Jill Dudley, née Wakefield, was a tall, attractive but ungainly woman with big feet. She married twice, first to John Lewis, a salesman, then to Jack Dudley, an accountant. With John she had identical twins, Marcus and Alex, and with Jack she had Oliver and Amanda.
Jill was born in 1931 and died in March 1995, five years after her second husband. Apart from a few stories of her noisy, party-girl flamboyance, she would, like everybody else, have slowly faded from memory. But the legacy of a freak accident has now exposed a bizarre, complex and terrible story in which Jill plays the starring role.
On the night of July 31, 1982, Alex fell off a motorbike and suffered grievous head injuries that left him in a coma. It was impossible to know how much damage had been done and it was not even clear he would ever wake up. But his identical twin brother was sure that Alex would recover. “Maybe it was the twin connection of blind faith,” says Marcus, “I don’t know. But I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he would wake up and he would be fine. I felt I was communicating with him, even though he was unconscious.”
For a week, Marcus spent hours sitting beside the hospital bed. Finally, Alex opened his eyes, looked directly at his brother and said: “Hello, Marky.” Nurses and doctors gathered around, excited by what seemed like a sudden and complete recovery. Alex, however, was not celebrating. He was irritated by the noise, particularly by the antics of a large, noisy woman who had rushed from the nurses’ station.
“Who is that woman?” he asked Marcus.
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'I felt I was communicating with him, even though he was unconscious'
“That’s our mother,” he replied.
Alex had forgotten everything and everybody except for his twin brother. Some scientists have claimed this is impossible. The twins shrug when I point this out.
“Very little is known about the connections between identical twins,” says Marcus.
Alex had to relearn how to walk up stairs, how to drive, and he had to meet old friends as if for the first time. It was like a second childhood; indeed, Alex says he feels he had woken up as a 10-year-old. Marcus was his devoted teacher. It came naturally to him because, as he keeps pointing out, identical twins are not two fully separate people.
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“We come from the same egg,” says Marcus, “one’s left brain and one’s right, one’s left-handed and one’s right. We are mirror images of each other. The connection is so strong that you will do anything for the other half of you. It’s not your sister or your brother, it’s you.”
So when I meet them at the offices of the publishers of their book, Tell Me Who I Am, I am shocked to discover they do not look alike, though as children they did. But the accident did long-term damage to Alex.
Now 49, they are, of course, the same height and they are wearing the same kind of smart-casual clothes, but Alex is a stone lighter than Marcus and only he wears glasses. He looks rather fragile and scholarly while Marcus has a strong, outdoorsy air of alpha-male competence. Alex’s eyes were damaged by glass fragments and he looks much frailer than his brother.
At the same time, it is impossible not to notice that they do, indeed, jointly inhabit a single bubble. Their mutual concern — love is not the right word, as there do not seem to be two separate entities — is apparent in everything they do and say. It is the depth of this connection that makes their story so extraordinary.
Jack Dudley, their stepfather, died in 1990. Though under the same roof of a large, rather chaotic 16th-century house in Sussex called Duke’s Cottage, he lived a separate life from his wife. There was little contact between them. He was a tyrannical man and the twins were treated a good deal worse than Jack’s own children.
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He called them the “dim twins”. They went to a private primary school but were then relegated to a comprehensive, where they were bullied and taught next to nothing: the one qualification between them is Marcus’s woodwork O-level. At home, Jack — “an arsehole”, says Marcus — treated them appallingly. They were never given a key to the house, never allowed to have friends home and they ended up sleeping in an unheated shed in the garden. These were the rules laid down, Jill assured them, by Jack.
After Jill died, the children had to embark on the long, gruelling and often profoundly upsetting task of emptying the house. This was a big job, as Jill had been an obsessive hoarder.
They had already known she was a hoarder of money. In January 1995, two months before her death, Marcus and Alex were going into business and Jill had agreed to back them. They didn’t expect much — she had always given the impression of extreme poverty and the children had been brought up in second-hand clothes. She took them to the bank and, to the twins’ astonishment, she was treated with extraordinary deference. A large cash sum was immediately handed over.
After she died, they discovered she had been hoarding money left to her by various members of the Attlee family — she was a distant relative of the postwar prime minister Clement Attlee. The bank had never seen so much money in a current account.
“How much?” I ask Alex.
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“Millions,” he replies.
Inside the house they found what seemed to be Jill’s life in the form of mountains of objects, letters and even urns containing the ashes of dead relatives. She had run a vintage stall in Portobello Road, so there was some excuse for her collection, and they had already accepted oddities such as a bath full of clothes. But this went way beyond normal stock turnover. There were photographs, letters, all sorts of bric-a-brac and, behind a concealed door in a wardrobe, a collection of sex toys and sexy lingerie.
There was also a picture of the twins aged about 10; they were naked, with their heads cut off.
Alex was baffled. Both twins had first begun to sense that there was something seriously wrong with their family after their stepfather died. He had been such a bully and a tyrant that they assumed he was the reason they were treated so badly. Indeed, their mother always blamed him for the restrictions they endured.
“But after he died,” says Alex, “nothing changed. Mum didn’t behave any differently. She didn’t give us a front-door key and so on. She had hidden behind him. He was a terrible, terrible man, but she was always one step ahead of him.”
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When Jill died, the behaviour of his sister and two brothers further disturbed Alex. His suspicions mounted when he noticed the total absence of grief in his siblings. He was the only one who cried; Amanda, Marcus and Oliver were entirely unmoved by the loss of their mother. He began to believe there was something he hadn’t been told. Furthermore, Marcus and Oliver had gone into therapy. He insisted on joining them, but the talk seemed mainly about their problems as orphans. There seemed to be nothing especially sinister. But the twins are nothing if not persistent, and Alex was determined to fill the gap still left in his memory.
The other children were saying nothing, but there was somebody else he could turn to. Jill had gone to enormous lengths to conceal Alex’s amnesia from his doctors. She did, however, make one attempt to help him — she took him to a healer she knew slightly called Vivien Kay. It had little effect at the time, but Alex came across her card among the junk in the house and went back. He ended up at a weekend workshop run by Vivien at which he began crying uncontrollably. Finally, Vivien told him she thought there had been sexual abuse in the family.
He was confused, he didn’t really believe it but, if he did, he assumed the abuser would be tyrannical Jack. Alex returned home and confronted Marcus and then Oliver, both of whom confirmed that there had been abuse and that the abuser was Jill.
ALMOST FROM THE moment Alex had woken from his coma, Marcus was determined to fill his empty memory with a happy childhood, not with the appalling reality. Why, I ask him, had he taken on this lifelong commitment?
“It was a subconscious decision. I never woke up one morning thinking I must decide today. He woke up and I had to teach him everything… He was quite frail. He got very tired and you couldn’t make jokes, you had to be careful not to upset him. Then he would ask what our childhood was like, and I would just say it was great — I was vague. It was a huge burden and I was very immature, we weren’t particularly mature 18-year-olds, we were 18 going on 16. I knew I didn’t want to talk about the abuse, it was so horrible and I realised I had an opportunity to free him from it. He got a free ride — he gets angry when I say that.”
When Marcus was forced to admit there had been abuse, this version began to crumble. For Alex, a second childhood had ended. There was much worse to come. Jill’s life story now began to emerge in full from beneath the piles of junk in Duke’s Cottage. A rather shy teenager, she appears, after marrying John Lewis, to have had some kind of psychotic breakdown. She became hypersexualised, embarking on a series of affairs. Then, a few weeks after the twins were born, John died in a car crash.
She then did something that, years later, was to be crucial in the undermining of Marcus’s last desperate attempt to conceal the full truth of their story. She put the twins into care so that she could continue her erotic adventures around London.
She put the twins into care so that she could continue her erotic adventures around London
“She wasn’t depressed,” says Marcus, “she was out shagging, drinking and partying. I was very upset, she so callously abandoned us so she could get on with her lifestyle.”
The discovery was made by Joanna Hodgkin, co-author of their book, who had been working her way through boxes of letters. She found some from friends and family pleading with Jill to take them out of the care home. Finally, she was shamed into bringing them back to Duke’s Cottage. Some years later, the abuse began.
Marcus was shocked by the revelation. It destroyed his conviction that only he had been the possessor of the whole truth. Meanwhile, Alex pressed on with his own investigation — he knew Marcus’s account was partial but he did not know what was missing — and their story had been spotted by a publisher. Marcus was uneasy with the idea of the book, but reluctantly went along with the process until, a few months ago, he suffered another shock. He is very precise about the moment when his entire project of concealment fell apart. He was driving down Gloucester Road in London. He saw lights on in a flat he knew. It belonged to one of Jill’s closest friends. The twins had gone to parties there to hand round drinks and canapés. He remembered being in that flat when he was about 12.
This is how he tells the story in the book:
“I could see a man in the drawing room who had done unbelievable things to me. And I had to go and serve him a drink. And I was so frightened that I peed myself in her hall, right in front of everyone, frozen on the spot, aged 12. My mother must have known what that was about. I can see him now, in the corner of the room by the window. And I went into the kitchen and I threw food over myself so I could disguise what had happened.”
Overwhelmed by a return of terrible visions of what had happened to him, he swerved off the road and called Alex. Five days later, the three boys met; Hodgkin was also there. What Marcus had been holding back was that Jill had not been the only abuser. From her stall in Portobello Road, she had given them to various paedophile men. She would simply drop them off at a house and pick them up the next morning, though sometimes she would stay and watch. Only one abuser was involved with Oliver — he remembers the man was called Patrick — but he was so angry and upset that Jill resorted to passing round only the twins.
Neither in the book nor in our conversation does Marcus go into any detail of the abuse. When I ask if it was brutal, he just says: “Sometimes.” What is clear is that it was systematic abuse. Jill’s hypersexuality drove her to involve others. In the book, Hodgkin writes that the twins “think it is possible that their mother was so highly sexualised herself that she believed everyone else was just like her: that they were driven by sex just as she was”. Certainly, she used to make friends uncomfortable with frequent references to her boys’ “willies”, but against the background of her flamboyantly odd character, it was perhaps just seen as one more oddity.
She was also helped by the louche, bohemian world of west London in the 1970s. Child abuse was then seldom discussed and, as a result, not even condemned. To paedophiles, it must have seemed like just one more expression of the sexual liberation celebrated in the 1960s. The Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall cases both spring from a climate and a culture in which exploitation of the young happened and was, apparently, accepted.
The twins have become curious about one aspect of those cases. Jill was born in 1931, Hall in 1929, Savile in 1926. “They all come from that period,” says Alex, “which is very strange.”
Marcus is angry about some of these cases. Some concern girls who are only just underage, which, he feels, is quite a different phenomenon to Jill’s abuse, which happened primarily when the twins were 10-12. He thinks opportunistic groupies distract attention from the real, much younger victims.
There is one more crucial aspect to this harrowing story: the twins are profoundly dyslexic. This, combined with the restrictions of their home life, put enormous pressure on them, but two things saved them. First, there were several family friends who, appalled by Jill’s neglect, would go to great lengths to get them out of the house. But their real defence was the fact of being identical twins. Every hardship drew them closer. They lived, and still live, in a bubble of mutual self-protection. Marcus speaks of them as being two halves of the same body.
That connection justifies Marcus’s burden of concealment. It also makes him grateful for Alex’s amnesia for, strangely, helping him with his dyslexia.
“He became less dyslexic than me…Dyslexic kids who have had a fairly torrid time at school — they get bullied, they’re told they’re stupid, their self-esteem is very low — when they go out in the world, they have to drag themselves through that. But Alex didn’t have that, he’s forgotten it all. I have dyslexia and I have the trauma of dyslexia. I had to fill out a form in a bank the other day and it all came back, I couldn’t spell my name and I panicked. Alex doesn’t have that.”
Now feelings seem to have softened slightly towards Jack. For all his faults, both twins are sure he knew nothing of the sexual abuse.
“Okay,” says Alex, “he was a tyrant but, knowing him the way we did, we don’t believe he would have accepted that if he had known. He might have been many things, but he was a gentleman.”
But now, with the full extent of Jill’s iniquity revealed, how do they feel about her? Did they, I ask them, love their mother?
“That’s a hard question,” says Marcus. “It would be too easy for me to say no. The answer is, I probably did.”
“That’s a hard one,” says Alex. “I was very angry with her over the years. If I could understand why she did it, I probably could. In that period I was a child, I didn’t know anything different and she was my mother.”
The twins never spoke of it to each other or to anybody else, and Oliver had grown up thinking he had been the only one who had been, as they call it, “passed around”. This silence is, they now know, common among abused children. But what, I ask them, would have happened if Alex had never had that accident?
“I think,” says Marcus, “we would have got a little bit older and we would have started discussing it in our twenties. I think we would have had to confront our mother and maybe get the police involved — get a prosecution and then get her put in prison. I feel very strongly now, that if she were alive I’d want her to go to prison. She was aware of what she was doing.”
“And was it done to her?” says Alex.
They shrug and come back with the one answer that seems to explain everything: they are identical twins
They are now very successful businessmen, with a property company and a boutiquey hotel — the Fundu Lagoon — on Pemba, an island just off Zanzibar. They are married and both have two very young children. Such success, such stability, after such childhoods is, I say, extraordinary. They shrug and come back with the one answer that seems to explain everything: they are identical twins, they are armoured against the world. Marcus has even married an identical twin.
But one day, I point out, their children will read this book.
“You know, I’m fine with that,” says Alex. “I’ll hold it back from them as long as possible, but at some point they will ask about their grandparents and I don’t want to carry this lie on to another generation — it has to stop here. If they ask me I’ll say they can read this book, this is really what happened.”
People who meet the twins often say there is an innocence about them, and it’s true. Marcus, for example, asks me what the big story is about their book. I think, in all honesty, he wants it to be the dyslexia but it is, of course, the abuse and his heroic attempt to save his brother from the horror of it all.
The aim of the book, they both say, is to tell other families that it is better out than in, that abused children are not, as they so often feel, guilty. Marcus has now laid down the immense burden of concealing something from not just a brother but his other half, and Alex can now abandon the quest for his lost childhood. Marcus has even found a way of explaining what it feels like to be dyslexic — he wrote the epilogue to the book and had it printed with all his misspellings and distorted grammar.
But Alex should really have the last word. I ask him how he feels about Marcus’s long lie, the story of the normal, happy childhood that never happened. “He did the right thing. Put it this way, if you flipped it around, I would have done the same.”
Dark deceptions come to light
Alex and Marcus decided it was time to get serious about sorting the contents of the house. The things they found as they continued to clear the house were bizarre. Sometimes disturbing.
Jill’s bedroom was filled with dark brown antiques, chests of drawers, a writing desk, tall cupboards. First they found more cartons of cigarettes. Then they uncovered boxes full of Easter eggs. Dozens of them, in all shapes and sizes. As they pulled them out, they realised they’d found every Easter egg they had ever given their mother: she must have thanked them, then stashed them away, never to be eaten, never to be thrown away.
Then, at the bottom of the cupboard, they found an old shoe box. They took off the lid and pulled out a bundle of envelopes. The dates went back to early 1965, the twins’ first birthday. Alex opened an envelope at random and found a card inside: Happy Birthday to Marcus and Alex, with love from Aunty Isabel.
A 10-shilling note fluttered to the floor. He looked at the date on the envelope. Their aunt must have sent it for their third birthday. Jill had never shown it to them, never given them the money, never even spent it herself.
Oliver opened the next one. It contained a WH Smith gift voucher from his godfather. A voucher that was more than 10 years out of date. The shoe box was crammed with cards and gift vouchers Jill’s children had never received: a ghost history of their childhood, the affectionate gestures of relatives and friends they’d been denied. All safely stored away.
But why? What had been going through Jill’s mind as she squirrelled their cards and presents away birthday after birthday, Christmas after Christmas? Why didn’t she want them to know that people were thinking of them, spending money on them?
Their mother’s pointless meanness was horribly unsettling for them all. They climbed up to the attic, where the air was thick with dust and cobwebs. The floor was covered with discoveries — in boxes, of course. Tote boxes and carrier bags, old suitcases, piles of junk everywhere. Most could be thrown away. But among the junk they found their mother had kept all her correspondence. Copies of letters she had written to her parents when she was working away from home. Letters from her mother, from her father, from her friends. Letters from the husband who had died when her babies were three weeks old. Letters from Jack. Letters from lovers. Many lovers.
Her bureau was full of tiny drawers and in one of those Alex found a key. After clearing Jill’s clothes from her wardrobe, he noticed a small door at the back. “It must be Narnia!” he joked, as he tried out several keys.
The one he’d found in her bureau worked and the door opened easily. He closed it again at once. It was full of sex toys and kinky underwear. A friend called Clare had been helping them to sort clothes into piles.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“You have a look,” said Alex.
She went into the wardrobe and opened the secret door. “Jesus!” she exclaimed, then said quickly, “Don’t worry, Ali, I’ll deal with this. It’s OK for me. She wasn’t my mother.”
A little later, he watched while Clare dragged a couple of black bin-bags down the stairs and hurled them into the skip without a word. There are things you don’t want to know about your mother’s private life.
The most disturbing discovery of all was a photograph Alex’s brother Oliver found in their mother’s bedside drawer. It showed Alex and Marcus when they were about 10 years old, perhaps younger. They were naked and their heads had been cut off. Two small headless boys, front view, no clothes. Oliver called his brothers and handed it to them without a word. Her twin sons displayed as faceless bodies. For once, their ability to turn almost anything into a joke failed them. As the house was emptied of a lifetime’s possessions, something dark was coming to the surface.
© Alex and Marcus Lewis 2013. Extracted from Tell Me Who I Am, published by Hodder & Stoughton on July 4 at £16.99. To buy it for £13.99, inc p&p, call 0845 271 2135 or visit thesundaytimes.co.uk/bookshop