Jane Lewin

Have you ever wondered what dark secrets might lurk in your family tree? What skeletons might be hiding there?

This is the story of one such dark secret. A family whose lives were turned upside down when their mother, exhausted from living with a man she did not love, decided to walk out of the family home, leaving her husband and their five children to cope without her! A mother who then went off to forge a new life with a young German gardener shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.

It is a story of the resilience of those abandoned children who supported each other during the crisis, how they lived through heartache and bewilderment at losing their mother and the hardship of the war years and beyond. We get a glimpse of life as it was in the early part of the twentieth century as one sister is taken gravely ill with a disease that was rife at the time but is now more or less eradicated. We see the family grow up, find love and happiness, and, in the case of one child, move to the wild prairies of Canada to start a new life.