pleasure and excitement of discovering a brother has to some extent been offset by a forced and continuing reappraisal of the past. In my own case, small instances keep offering themselves up for recalibration: when I was nine my mother told me that I was never to mention in company that Margy and Jim had a different father from mine; when I interviewed my father on tape in 1989 and asked him to describe his first meeting with my mother, he became unaccountably angry - and so ended a half-hearted attempt to put together a family history; when, in 1987, I met Jim for a drink - a rare event in our fractured family - my parents were strangely nervous, my father especially plying me with questions the next day as though, it now seems, he thought Jim might have known too much; in the late 1990s my mother told my cleaning lady that she, Rose, had once "lost a baby". Hearing this at second hand, I thought the reference was to a miscarriage and, carelessly, never followed it up. Now and then, small moments from the past like these demand reinterpretation.
The larger pattern seems a little clearer. It always baffled me why Jim was sent away to live with his granny, and I never received a satisfactory explanation until now. Only now do I fully understand that there was an unspoken, or rather, unconscious, rule in our family that the name of Ernest Wort was never to be uttered in my father's presence. David McEwan served abroad until his mid-60s, even though he had many opportunities to return to England. I wonder now if this was not a self-imposed exile. In 1959, at the age of 11, I was sent from Tripoli, Libya to a state-run boarding school in England. Cut off from family, my parents' existence, especially in north Germany for the 20 years after 1961, seemed well ordered, and empty. They lived in married quarters on a variety of British Army camps and were profoundly bored and lonely. Occasionally they invited family out to join them and were extravagantly and exactingly hospitable. They watched German television at night, even though they did not understand a word. My mother occupied herself with the constant purchase and wrapping and dispatching of birthday and Christmas presents for even the remotest member of the family. She knitted for babies she would never meet. In retrospect, all that diligence, all that distance, seems immensely sad. So, too, does their failed attempt, years before in the mid-50s, to adopt a child from a Dr Barnardo's home. I sometimes think their lives were haunted by the deed on Reading station, and that the ghosts became more vivid as Rose and David grew older. I hope I am wrong.
My parents died with their secret. My father, among many things a companionable man who liked a drink, knew in his mid-70s that he was dying of emphysema; we passed many late nights together talking freely, but even the approach of the oblivion he was convinced of did not prompt him to speak. Rose lived on six years after he died and sometimes talked about her marriage in intimate, almost unbearable detail, but never of this. When her mind started to go, but while she had a decent portion of memory remaining, she spoke more of Ernest than of David, to whom she had been married for almost 50 years. But her growing confusion could not trick her into indiscretion. When she was at last reunited with the child she gave away, she had no means left to her of understanding the occasion.
Against all the sadness was the simple fact of David's appearance. He found us by way of the Salvation Army. Lieutenant Colin Fairclough, who was coming to the end of a distinguished career and whose last case we were, handled his role as go-between with great sensitivity and wisdom. I shall always regard it as one of the strangest and most wondrous moments of my life, when I entered a pub on the edge of Oxford in February 2002 for a rendezvous with a brother I had never met. He was not difficult to spot; it was as though I was walking towards a mirror. Since there are no established conventions for such occasions (except, perhaps, at the end of a Shakespeare comedy), we were bound to fumble between a handshake and an embrace. There was further bathos when it took me more than a quarter of an hour to buy two glasses of wine at the bar. I kept glancing back over my shoulder at him, half expecting this apparition to fade. It is disconcerting, how quickly two lives can be summarised. We spoke for two or three hours. I was interested to discover what we had in common that could not be accounted for by experience alone: an aversion to tobacco, a tendency to develop basal cell carcinomas, and the interesting fact that we had stayed at the same hotel in Spain the preceding summer. A gene for hotel preference awaits expression.
David has not wandered far from Reading station - south Oxfordshire is barely 20 miles away - but the story he tells is of a psychological distance travelled. What a relief it was to learn that first night that his adoptive parents loved him and looked after him well. He had all the information necessary to track down his biological family when he was 20 years old. I can understand why he hesitated then. His - that is, our - parents sent him a card on his first birthday, in 1943. Thereafter, apparently, silence. If they had not contacted him in 19 years, so the young man reasoned, they would not be pleased to hear from him now. I like to think that in fact they would have been delighted and terribly relieved - a great burden of shame and silence would have been lifted. But of course, they could have lifted it for themselves. I am grateful to David for taking, as his 60th birthday approached, the difficult, risky decision to discover his origins at last. Not only have I acquired a brother, a sister-in-law and a niece, whose wedding we were lucky enough to attend, I have also learned a great deal about the past. The cliché runs that there is no such thing as an ordinary family; I have had to live this long to find out just how strange ours really is.
· This is the foreword, by Ian McEwan, to Complete Surrender, by Dave Sharp and John Parker, published next week by John Blake at £17.99. To order a copy for £16.99, with free UK p&p, call 0870 836 0875, or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
