IAN McEWAN, the Booker prize-winning novelist, has told for the first time how he took his long-lost brother to meet their mother in a nursing home, writes Maurice Chittenden.

David Sharp had not seen his mother since she gave him away to adoptive parents at a secret meeting on Reading railway station 60 years before.

Sadly, it was a bittersweet union. Rose McEwan was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and could not understand what she was being told.

“We tried to see if there was any way through,” said McEwan. “We both provided hints just to see if we could get through. But it meant nothing.

“At that momentous moment when he might meet one of his parents, there she was, alive but not there. But he dealt with it very well. He was very decent and mature about it.”

Sharp, 64, a bricklayer who was born as the result of a wartime affair, came forward in January to tell how he had tracked down his real family through a Salvation Army tracing service.

McEwan, 58, the author of The Comfort of Strangers, Amsterdam and Atonement, says in an interview in today’s News Review that he can sympathise with the shame his parents felt, but wonders at their secrecy.

“We talked a great deal and often about the past. They had endless opportunities to tell me. I can only think the shame was too great,” he said.

His mother was married first to Ernest Wort and they had a daughter and son. McEwan, who was born in 1948, grew up knowing his half-sister and half-brother.

In 1942 while Wort was away fighting the Germans in north Africa, Rose Wort had a brief affair with David McEwan. She had his baby, but knew that with her husband returning she could not keep the child. In fact Wort was killed later in the war and Rose then married her lover.

In December 1942, she and McEwan placed an advertisement in a Reading newspaper: “Wanted, home for baby boy, age one month, complete surrender.”

The Sharps came forward and the baby was handed over at the town’s railway station.

On the baby’s first birthday, the Sharps received a birthday card for him from his real parents but that was the end of the contact for six decades.

Sharp is now writing a memoir of his own life entitled Complete Surrender.

McEwan adds: “It’s his story. I will one day write my version.”

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