'I was lucky I didn't fall in': Author ended up on wharf in Youghal while sleepwalking 

When best-selling British author, Lesley Pearse, decided to set her latest novel in Ireland, she had a strange nocturnal adventure while staying in Youghal, prompting friends to say that it sounded stranger than fiction.

Lesley, who lives in Devon, chose Ireland as the setting for her new book, in homage to her Irish ancestry (her mother was from Roscommon) and the community that helped her find her long-lost son after a search that lasted more than 50 years.

Lesley’s close friend invited her to stay in her daughter-in-law’s father’s apartment in Youghal.

Lesley’s novel, The Girl With The Suitcase, set during World War II, follows the story of shy and meek Mary who meets a woman called Elizabeth in a coffee house in London. Elizabeth is about to travel to Ireland where she has inherited her godmother’s house.

Her life couldn’t be more different than that of Mary’s dreary existence as a housemaid. However, when an air raid forces them to take shelter underground, Mary’s life is suddenly changed forever.

She wakes up in hospital, injured, while Elizabeth has died. As Mary is handed Elizabeth’s suitcase, money and tickets to Ireland, she realises this is her opportunity to start a new life.

Eighty-year old Lesley, who has written 32 novels and an autobiography since taking up writing at the age of 49, says her new novel could be her last. So it was important for her to give it an Irish backdrop.

She and her friend, Jo, spent a week in the County Cork apartment. “It was bitterly cold while we were in Youghal. We roamed around; I did some research, talking to people. It’s a very pretty place.

“I could imagine someone coming over from England to live there, but how lonely it could be as well.

“Up to the day that myself and my friend came to Ireland, I was doing TV and radio all the time about Martin (Lesley’s son). So I was rushing and I was very stressed. When we got to the apartment, we downed a few drinks. Big mistake that!

“I went up to bed. Jo later said I was out cold, having fallen asleep on top of the bed. She took off my trousers and shoes. I was fast asleep and Jo went off to bed.

“While asleep, I went downstairs and out of the apartment block. Of course, the door shut behind me. I was out on the wharf, lucky I didn’t fall into the water.

“I think it was the cold that made me wake up. I only had a thin raincoat on. When I saw a car coming down the road, I waved at the driver. I told people afterwards that I was rescued by a French baker. He took me into the shop and put an electric blanket over my feet.

“I met the landlady of Aherne’s bar and restaurant. She was lovely; she loaned me a fur coat.”

Everybody was highly amused by the sleepwalking story and Lesley says she could see the funny side of it afterwards.

Her own life story is the stuff of a book. Lesley’s mother died in 1948 when she was three. With her father away from home because he was in the Royal Marines, she and her older brother Michael were sent to two different orphanages; in London and Gloucestershire respectively.

“All we could talk about at the orphanage was getting a new mother. The place was run by nuns; you know what dragons they could be.”

When Lesley’s father remarried, her stepmother, an army nurse, “was horrified by what was going on at the orphanage. She was worried about the older girls who were hopping into bed with one another. When people are left without anybody to love, they find someone. The sex doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

The children’s father and their stepmother took them out of the orphanages. Lesley left home at 15, working at various jobs including as a nanny, and as a bunny girl – “the worst job in the world because you had to wear high heels all night.”

While Lesley says her stepmother, Hilda, was a difficult woman, she is forever grateful to her for introducing her to reading, despite Lesley having undiagnosed dyslexia.

But well before Lesley took up the pen as a means of making a living, she became pregnant at the age of 18. The father was a travelling salesman – “a bit of a cliché. I hadn’t had any experience of sex before so I was a bit naive.” The salesman didn’t stick around.

Lesley found her son after a reunion with relatives in Ireland. It triggered the realisation that the man who had recently contacted them from America after a DNA trace indicated that he could be Lesley’s son. (Lesley used to speak to the media about her adopted son while doing press for her books.) Mother and son were reunited. Martin has retired from his job as a nautical engineer.

Lesley had tried to keep her infant son. She had him for four months. “I had an awful time, trying to hold onto him. It was just impossible in the end. I couldn’t get a job or find anywhere to live.

“I realised the kindest thing for him would be to let him go. I let my dad see him just before he was adopted. My dad just cried and said ‘my first grandchild and I can’t tell anybody’.”

Having lived through a lot of social change, Lesley says she can hardly believe how the world has turned into a completely different and more tolerant place. She has been married twice and has three daughters, for whom she was able to buy houses thanks to her successful writing career. You could call it poetic justice.

The Girl With The Suitcase, by Lesley Pearse, is published by Penguin Michael Joseph.