A WARTIME romance, a pregnancy and a raft of previously unknown relatives have been uncovered by a Witney woman after a sickbed confession.

All her life, Karlene Brook believed her grandfather was Edwin Brook, who died in 1995.

But after father David Brook spoke to his 91-year-old mother Hilda on her sickbed he found he was actually the product of a wartime affair with prison guard Frederick Stanley Lester Marklew.

Both Mr Marklew and Mrs Brook were married at the time of the affair, in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Miss Brook, 27, has spent the last three months working with her father trying to track down her true family.

After hours scanning records and searching on Facebook and ancestry websites, she found a half-aunt, Annette Paget, in Stirlingshire, Scotland and organised an emotional meeting in Luton.

Sadly, Miss Brook and her father were too late to meet all the family as her real grandfather died of cancer in 1981 and Mr Brook’s half-brother, also Frederick Marklew, died two years ago.

Miss Brook, a project administrator at Oxford University, said: “It’s amazing really.

“When my dad told me we were excited because we knew there were more people out there that we were related to.”

Miss Brook said: “We thought it was going to be quite sad but we heard lots of nice stories about the family.

“We had it in our head that my grandfather probably wasn’t alive, but there was a little chance.

“We’ve got pictures of him now, which is really lovely.”

She said the experience was “surreal” but she was delighted to meet her extended family.

Miss Brook said: “It is a bit of a scandal really because he was married too and had young children. Apparently it happened a lot in those days.”

Her father, a special constable in Oxford in the 1990s who now lives in Stratford, said he asked his mother, who had suffered a series of strokes, after hearing “whispers” from family members.

He said: “It certainly was a shock.

“The rumours were that he was an American airman and I asked her and she told me who it was.”

He said he had “mixed feelings” about what he had discovered, and wished he had known earlier so he could have met his half-brother and father.

Mr Brook, 67, said: “You never think your mother would do something like that.

“I don’t think it would have come out if she wasn’t so poorly, but I’m glad it has.”