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When her mother died, Kate Lloyd discovered that the person she knew was really someone else. She had walked out on her family after the war, changed her name and reinvented her past. But why? My mother painted a sensational portrait of her early life, saying she had been an orphan brought up by a cruel aunt after her mother was killed in a riding accident and her father died of a broken heart. This was high drama and seemingly played out in the context of landed gentry at least, if not the aristocracy. She said they were Irish Catholics, that she and her sisters had gone to a convent school. She certainly played the part, not that she went to church, but she had a rosary and used to go on about the nuns. She told me her father was moved to tears by music, that he took her to hear a Wagner opera when she was much too young, which was why she didn’t like it. At the time I never doubted what she said, even if it verged on melodrama. When I asked her why one of her toes was a bit squashed, she said: “My race horse stepped on me.” The horse had run away with her and ended up in the centre of Cambridge, and she fell off in one of the colleges. Now it all sounds so improbable. Maybe I should have asked why there were no family photographs, or even any relatives on her side of the family. But my father seems to have accepted her account of things and as I grew up there seemed no reason to question her stories. It wasn’t until much later that I started to realise how odd it sounded. I think one of the reasons she carried it off was that she was an incredibly beautiful woman, and a talented portrait painter. So there was no reason to doubt her claim that she had studied at Chelsea School of Art alongside Dirk Bogarde, when Henry Moore was teaching sculpture there. Friends used to refer to her as the duchess because she behaved like one. She told me that I would be presented at court as a debutante, just as she had been. Of course, I believed her. With hindsight, I can see there were inconsistencies, but you couldn’t query anything. She clammed up as soon as you started talking about her family and changed the subject. She died on New Year’s Day 2007, aged 89, but when my brother and I cleared out her flat there was no birth certificate, which made me curious. So I sent off for it. When I opened the envelope, my first thought was that it was the wrong one because the name was Margaret Ada, whereas my mother had been Margo Adela. But her father’s name – Richard John Beasely – and date of birth were both correct. Then the penny began to drop – this was her birth certificate. At some point she must have changed her name to make it sound more refined. But what shocked me even more was seeing that her father was a fishmonger, her mother a housekeeper and they weren’t even married. The rest of the story began to unfold when I went to the public record office. As Mother had often referred to the fact that she was a twin, the clerk said her sister must be on the same page of the register. That was a spooky moment. We found the twin listed, with the name Janet Kathleen. I’m Dinah Kathleen, so I’d been named after her without ever knowing it. I discovered eight other siblings born outside marriage, all, at some time, living in the family home in Kensington, west London. I also discovered cousins in Minneapolis and Australia and, most astonishing of all, my mother’s younger sister Lily, still alive at the age of 91 and living near me. That was another moment, meeting my aunt for the first time. She didn’t hide the fact that she disliked my mother, saying: “Margaret considered herself better than the rest of us.” Disappointingly, Lily was unable to shed any light on what the family thought had happened to Margaret, or how they lost contact. Did she just disappear overnight? Her version has a lack of clarity, simply because of her age, though it’s clear she was glad to see the back of Mother and I can’t imagine she would have tried very hard to get back in touch. There’s a vague suggestion that people thought Margaret had emigrated to America, which probably suited her. But it was something Lily said about her own life that struck a chord with me. She claims to have fallen out with her own daughter 20 years ago, and they haven’t spoken since. That combative, argumentative nature, and the tendency to bear grudges is a recurring family trait, which I recognise because my mother was also prone to it. Maybe it helps to explain the rift. Lily went into service and later may have worked for a photographer. Some of the details of her life are hazy because she’s become a little forgetful. But what emerges from all the marriage and birth certificates I’ve collected is that all the brothers and sisters except Margo went into manual trades and became plumbers and electricians, and so on, whereas Margo managed to gain access to a much higher social echelon and more financial security than she was destined for at birth. Nowadays, Lily lives in a very modest flat whereas, even after 20 years as a widow, Margo lived in some style. She was always perfectly turned out, with the best clothes, shoes and handbags, and looked immaculate. People outside the family regarded her as charming and elegant. My impression is that Lily’s life was less happy. Though I still have a lot of questions about my mother’s life, it’s clear that from an early age she had the ambition to shed the family and its low social status. It’s sort of sad, even chilling, but at the same time you can admire the cleverness with which she did it. It also explains some of her incredibly fierce opinions. She thought having children outside marriage was terrible. She was absolutely scathing to a friend whose child had children without being married. When I was small, our behaviour had to be perfect. Anybody who said, “Pleased to meet you” rather than, “How do you do?” was beyond the pale and absolutely common. Of course, it came as a tremendous shock when Aunt Lily told me that my grandfather was a boozer and womaniser, but maybe it helps to explain Mother’s distaste for her origins. My father was a comfortably-off doctor in Malvern, so marrying him must have provided the social cachet she yearned for. All the more so because the family was quite gentrified, being directly descended from the founder of Lloyds bank. My paternal grandmother was quite a grande dame and highly intellectual, which made her frightening to me, but I can imagine my mother saw her as a role model. Mother was ill with cancer for her last six years, during which we got closer and closer. Once we were reminiscing about my childhood. I said my first memory was her ticking me off when I was about three. I’d been sitting outside the house with bunches of grape hyacinths I’d picked in the garden, trying to sell them to passersby. And she came and sort of snatched me up and said, “Good gracious, you look like a Gypsy!” We were giggling about that, so I asked, “What do you remember of your mother?” And she snapped, “Nothing!” I just left it, and let it hang, and after quite a long silence she said: “Perhaps I don’t want to remember.” Sometimes I wonder if she actually believed the stories that she’d made up because she told them so often that they were real to her. After she died, I discovered she’d been trying to trace her twin sister online. There’s a terrible pathos about that. Realising she was near the end, maybe she regretted cutting herself off from the family and wanted to see her twin again before she died. In fact, Janet had passed away in 1998. I think perhaps Mother succeeded because of the war and the social disruption it caused. And because she was talented and very beautiful. Part of me thinks she was damned clever to live a lie from 1939 and carry it off. You have to have a bit of admiration for that. She would be very cross with me for digging up her past, but I feel cross with her for keeping it secret. Particularly when we were so close at the end. It’s my heritage as well as hers. To discover cousins that might have been lifelong friends if I’d known them earlier felt strange. I suppose part of me was sad that she didn’t talk about it at the end when I gave her the opportunity. And to think that my grandfather was alive during my lifetime – that I could have met him but was never given the chance. Family Parents and parenting guardian.co.uk