Her name was Lia Hua and she was from Malaysia.  Sometime in the 1950s David Hunter accidentally killed Lia's parents during the fight against the Communists.  David took responsibility for the infant Lia and sent her to a convent, paying all her expenses.  But Lia was not satisfied.  She wanted more than anything else to find out who her guardian was.  One night she crept into the nun's office and looked at the files.  There she saw David Hunter's name, and the Motel's address.

 

Lia left the convent and found employment as a nurse.  After several years she had saved enough to make the trip to Britain.  Finally she found herself on the doorstep of the Motel, a mystery girl with a heartwarming story to tell.

 

June Bolton, the pretty young actress who plays Lia, is herself something of a mystery.  Despite her English name and Oriental good looks, she in fact hails from a tiny island off the coast of Venezuela in the Caribbean Sea.  She left when she was eight and moved to England.

 

Ironically enough, June found herself on the Crossroads set via a play called Passage to England.  Crossroads producer Jack Barton spotted her performance, liked what he saw and arranged an audition.

 

"The lovely thing about coming to Crossroads is that everyone is very friendly," laughs June, curled up in her Crossroads dressing room.  "In the beginning it was very frightening.  You think when you come in mid-way through that everyone else is all settled, and you're a stranger.  You think, 'What's going to happen to me!'  But they're so friendly here that after only a few hours you feel you've been accepted."

 

The thing that June really likes about the series is its authenticity.  "Even if you didn't watch Crossroads, you'd be hearing the same sort of conversations in the pub next door, right?" she says.  "It could all be true.  I thought about Lia Hua and asked myself, 'Could there be a girl like that who'd lost her parents?'  Then I began to associate her character with people I have known in the past.  Now she is real."