I meet Aunt Dolly

So on a Saturday afternoon we knocked on Aunt Dolly's door.  She was very old but came to the door.  When we went into the small sitting room and a man about my age welcomed us in.  This was my cousin John.  He was the son of one of the other sisters but had been brought up by a family friend.  It seemed this family had quite an odd history. John confirmed Ellen, my birth mother, was alive and living in south London!

We had a cup of tea and John explained a little of the family history.  He confirmed I was the second of three children.  My elder brother Mick was born two years before me in 1946.  He was brought up with a family friend Nurse Lambert until he was nine and then put into care.  He never knew our mother Ellen.  After Mick, Ellen gave birth to me a couple of years later (1948).

But the house was very small and Ellen was forced to leave and maybe that's why we both ended up in the hospital in south London.  We were homeless.  It was there she left me and a year later I was placed into care.  Some ten years later Ellen had her last baby, my sister Theresa.

After my brother Mick had spent nine years with Nurse Lambert and a year and a half in council care, to his great surprise and confusion Ellen and her husband, neither of whom he had ever met, came to take him out of care and bring him home.

However they were strangers to him and it did not work out, and at the age of eighteen he left home.  He later emigrated to New Zealand.  (and never seen again? - well, maybe, just read on)

My sister, I discovered, was married with two children and living in south London, no more than a dozen miles from me

We said goodbye to Aunt Dolly.  John, who said he would contact Ellen and tell her about me, and see how she felt about meeting me