Grandmother is reunited with the brother she lost for 50 years – and he was only a bus-ride away

By Miranda Slade

A grandmother has been reunited with the brother she lost for 50 years – and found he was living a bus-ride away.

Alice Jones, raised in Kitto Road, Nunhead, discovered Sam had been living in Catford – and was shocked to learn she had two more brothers also living in South London.

In 1968, 11-year-old Alice went to visit her mother and was introduced to her younger brother, Sam. She didn’t see him again for five decades, despite asking after him.

“I always remembered his smile – and his chubby face,” she said.

Alice is now 64, a mother of three and a grandmother of five, and her extraordinary story doesn’t end there. She applied to Long Lost Family – the ITV programme that reunites separated family members – to try to find her brother and was accepted onto the show in 2018.

While filming the show, Davina McCall broke the news to Alice in the kitchen of her home in that not only had they found Sam, who was then 60, but that she had two more brothers. And one of them, her older brother John, lived just moments away from her front door.

“When Davina said to me he lives in Peckham, I just went, ‘Peckham?!’ – I had to go out on the balcony, I wanted to be sick,” Alice said.

“Once I was on the balcony I was looking out and thinking to myself ‘He could be over there – he could be anywhere, he could be across the road.

“Well, it turned out that he literally was just across the road.”

Alice, who lives in Peckham, is still in disbelief, two years later. “We’d been living across the road from each other for eight years,” she said. “I can step across the road, walk down a bit, step across to another road, turn the corner and I’m there.

“We shop in the same supermarket… We know the same people. I still can’t believe it.”

Alice’s mother and father were both born in Jamaica, and had left their spouses at home when they came to the U.K. as part of the Windrush generation. They met on the journey and Alice was born soon afterwards.

Alice was raised by her father and her stepmother, who she describes as an incredible woman who raised Alice as her own. They lived on Kitto Road, in Telegraph Hill, and Alice went to Edmund Waller primary school, in Waller Road, New Cross.

Alice had been asking around about her brother – the only one she knew about – for years, but no one was able to help her. She knew there was a possibility he might live in Catford – she even drove there and asked around. No luck.

One night while watching Long Lost Family her husband Errol encouraged her to apply and see if they could help her find Sam.

What Alice didn’t recall about that day, 50 years ago, when she met Sam and clocked his “cheeky smile” for the first time, was that she had also met two older brothers, John and Richard.

“Wow, yeah,” Alice says, the astonishment still present in her voice. “I thought I could have had brothers or sisters, but not here – they would have been in Jamaica on my mum’s side. It was a massive shock.”

John – who Alice calls Johnny – lived in Jamaica with their mother until he was 13 before coming to live with her in the U.K.

For Alice’s reunion with two of her brothers – her third brother, Richard, decided not to appear on camera – the producers chose a pub: The White Horse, in Peckham. “It took a lot of takes to film that,” Alice says.

“I was nervous. I was shaking before I walked in, I cried from all the emotion.

“I can’t even remember the first thing we said to each other. I think I could only manage to say, ‘my brothers’ and, ‘I can’t believe it’, then ‘don’t let me go’.”

She looked into their faces to find a resemblance that the three share, and she thinks it’s their smile – one that has grown even wider, since finding each other, and nieces and nephews to boot too. The whole family is looking forward to restrictions being lifted so that they can enjoy a proper, long overdue, reunion.

Throughout lockdown, Alice met with Johnny, the brother who lives just over the road from her, for walks around Peckham. On one of their walks, they compared their memories of the local landmarks they shared.

“It does make me feel emotional,” she said. “Peckham is close-knit – someone always knows somebody else. I must have walked past my nephews and nieces and not known it was my family.”

“It is not an ending, but a new chapter.”

Although Alice’s story has a happy ending, before she reunited with her brothers she had doubts about whether they’d want to meet her, and what kind of people they’d be. “What if I’d had an argument with one of them?” she said.

Sadly, Alice’s mother had passed away before she was able to see her children’s reunion. For Alice, the memory of her mother is still complicated. She remembers the feelings of abandonment she had as a child.

Alice said there were parts of the filming for Long Lost Family, where she spoke of her mother, which were too sad for the final cut. “I was crying, and if you had seen them, you would probably still be crying,” she said.

But meeting her brothers, who could tell Alice more about their mother, and sharing her experience with John, who had also been left by their mother in Jamaica, helped Alice.

Although she now understands more about her mother’s situation, she still has some questions left unanswered. She said: “Whatever she did, there was a reason behind it and she was probably doing it for the best.”