Journey's End

Jurney's End

"When I was 24," said the old, retired sailorman of South Shields last week, "I married a gentle girl named Marion, three years older than me. We bought a house in Seaton Sluice. I was a coal hewer then, and we were terribly in love.. We both wanted a son. A year after our marriage, 51 years ago, he was born, but Marion died. On the day of her funeral, I handed the baby, John Charles, to my sister Louise to look after. Then I sold the house, packed up and went to sea. I was very young, very sad and very lonely."

For a quarter of a century after that, Fred Jaques followed the sea. He heard once from his sister Louise: she had divorced her husband, and was putting the sailor's son up for adoption; then she drifted out of sight. When Fred Jaques returned to England years later, he tried to find his boy, and was told that he had migrated to Australia.

Soon afterward Fred became a glazier in the Northumberland town of South Shields. With only an ancient cat named Dimpy for company, he settled down to a life of solitude punctuated only by occasional memories of the wife he had loved and the son he had lost. Then, one day this month. Fred was called in by a neighbor to fix a broken windowpane. Over the inevitable cup of tea, the lonely man, now 77, told his story. "Why, that's funny." said another neighbor who had dropped in. "I heard almost the same story from a bus conductor right here in town, and his name is Jaques too."

Fred's heart leaped. He sought out the bus conductor, learned his full name, saw his birth certificate and his mother's picture. "All doubts were flung aside," he said. "It was John, all right." Last week, no longer lonely, Fred Jaques was happily reunited at a family party not only with his lost son and a daughter-in-law, but with five grandchildren and a great-grandson, aged one. They had lived less than two miles apart for more than 25 years. "It's odd," Fred told John, "to think that you must have given me a bus ticket hundreds of times, and neither of us ever wondered who the other was."

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