Hard times so near at hand

When biographer Adam Sisman began to use professional methods on his own family history, he uncovered a shocking story of poverty and neglect

Writing biographies teaches scepticism. When writing my first book, a biography of the historian AJP Taylor, I was startled to find how many people I interviewed told me stories I knew not to be true, or testified to events from the point of view of a witness on occasions when I knew they could not have been present. Even professional historians were guilty - not of lying but simply as victims of that strange human tendency to believe they had been present at a scene only imagined from a description. The mind rearranges events into what seems a rational progression, making order out of chaos. The historian Sir Lewis Namier wrote that we imagine the past and remember the future.

In researching my book on Taylor, I sensed that much of what I was told was biased or partial. Whenever I came across an interpretation of events or behaviour I tried, wherever possible, to test it against the ascertainable facts. Then I began to apply this method to my own life. I saw that many of the conclusions I had reached rested on shaky foundations.

So much of every family's past is obscure, wilfully or otherwise. To understand what it means to be another person, to make sense of the past, a biographer needs to imagine what it must have been like for his subject, to hypothesise about motives and causes, and then to test these hypotheses against what is known. Like a scientist, like a detective, the biographer proceeds from what is known to explore what is not.

I had a privileged childhood: private education, a large, uncomfortable house in west London, no shortage of toys or holidays, let alone food or warmth, which - as my parents never ceased to remind my sister and myself - many children in poorer parts of the world lacked. As a result, I grew up feeling vaguely guilty about my circumstances. I railed against my parents for sending me to such a good school, and discounted my academic successes on the grounds that with such advantages, to fail was hardly possible. As soon as I was old enough to choose, I decided to deviate from the ordained route by refusing to sit Oxbridge entrance.

In my teens, in the late 1960s and early 70s, I thought myself part of a revolt against middle-class values. I taunted my father with being a bourgeois - as if I had ever been, or ever would be, anything else. He never reproached me. I think of him now with love and slight shame. I try to imagine what his life must have been like: boarding school, sent to sea at 16, the terrifying war years when he served in submarines and on convoy duty, arriving back at Waterloo station with only the clothes he stood up in after his ship was sunk, and later, as a penniless art student, and then a young husband, striving to provide for his wife and babies.

I never knew my grandfathers. There is a picture of my father's father holding me. I later discovered that he was a bigamist and a bankrupt. He died soon after I was born, leaving my father nothing but a disgruntled widow to care for. My mother's father was a more shadowy figure. Nobody seemed to want to talk about him. I assumed he had originated from the same petit-bourgeois background as my mother. I discovered only recently that he too had lived to see me born, dying while I was a baby. I knew only that he had been a surveyor and an engineer, manager of a small factory in Ceylon. I never realised that he had a life in England, that he had been born here and died here. I didn't even know his name.

My mother explained that he had been virtually a stranger to her too; my grandmother had not liked life in Ceylon and had returned to England after a few months with her elder daughter, leaving her husband behind. She was pregnant with my mother, who was born in England several months later, so my grandfather saw his younger daughter for the first time when he came home to Lincoln on leave, when she was already two and a half. He came back to England four years later, and then again after another five years, when my grandmother was dying.

My mother remembers being embarrassed by this stranger who tried to embrace her, and fleeing the room. After my grandmother died in 1937, my mother and her sister were brought up by an aunt, my grandmother's sister. My mother did not see her father again until after the war, when she was a young woman. He was by now married to his second wife, a missionary teacher he had met in Ceylon. Together they retired to the Isle of Wight.

This was all I knew of him until a few months ago, when a package arrived containing copies of letters and photographs unearthed by a distant cousin in Australia. There was a photograph of three urchin boys in flat caps standing behind a stone wall: one of them, my grandfather, caught in the act of throwing a snowball (or perhaps shamming).

Most remarkable was a letter, dated November 28 1896, written from an address in Liverpool in a looping hand by my grandfather's elder sister, Lennie May, then 16. As I read her letter, I realised with a jolt its importance to me. "Dear Uncle John," it read (I had no idea then who Uncle John might be): "I am writing to tell you how affairs stand. Father is not working. We are all bare-footed again for he has pawned our boots, in fact, he has sold everything saleable, we have not even a decent bed to sleep on, and I cannot bear to see the children suffer so, for Mother's sake... the poor children are in a state of semi-starvation... they never have anything in the way of nourishment... your affectionate niece, Lennie." There was a postscript: "Please do not mention me having written to you...

On the back of this letter, in a different hand, were the words: "Should the child be favoured with a reply, let it kindly be addressed to her at 17 Dawsons Grove, Liverpool and the writer will hand it to her. She fears getting into trouble with her father if he knew she wrote."

The letter only hints at the terrible suffering Lennie and her younger brothers and sisters had endured. Six months earlier, their mother had died as the result of a miscarriage, having borne 11 children in 18 years. Three had succumbed to bronchial pneumonia in the space of a few months. It seems that as the eldest daughter, Lennie May was left struggling to look after the other five children. My grandfather, Frederick, was one of these, then aged 11. Lennie's father never gave her money to buy food and often came home very late. He had lost his job, and it seems clear that he was drinking heavily. They were living in a slum in one of the coldest parts of the city, where diphtheria, whooping cough, and bronchial pneumonia were rampant and typhoid not uncommon; the children could not survive much longer unless something changed.

In desperation, Lennie May wrote to her mother's brother, "Uncle John", a prosperous grocer in Broadheath, Cheshire, on the outskirts of what is now Greater Manchester. It seems likely that she was helped by a kindly neighbour, who wrote the note on the back of the letter to protect Lennie from her father's wrath.

This plea for help prompted John to travel to Liverpool to rescue the children. Lennie May and her charges were scooped up and taken to live with their uncle and his family; their uncles, John and his brother Samuel, took steps to become the children's legal guardians. My grandfather was sent to boarding school in Lincolnshire and afterwards apprenticed to Ruston's, an engineering firm in Lincoln. His later life gave no hint of how hard his early life had been, though he always retained a special affection for his older sister who, perhaps unknown to him, had saved the children from almost certain death in that Liverpool slum.

Also in the package were documents which explained much of the background to Lennie May's letter. Her mother, my great-grandmother Sarah Ann Hulme, came from a respectable Lancashire farming family. There is a photograph of her which hints at a certain docile gullibility; and of my great-grandfather, Owen Peake, a handsome man, younger than Sarah Ann, with a reputation as an irresponsible wastrel.

Perhaps he married her for money. Their marriage was very much against the wishes of my great-grandmother's family; in will after will, they specified that money was to be left in trust for Sarah Ann and the children, where Owen could not lay his hands upon it. Owen seems to have worked for his father at first, describing himself as a metal finisher and polisher, and later a journeyman hot water engineer.

He and his new wife lived first near his family in Altrincham, and then moved for a while to London, where Lennie May was born in the shadow of Waterloo station. Afterwards they moved back to Altrincham, where my grandfather was born, before moving once again to Liverpool.

In 1895 the crisis came. Three children died in quick succession, followed by their mother. My great-grandfather had no further contact with his children after they had been rescued by their uncle. It was assumed that he died soon afterwards. On his marriage certificate, my grandfather registered his father as "deceased".

In fact Owen lived for another 35 years, dying in London, one of the last residents of a workhouse before they were abolished in the 30s. A "notification of death" form appealed for relatives to make themselves known. In their absence, it advised that burial would be carried out by the London City Council, with provision being made for two official mourners to attend the funeral. No one came forward to collect the body, and my great-grandfather was buried in a pauper's grave. My Australian cousin headed her account of these events "A Story Reluctantly Written Which Had to Be Told". My mother and her sister were reluctant to read what had been so reluctantly written. For them, their father's past is best forgotten.

I too found this discovery strangely disturbing, but in a different way. Far from being ashamed of my grandfather's humble origins, I felt defiant, almost proud of them. This discovery had moved me deeply, but more than that: it had subtly altered the way I thought about myself. My comfortable assumptions were blown apart; I realised how precarious my existence had been. There is a sense in which each of us is endlessly writing and rewriting our autobiography. We are constantly trying to explain who we are and what we have done. We cling to facts that seem to indicate the direction we have followed. But very occasionally, we stumble across some awkward piece of evidence that forces us to reshape our interpretation of the past. This is what happened to me when I opened that package.

A few months after it arrived, I journeyed up to Liverpool, a city I had never visited before. I spent a morning in the central library trying to find the address where my grandfather and his siblings had lived. The whole neighbourhood had been bulldozed in the slum clearances of the early 1960s. Dawson Grove no longer existed; all the surrounding streets had been levelled to make a park, with views over the Mersey estuary.

I sat down on a bench and tried to imagine Lennie May a century earlier, battling to care for her young brothers and sisters. I marvelled at the courage and the strength of that 13-year-old girl, who defied her brutal father to save the little ones. And I reflected, not for the first time, that she had enabled me to live.

 Adam Sisman's book, Boswell's Presumptuous Task, has just been published by Hamish Hamilton, priced £17.99.