Mum couldn’t take on the Post Office alone. I hope now we can clear her name

Sharon Kerrigan remembers the sickening moment her mother was accused of stealing £44,000 from the Cumbrian village post office that she’d set up – and how the shame drove her to sell the retirement home she loved, to pay off the ‘debt’

Patricia Kerrigan wanted ‘a little part-time job’, and so set up a village post office near the Scottish border (EPA/Supplied)

When she was young, my mum, Patricia, got a job as a telephone operator – she was one of the original “Hello?” girls, working on the exchange switchboards, putting calls through. By the early 1990s, having made a career in communications, she was retired from her supervisor job at BT, but still young, in her mid-sixties. She wanted a little part-time job to keep her busy.

Dad was a little older than her, a publican who had managed pubs all over Manchester. He was the relief manager of the pub in Bowness-on-Solway, a small Cumbrian village. Mum went up to stay with him and was really taken with the place.

It wasn’t long before they bought a cottage in Bowness-on-Solway, and had the annexe converted to become the village post office. Mum would open it a couple of days a week, and Dad would retire. I never lived there, but still have fond memories of the place. I got married there 30 years ago. Which makes what happened next all the more sad.

It was in 2000 that I got a call from Mum. She said that something really awful had just happened. “I’ve just had an audit by the Post Office – they’ve accused me of taking money out.” False accounting, she said. Stealing, basically.

It just came out of the blue – and was so out of character. She was just heartbroken.

A friend of theirs sent me the local paper, which said my mum had been accused. Before they left, people had stopped talking to them, and acting really funny.

My husband and I went up to stay with her, to be with them both. While we were there, there was a knock at the door. It was a couple of Post Office goons – as I refer to them now. They had an envelope for her with official documents about the missing money, some kind of final demand or details about criminal proceedings. They insisted that they come into the cottage. My husband wouldn’t let them in.

And at first, she couldn’t bring herself to tell me how much was involved. She only ever told me bits and pieces. She would become too upset to talk. She had been accused of taking £44,000.

It was a ridiculous amount of money for someone doing stamps and pensions and saving office accounts in a tiny village. We looked around and thought to ourselves: “You know, if she has gone crackers and taken money, they have nothing to show for it.”

To begin with, in the first few months, Mum was determined to fight all the way. She had been a union rep, so was used to standing up for herself and others. Then, Dad had a stroke.

I put it down to the stress of it all, because he had been supporting her full time. She’d lost her voice through stress, she wasn’t capable of driving a car. It was a horrible time.

But when he had the stroke, she had to pick herself up – and it was when she decided: “Right, I can’t push this. I need to get this out of my life so I can look after your dad.” So that’s when she made the decision to pay off the amount of money they said she owed. And to do that, they had to sell up and move away.

And that’s what she did. She sold the cottage and paid them, all signed and sealed in no time. My parents came back to Manchester to live in a council flat, which they got because of Dad’s condition. People asked, why on earth have you come back? What’s happened to the cottage? Why are you in a housing association home?

They never spoke about it to anyone. Mum would no longer answer the phone because she was frightened – of the press, of the Post Office harassing her. And we never discussed it as a family again.

For me, it was too much to even watch clips of the miniseries, it felt like PTSD

In Bowness, it was the talk of the town. When all of a sudden the post office closes, never to reopen, it’s swooped on. It’s the Post Office, the Post Office don’t get things wrong, you know – it’s an institution. A friend of theirs sent me the local paper, which said my mum had been accused. Before they left, people had stopped talking to them, and acting really funny.

Mum was really struggling with Dad’s routine, and I couldn’t understand why district nurses weren’t going in to help. So I phoned up the doctor’s surgery and spoke to a GP. He said: “Oh, well, I didn’t realise it was that bad.” And I said: “Well, Mum could do with some help.” And he said: “Well, your mother isn’t the most accurate historian, as you know…” It was awful.

My mother never spoke a word to my brother about what happened. After Mr Bates vs The Post Office finished – which I couldn’t bring myself to watch – it came up in conversation and I brought up what had happened to Mum, and it came as such a shock to him. I thought he knew. But he said it made some things make more sense, not least the move back to Manchester.

For me, it was too much to even watch clips of the miniseries. It felt like PTSD, because I’ve suppressed so much of the feelings that I had at the time, and how awful it was. And it has just brought it all back.

If Mum had lived to see the public fury, after all these years, she’d have been out there, shouting the loudest. If it hadn’t been for Dad having a stroke, she would have fought it all the way.

But Mum died in 2010, two years after Dad. They never knew what had happened to them had happened to anyone else, let alone hundreds of people. They thought they were the only ones.

My brother and I are going to try and see what we can do now. Because there’s now some hope we can clear her name – and because the Post Office has tens of thousands of pounds of not just my parents’ money, but other people’s, too.