Pamela Moriarty thought her mother had abandoned her as a child. Years later, Pamela, from Lexington, Massachusetts, found out that in fact, Kathleen Jeffrey was one of the 130 who lost their lives in the devastating air raid on Bournemouth in May 1943.

Pamela, who visited Bournemouth last week for the 70th anniversary of the bombing, tells her story. . .

BOURNEMOUTH was the last place on my mind when, as a grown woman plagued by baffling bouts of depression and suicidal thoughts, I asked my aunts, Eve and Win, what happened to the mother who disappeared from my life when I was seven.

She brought me from England where we were living at the time and left me in a boarding school in Dublin.

I never saw her again, nor would anyone in my family speak of her.

I assumed she’d abandoned me. My journey to find her began in America, where I’d been living, when a classmate at the college I was attending asked me about my mother.

To my dismay, her question set loose memories of exploding bombs and air raid sirens and my mother weeping, “We can’t go on like this.”

Were these memories of things that had actually happened or was I losing my mind? I finally confronted my aunts. They told me my father, who had since died, had forbidden them to speak to me of my mother because he wanted me to ‘forget all about her’.

She’d been the eldest of nine living in Dublin when their mother died. My mother was 17. “She became our mother,” Eve said.

Instead of worrying about pimples on her chin or having nothing to wear or if a boy she liked noticed her, my mother spent her young years desperately trying to hold the family together.

Then she met my father and had me. They moved to England when war broke out. My mother ended up in Bournemouth working for the Army Pay Corps. My aunts told me I should go to Bournemouth if I wanted to know what happened to her. They didn’t want to tell me.

So I made the journey from America to this lovely, seaside town in southern England, a prosperous place, humming with people and traffic, peaceful under the June sun but, as I was to discover, Bournemouth hadn’t always been that way.

Once, it had been filled with servicemen, young pilots in training from Canada, Australia, Britain and America, planes roaring overhead all hours of the day and night.

On Sunday, May 23 1943, my mother met friends for lunch in the Metropole Hotel, a grand, old Victorian in the Landsdowne district of Bournemouth. It was filled with servicemen, relaxing over whatever the hotel had managed to scrape together in those days of tight food rationing.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, from across the Channel, the Germans launched a ‘tip and run’ raid. A squadron of 22 Foch-Wolfe 109 fighter-bombers swept in at wave top level avoiding British radar. Each plane carried a high explosive 500 kg bomb. The raid was precisely planned, deadly, over in minutes and left Bournemouth shattered. The Metropole Hotel received a direct hit that reduced it to rubble and killed scores, among them my mother. I was stunned. All those years I’d bitterly denounced her for walking out on me. Instead, this courageous young woman, who’d spent her life in the service of others, had been obliterated by a mindless bomb.

As part of my own healing process, I decided to tell her story in my memoir, Finding My Mother, Finding Myself. I go on to recount my shocking discovery of her anonymous grave in East Bournemouth Cemetery and how, in putting that right, I was finally able to bring peace to my heart and let her go with love.

She now rests among all the honoured dead in Bournemouth who gave their lives in World War Two to keep the world free.