Positivity: “I’ll see her again after 40 years”
A UK will be reunited with his long-lost daughter after almost 40 years:
Emotional Joe Baines, 63, told how he cried when he received an e-mail from daughter Carole Hungerford, 42, who he had gradually lost touch with after he split with her mum in 1968.
He last saw her when she was five, and Carole emigrated to Australia when she was aged around 15.
But now the pair are set to reunite after Joe’s brother Martin Baines saw her name by chance on a Hartlepool student website.
Martin, 55, of Newquay Close, Hartlepool, then started e-mailing Carole and gave her Joe’s e-mail address.
Joe, of Dean Close, Peterlee, said: “She was round about five years old when I last saw her.“When I had the first e-mail from her I cried.
“I answered that one and we were both a bit tentative in what we said - we didn’t want to offend each other. But that’s all gone now.
“She had been wanting to come home for a few years to visit but she felt she had nobody to come and see.
“So when we started talking again she made her mind up.”
Carole, who has three children, Megan 19, Jamie, 17, and Daniel, 16, and lives in New South Wales with husband Craig, is set to arrive in the UK on Thursday, June 1.
And Joe is set to go to Durham and Tees Valley Airport to meet her.
He said: “I am looking forward but I am a little bit nervous. I will definitely recognise her - as she has sent photographs. But she is not how I remember her. My last memory of her was her sitting on the sea front, in Marine Drive.
“She was just sitting there and I was trying to talk to her - but she was just a shy little girl.
“Believe it or not, I always wish her happy birthday, she is my daughter.”
The family is now trying to organise a reunion party for anyone who knew Carole, a pupil of the former Henry Smith School, during the second week of her visit.
