Jag Sherbourne grew up thinking she was an only child, but in fact all their lives her parents had hidden from her what had happened when the young couple had been separated during the war
As the dust settled after the end of the Second World War it wasn’t just the stories of battlefield bravery and heroism that slowly began to emerge, but also those within normal families – which were often no less dramatic.
Jag Sherbourne’s wartime drama came 64 years after VE Day – thanks to a stranger’s email in her inbox. It was the start of an incredible journey which would change her life, as the true story of what happened to her mum and dad – separated when the Nazis invaded their Guernsey home – finally began to unravel.
The Channel Islands, including Guernsey, close to the French mainland, were the only British territories to to be occupied by German forces in the Second World War. Following Churchill’s decision to withdraw troops, 25,000 residents were evacuated to Britain, before Hitler’s troops marched onto the five islands on June 30, 1940.
Growing up an only child in Guernsey’s capital, St Peter Port, Jag knew her parents, Kathleen and Charles, had spent the whole war apart, finally reuniting two months after VE Day and continuing with their lives together.
What she didn’t know was that, during those five long years with very little communication, her mother had given birth to two daughters – her long-lost sisters. Retired maths teacher Jag, now 69, remembers: “I’d got a friend request on Facebook from someone called Charley Miller. It was one of those requests with no profile picture so I’d deleted it.
“A week later I got an email from Friends Reunited, from the same woman. This time I opened it. It was quite brief, saying she was looking for her grandmother’s sister. She told me her grandmother was called Michele, and had a father called Charles, and that his surname was Le Bargy.
“That’s what caught my attention, because it’s a very rare Channel Island surname, there are only a handful of people and they are all related.
“We started an email conversation, but I quickly realised she must be mistaken. She said her nan was born in January 1945 and she’d found another baby girl who’d been born in 1942. I told her, ‘It can’t be me. My parents were apart during the war. It’s very interesting, but I’m afraid it’s all just a coincidence.’”
But the next morning Jag woke up to another email telling her that her nan had once worked in a guest house on Guernsey called Romo.
Jag was astounded. “After the war, my parents turned their house into a guest house in the summer and called it Romo. They moved away after a few years and the name was lost. No-one could have known what that house was called.”
Until then, all Jag knew was that when evacuations began her mum, then aged 24 and married for two years, had gone with her younger sister to live with family in Bridgewater, Somerset, where she had worked at a gunpowder factory. Months earlier she had given birth to a boy, Jag’s brother, but he had sadly died at just two months old, in March 1940.
Jag, who was born 14 years after the end of the war, explains: “The Germans were advancing across France and it looked like the Channel Islands would be invaded. I think both Mum and Dad intended to evacuate, but my dad worked at the power station and wasn’t able to go with mum straight away.
“She took his suit with her. He had applied to join the army, so he had every intention to follow her. But the island was bombed at the end of June, and then it was occupied, and that was it. They lived apart with no communication, other than the occasional Red Cross messages, which were just 25 heavily censored words, a few times a year.”
Jag remembers how her mum, who died in 1988, aged just 32, rarely spoke about that time. She says: “I deduced from that that she didn’t have anything interesting to say about it, ridiculous as that sounds.
“My dad, however, seemed to really enjoy it and would often talk about the occupation and his escapades. Because he worked shifts, he would be outside after curfew, and remembered coming across German roadblocks where they’d be shining torches on him.
“He’d tell me how, when he came across Nazis who didn’t speak English, he would mock them in a friendly manner, so they wouldn’t know. He also entered amateur dramatics during the war and was in a lot of plays. I think it was an exciting time for him.
Jag’s dad died in 1995, but she hadn’t opened the box of his personal things her husband had packed and put in their attic, even though she knew it would contain more memories.
But the unexpected email from Charley, who was convinced she was her sister’s granddaughter, changed that.
She recalls: “When she mentioned the guest house, that’s when it started to click. I remember when I was about six this teenage girl came to stay with us, she helped around the house but we also shared a room, it was like having an older sister. But she didn’t stay long, I vaguely remembered that there were arguments and she had run away.
“And then I remembered once sitting with my dad on my bed, telling him how my dream was to have a sister, and my dad saying to me, ‘You do have a sister, but she ran away’. And I remember getting really upset at that, and Dad never spoke about it again.”
It was then that Jag decided to open her father’s box of memories. “There was a lot of stuff relating to the war, including all the Red Cross messages” she remembers. “Then I found one sentence in one of the letters from my mum, telling him that if he wanted to tell the family about the baby she couldn’t, but it might be better to wait until she got home as there was a lot to explain.”
Realising that what Charley had told her was true, Jag made her own investigations, using ancestry websites and sending off for the birth certificates. It was becoming clear that Michele, born in 1945, was her sister, but there was another baby who had been born in Newton Abbott, Devon, in 1942. At first, she wondered if this might have been the baby her mum had lost, perhaps with an error in the birth year.
The birth certificate showed that her mother hadn’t named the baby. In the margin, a note said ‘Adopted’. Jag paid a mediation service to trace the woman, Pauline, who replied, wanting to make contact. After exchanging messages and phone calls, Jag and her husband Peter went to England to meet Michele in London, and Pauline, now living in Swindon, Wiltshire, for the first time.
Jag, who has a son, daughter and two stepsons, says: “When I first saw Michele it was like I was looking at my mother. She remembered me from that time she’d come to live with us in Guernsey. At first she held herself back and there were things she didn’t want to talk about, but she was very loving towards me, she really treated me like a sister. After that, every time we went to London we’d see her, and she came over with Charley and her daughters to stay with us.
Michele, a former home help carer who died in 2017, had three daughters. She’d even named her youngest Jacqueline – Jag’s full name – after the sister she hadn’t seen for decades. Jag and Pauline, a retired bank worker who has a daughter with her husband Ken, have become close friends since first meeting in 2011.
She says: “We phone each other regularly and we take our camper van over to see them at least once a year. They’re keen bird watcher,s so we park in the Cotswold Water Park and spend time together. We both have the same sense of humour, our mother’s.”
There remain many unanswered questions. Jag, who tells her remarkable journey in her book Clouds in my Guernsey Sky, says: “I found a photo amongst Mum’s stuff of a British soldier in the Somerset Light Infantry. I think he’s probably the father of one of my sisters, but I don’t know.
“We forget how things were back then. No-one knew if the Germans would invade Britain and if they would see their loved ones again. At that time, any child born out of wedlock was put up for adoption. I can’t blame my mother for that.
“Michele was born in January 1945. I think mum put her in an orphanage temporarily until the war ended. I found letters from my dad applying for jobs in the UK and Australia. I think he wanted to bring her up as his daughter, but Guernsey was a very Methodist island. That would have brought shame on them, so they planned on moving somewhere else.
“There is huge sadness for me that my parents aren’t around to talk about it. I think they would have some fascinating stories to tell.”
Finding her long-lost sisters, however, has made the whole journey worth it. “It’s been life changing for me,” says Jag. “Throughout my life I always wished I’d had a sister, I somehow felt that was missing. And now I’ve discovered that all this time I had not one, but two. I’m so pleased I finally found them.”
