The year was 1939 and soldiers were about to go to war. Constance Cummings, a sixteen-year-old beautiful but naïve young girl, was taken in by a conniving and duplicitous junior army officer who was already married with a family using a false identity. With the false promise of later marriage and following a wager with his colleagues he lured the girl into a seedy room where he raped her. She found herself to be pregnant and in 1940 she had a baby with an unknown father. Even though she had been duped and raped this was considered to be a disgrace and the child, a boy, was taken from her without her even being aware of his sex. Meanwhile, some miles away the offender’s real wife gave birth to a son. This is a story of their lives from that point on. Will Constance ever meet up with her son? Will the offender’s real wife ever realise what a dreadful man she had married? Will the two half-brothers ever meet and become friends?
David Tetlow was born in 1941 in Rossendale, Lancashire. He attended St James the Less school in Rawtenstall, leaving to work as an apprentice mechanical engineer at the age of fifteen, he worked in that industry for eleven years. He married Joyce in 1963 and joined the Lancashire police in 1967. He retired from the Greater Manchester police in 1997 as a senior investigating officer. David and Joyce have a son and daughter, four grandchildren and one great grandchild. His first book, Beware My Shadow, was published in 2018 when David was 77 years of age.