My mother was born in 1914 to Charles de Lacy Hawkins and
Mary Jane Hawkins. When my mother was about 13 she and her younger brother
were put into a home because their mother was dying of cervical cancer. This
all happened in Wales. When she was 16 she moved to Weston-super-Mare and
fell pregnant to a Mr. Marwood. Peter John Hawkins was born in 1934 in
South Petherton, Somerset. She then met and married a Mr. Francis Fisher
and in 1937 they had a daughter called Janet. At some stage she met Gerard
Munson but when he realized that the two children with her were her own and
not her brother and sister as she first told him, he left. She went after
him and and persuaded him to take her back. She then took Peter to the
nearest Dr. Barnados and put him up for adoption (he was about 4 years old)
and took Janet to the house in Wales, tied her to her cot and left for
London which is where she was living at this time probably with a family
that she used to work for. Janet was 18 months old. They now moved to
Middlesbrough where Gerard was born and they had Fred and Anne before moving
back down to London where Maureen was born. Gerard was in the army and we
think that he was sent abroad because she then met and married Christopher
Fairchild (she was never married to Gerard). They moved to Liverpool taking
Fred, Anne and Maureen with them and had Paul and David. For some reason
which we will now never know, she waited for Christopher to go off to work
on the buses at about 3 in the morning, got her 3 children from Gerard up
and, telling them that Christopher no longer loved them, got them dressed
and traveled down to Gravesend, Kent where Gerard was now working. This
meant, of course, that Paul and David were left on their own - Paul was
nearly 2 and David was 8 months. This was in 1947 and 2 years later, I was
born. She carried on being unfaithful to Gerard until he eventually left in
1953 taking Fred with him. We girls had an horrific life with her until,
when I was 10, she threw us out at 10 o'clock at night because we wouldn't
go to the pub and get her a drink!! None of us saw her again until Oct.
1997 when Fred got a phone call from a lady who turned out to be Janet. (I
forgot to add, Mike, that none of us knew about the other children, except
Fred can now remember things about 2 little boys in a small 2 up 2 down
which must have been the 2 boys in Liverpool.) It seems that Janet's father
received a letter from our mother when she was 13 saying that if Janet
wanted she could now live with her. Janet didn't of course but she
remembered that in the letter it said that there was a brother who had just
passed his 11 plus. This stuck in Janets' mind and when her father and then
her step-mother died she started the long search for her brother who she
knew nothing about except that he had passed his 11 plus when she was 13!!
It took her 10 long years during which she gave up a few times!! Fred then
went to see our mother and she told him about Peter and Paul but she never
mentioned David. I was determined to find them which I eventually did but
there are 2 more siblings which I cant find. I don't know if they are male
or female or their ages and our mother wouldn't tell me when I telephoned
her. She is dead now so I will probably never find them.