The novelist Ian McEwan has discovered that a bricklayer is the older brother he never knew he had, following the man’s quest to uncover his roots.
The revelation emerged that Rose McEwan, the novelist’s mother, had given away Ian’s older brother, Dave, at a railway station. He was conceived by Ian’s father, David, and Rose while she was still married to her first husband.
She had fallen pregnant from her wartime affair with David and wanted to give her baby away before her husband returned home on leave. An advert she placed in a local paper read: “Wanted, home for baby boy, aged one month: complete surrender.” Rose and Percy Sharp were given the baby at Reading railway station, in Berkshire.
Rose married McEwan, the child’s father, then an army officer, after her husband was killed in the Normandy landings.
The couple had their second son, Ian, six years after Dave Sharp had been born. Ian McEwan CBE, who has another brother, found out about Dave Sharp five years ago after the bricklayer’s inquiries about his past led him to the author’s family. In a statement, McEwan (58) said it was “a great surprise and pleasure” to discover he had another brother. “We welcomed him and his family into ours and we keep in touch. I am sad he never got the chance to know our parents.”
After Sharp’s adopted mother died, Percy let slip a hint of Dave’s past.
But the bricklayer waited until he was 60 before he contacted the Salvation Army’s Family Tracing Service.
Mrs McEwan suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2003.
The lives of the two men have taken very different paths. Sharp (64) worked in the building industry in south-east England during the post-war years. His undiscovered brother went from private school to university before finding international acclaim with such novels as Atonement and Enduring Love. For 20 years the brothers lived just 24km apart, McEwan in Oxford’s exclusive Park Town, and Sharp in the Wallingford.
Sharp told the Oxford Mail: “I had never heard of him. Of course, I’ve read all of his books now, but whether he’s a road-sweeper or an author is immaterial. He’s just my brother to me.” — Â