THE discovery of a long-lost brother would, for most families, be a source of joy. But, in the case of the family of Ian McEwan — whose novels hint at unspeakable secrets — it has stirred up uncomfortable memories.

News of the reunion of McEwan, the Booker prizewinner, with a brother handed over for adoption at a railway station in 1942 has revealed a family divided by illicit love and loss.

It has now emerged that McEwan, who has written of his regret that during his childhood he “lacked siblings”, also had a half-brother whom he barely knew. The brother was estranged from the family at the age of 11, when his widowed mother married her lover.

The wartime affair between McEwan’s mother, Rose, and his violent father, Major David McEwan, began when she was married to Ernest Wort, a house painter, by whom she had two children, Roy and Margaret.

She fell pregnant by McEwan while Ernest was on active wartime service abroad and gave birth to a son, Stuart David. She was already dependent on the parish for financial support and when she heard her husband was returning home on leave she decided to put her son up for adoption.

In December 1942 she placed an advert in the Reading Mercury that stated baldly: “Wanted, home for baby boy, age 1 month; complete surrender.” The three-line advert was sandwiched between two wanted notices, one from a band seeking a violin, saxophone, clarinet and trumpet, and the other for second-hand furniture.

The baby was handed over to a family at Reading station. Ernest Wort was killed in the Normandy landings in 1944 and she was able to marry McEwan three years later.

Rose still faced a dilemma about what to do with the two children from her first marriage. A source close to the family maintains that one of the children was placed in a children’s home and another was sent to live with a grandmother, in Ash, near Aldershot.

Both McEwan’s half-siblings were last week unwilling to comment. Roy Wort, 72, lives in a modest, immaculately maintained terraced house in the south of England.

He was 11 when Rose married McEwan, but, when asked who brought him up, would only say: “I wasn’t involved in the second marriage.” Asked whether David McEwan was responsible for his exit, he replied: “That had nothing to do with it.” Referring to his sister and mother, he added: “We lost touch.”

His sister, Margaret Hopkins, 68, now lives in a small chalet on the south coast, just two streets from the beach. She also refused to comment last week but her husband said suggestions that she had been made to live with her grandmother “didn’t sound right at all”.

According to her previous husband, Brian Chelu-Armour, Margaret lived with both her mother and grandmother in Ash while Rose was waiting for her second husband to be given military accommodation. Chelu-Armour was unaware that Margaret had a brother called Roy. “The name was never mentioned,” he said.

McEwan was born in 1948, and endured a lonely childhood as he lived in the shadow of his father, whom he claims beat Rose. “At home, there was violence in the air,” he wrote in 2001. “She was always frightened of him, and so was I. I drifted away and saved my darker thoughts for my fiction where fathers . . . were not kindly presented.”

McEwan’s novels contain scenes that may offer glimpses of the author’s life. The Cement Garden, published in 1978, opens with the ominous line: “I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way.” It follows a family of abandoned children after their overbearing father dies of a heart attack.

In The Child in Time, published in 1987, the main character’s parents are both modelled directly on McEwan’s own mother and father. One scene captures the father’s bullying behaviour. “Was it a nightmare . . . when he put his red and angry face close to Stephen’s and said he was a mother’s boy, or worse picked him up in front of visitors to hold him like a babe in arms and rocked and shushed him?” McEwan has declared a “complete lack of interest in family trees (and) poking around in parish registers”, but in his books the characters are frustrated by their limited knowledge of their parents’ lives.

In The Child in Time he wrote: “Even when their stories began to concern himself, Stephen knew next to nothing of how his parents met, what attracted them . . . or how he had come about.”

The book went on: “He owed it to his love for them not to let them slip away with their lives forgotten.”

Were it not for the determination of his adopted brother, however, McEwan would still not know the truth about his family history. At the age of 60, Stuart David, who now uses the name David, turned to the Salvation Army’s family tracing service. All four were reunited before their mother died.

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