ONE day a letter dropped on the mat at Mirelle Pull's home. Gently she picked it up, slowly opening it. Unable to speak, move, or even to cry, it took her husband Raymond nearly an hour to get any sense at all from her.

Mirelle had just had the first word from her beloved brother Jean, a brother she had believed dead, for the first time in 52 years.

With the news came a flood of memories. First a vivid snapshot of a man she knew, bursting into her flat in Paris, her childhood home, fleeing German soldiers. Then, shortly later, other soldiers grabbing her, her little brother and the rest of her family and carrying them away. The reason? A French resistance volunteer had been in their home.

Next came the dull, suppressed memories of six years in Nazi camps somewhere in Germany, together with Jean, six years of keeping herself and her brother alive, 'me taking hidings for him and him taking hidings for me,' only to then be separated in the confusion when the gates were opened at the end of the war.

She was separated from a brother, just a year-and-a-half younger, who was 'my other half, the person who made me one.'

She was later reunited with her mother, who was distant and did not seem to want her any more.

And then there were the memories of being an 11-year-old girl being sent by Catholic nuns to a strange land - England - and a never-heard-of place called County Durham. A move 'from hell to heaven.'

Raymond had been her husband for 15 years when she first told him she had a brother, and then it took the French Salvation Army six years to trace Jean after television appeals and examining Government records.

But once contact was made everything came with a frightening rush. After half a century it took Jean just two or three days to make his way to the Pull family home in Sacriston

Looking back to that moment of reunion, four years ago, Mirelle says: "I was in a panic, and when I panic I really panic.

"He was supposed to be here at four o' clock, but of course that was French time. It got to five and I was in a state. I really thought he'd had an accident and died.

"Raymond said 'what can I get you?' I have no idea why but the first thing that popped into my head was a Pot Noodle."

Raymond nipped to the shop and saw a strange car. It was Jean, who had navigated his way through London on his first-ever trip to England, but had somehow managed to get lost in Sacriston. Raymond took him home and stayed outside for a moment while the long lost brother met his beloved sister.

"There aren't the words for that moment when we met," smiles Mirelle. "We tried to talk, to laugh, to cry and to stay still and to jump up and down all at the same time. I never did get my Pot Noodle!"

She learnt that her brother had worked as a professional wrestler, a paratrooper, a bodyguard to someone he still will not name, a bouncer at the Follies, and, finally, a pub and restaurant owner. He ended up having no fewer than 11 children.

Just this month Mirelle and Raymond returned from one of her regular month-long stays at Jean's family home in Britanny. A place where, from having just Raymond as family, she now has an entire tribe and is rapidly relearning her forgotten first language of French. "Every night Jean says, 'goodnight big sister,' and I say, 'goodnight little brother.' It is so lovely to hear and say those words."

Mirelle doesn't dwell too much on the cruel luck that led her to being carried away to a camp somewhere in Germany in 1940. Neither does she talk too much about her experiences there, although she says it was not a concentration camp. Her mother, she says, was a bad-tempered woman who had a new family after the war. It was hard to fit in and she no longer felt wanted.

But Mirelle comes alive when she tries to explain why she didn't try to contact Jean for so long. And for that she begins with her story as a little girl about to be put on a boat for England.

"I was not even sure that the war had really ended. I didn't know the sea and the ocean really existed. Everything, and I mean everything, was unbelievable, just getting on a boat. It was scary but an adventure at the same time."

Mirelle was taken to County Durham where a number of children were to meet guardians and foster parents in a hall.

Mirelle was taken to a house in the pit village of High Spen, near Rowlands Gill, in the Gateshead area.

"Almost the first words I learned in English were 'don't cry' from my guardians, Jane and Oswald Short. I remember seeing Mr Short who had come from the mine and thinking he was a black man, even that made me cry."

She learned English fast and in her second year at school she won a book called Bon Voyage about English children going to France for coming top of the year in English. It is a book she treasures to this day.

She knew she would be safe and happy that first Christmas. "I remember coming down the stairs and there was all this tinsel and baubles and things. It was fairyland, it really was. I am sure every house on the street must have got me a present. There was so much. And the talk of Santa Claus was a wonder. I must have been having a bit of a second childhood because I refused not to believe in Santa Claus until I was 16 and then I cried and cried.

"In this new world it was hard to go back and find Jean. When you are a child it is hard."

Mirelle went on to work as a hairdresser in a Newcastle department store before being unhappily married to a man who didn't want her to look for Jean. Later she fell in love with then steel worker Raymond, a man she says she wouldn't swop for all the money in the world, but still thought men would not like her looking for her brother.

But still she never forgot. She still kept an old, precious photograph of her and her long lost brother through all the years. It is with her still, along with the new photographs and the new, happy memories