Sometime in the late ’70s, I discovered that I was a half-bastard. A minor discovery in the light of the others contained in this book. But an intriguing, and perhaps significant one, nonetheless.
It had always been my mother’s practice to remove her engagement ring when doing the washing up. I was used to seeing it lying on the mantelshelf in the kitchen, amongst dog-eared family snaps, old postcards and handy bits of string. But I would never give it a second thought. However, one evening when I was drying the dishes, for some reason Bea removed her wedding ring as well. Carrying the crockery through from what she always referred to as the kitchenette, to put it away in the kitchen cupboard, I noticed that, unusually, her engagement ring had a companion resting by its side.
I don’t know what prompted me – idle curiosity, a moment’s respite in the parade of plates needing dried, or just plain nosiness – but I picked up the wedding ring for a closer look. It was an object I’d always been familiar with and to which I had never paid any particular attention. But I had never known her to take it off in the past. Mum was still fully aproned, rubber gloved and up to her wrists in suds so, even if she’d noticed me picking up the ring, she would not have been able to stop me examining it in time. In the event, she can’t have noticed. Turning her wedding band around in my fingers, I took a quick look before getting back to the plates and dishtowel.
The inscription round the inside of the ring gave me pause. It commemorated the date of my parents’ wedding in April, 1950. As they had never celebrated their wedding anniversary, all I was aware of was the year of the marriage, but neither the month nor the date. With such occasions being outwith the radar of a young boy, especially one in a largely male household, it had never occurred to me as odd that the date wasn’t a cause for celebration.
Since I was born in the September of the same year, it immediately dawned on me that my parents could not have been married when I was conceived. At the time, this was intriguing, but I let it lie. It was not something I broached with my mother until many years later. I never once raised it with my father, who died not long afterwards. The information was stored away in the back of my mind until, with the revelation of my father’s previous marriage, the circumstances and timing of my conception became more relevant, began to take on a feeling of importance to me.
To one who was a teenager in the ’60s, there was nothing shocking about an out-of-wedlock conception. My generation grew up with the increasing ubiquity of ‘the pill’ and the spread of a culture that aspired, or at least pretended, to ‘free love’ – albeit rather skewed to the advantage of the male libido. At the same time I was amused that my parents’ relationship hadn’t differed so far from my own. I wondered if my efforts to conceal the fact that my wife and I had been living together for a time before we were married had been at all necessary. Remembering a surprise visit Dad had made to the student house we had been sharing, perhaps I could now understand why he had made no enquiries whatsoever about our living arrangements and had seemed not at all put out by my wife-to-be’s presence there. So very different from my future in-laws from whom it had been vital to keep the nature of our relationship undisclosed. Dad’s relaxed attitude certainly contrasts with my wife’s parents’ outrage when they arrived unannounced at our cottage some years later only to find us out, but – scandal of scandals – an unmarried couple of friends in bed together in our spare room.
Being relatively newly married when I noticed the discrepancy of dates revealed by Bea’s ring, I remember thinking how romantic the circumstances of my conception must have been. A decade or so before I would have tried to pretend that such a thing had never happened. At any earlier age, to have imagined my parents indulging in such intimate physical activities would have been an image I would have cringed to conjure up. And as an adolescent, I firmly accepted Philip Larkin’s assertion in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ that sex had only been invented in 1963, ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban’, as he put it, and ‘the Beatles’ first LP’. To have realised that this was far from the case would have undermined the naïve illusion I held to of sexual liberation dawning only with the advent of ’60s youth culture and later ‘flower power’. However, by my twenties, when that tell-tale inscription was spotted, I was happy to take all that it implied on board. And, perversely, I was equally happy to take on board the rather rakish notion that I was, if not a whole one, at least half a bastard.
The term ‘bastard’ was, of course, ubiquitous. A common swear word, even in the supposedly refined halls of my fee-paying school, it was bandied about with alacrity. It was not always so. In earlier times it was a term of genuine degradation. Applied to all illegitimate children, it even had gradations of shame. ‘Natural bastards’ were those whose parents could have married, but for some reason chose not to; ‘sacrilegious bastards’ were those where at least one parent had been in celibate holy orders; ‘spurious bastards’ were those whose fathers couldn’t be identified due to them ‘doing a bunk’ or to the mother having had several simultaneous lovers. Further categories, whose natures can easily be imagined, included ‘abandoned’, ‘adulterine’ and ‘incestuous’ bastards. So sensitive could the term’s application be that there is a case from as late as 1952 where a man was murdered for insulting another by calling him a bastard – the individual so addressed turning out actually to be one. His loathing of the term so incensed him that he straight away did his verbal abuser to death. That was the world into which my mother’s secret daughter had been born in 1941, and the very same in which, had circumstances differed, I might have been similarly categorised at my birth.
All this was far – very far – from the flippant attitude we took in the ‘liberated’ era of the ’60s and ’70s. Then, we of a certain age thought we had changed morality. The word ‘bastard’ took on an almost comic aspect, laughed at in sketches from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the like; meaningless to those who favoured the term ‘love child’. The disgrace attached to the ‘taint of illegitimacy’ had so exercised previous generations that it had been seen as something almost able to be inherited, the ‘bad blood’ that families were desperate to protect future generations from. Even this was now a topic for humour. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band did this so well in a number from their 1972 album Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly. In a spoof western ballad, lyricist Vivian Stanshall captures both the outmoded notion of an ineradicable taint and the ridiculousness of such an idea. Bad blood, the song says, is like some egg stuck to your chin – ‘you can lick it but it still won’t go away’.
I had long been particularly amused by a laconic quip that closes a Lee Marvin western of the period. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining my fascination with my new found birth status. In the movie, Marvin’s character finally bests the main villain of the piece and prepares to take to the trail.
‘You bastard!’ the baddie hisses, through gritted teeth.
Not lost for words, Marvin turns in the saddle and snaps back at him, ‘Yes, sir! In my case an accident of birth. But you are a self-made man!’ Then off he gallops into the distance in a cloud of – surely contemptuous – dust.
Sadly, no-one has ever – at least since then – called me a bastard to my face. All my fantasies of a similarly pithy riposte have remained just that – fantasies. But there’s time yet.
* * *
At the time I discovered it, I had said nothing about the discrepancies in dates that Bea’s wedding ring inscription indicated. I preferred to dwell on the various romantic scenarios my imagination provided. It was only many years after my father’s death that I decided I’d like to know more. Considering that my mother might be put out by a direct and potentially embarrassing question, I felt she couldn’t really object to a tentative enquiry. I had nothing to lose. But rather than confront her with a direct question, I decided I would just bring up, in a casual manner, the inscription I had noticed on her ring back then.
‘Is it possible that I’ve got the date wrong?’ I went on to ask her. ‘I might have misread it all those years ago.’
‘Actually, you haven’t,’ Mum said, not at all put out. ‘It’s perfectly correct.’
The wedding, she went on to explain, had originally been planned for July. But, discovering that she was pregnant, my parents had brought the date forward to April. On my probing further, she was insistent that they hadn’t decided to get married as a consequence of my conception. When they got engaged in the first weeks of 1950, they had not even known she was pregnant. I was, it seemed, what Bea described as a ‘happy accident.’
Ages on from this, when I found a cache of letters after my mother’s death, her whole plan for a ‘proper’ church wedding was revealed. In a letter from her brother down south, dated from mid-January 1950, he congratulates her on her engagement and promises to get a copy of The Scotsman newspaper – always tricky in London – so he can see the announcement.
We were very much excited over the news in your letter of this morning which has been practically the sole topic of conversation here all day! We have already said so on the phone, but once again, my very best wishes to both of you & I hope you will be very happy. I am sure you will be feeling very thrilled. Please convey to Gilbert my congratulations & best wishes & tell him that I look forward very much to meeting him. I believe it is not considered the correct procedure to congratulate the lady, but I most assuredly wish you all the very best both now & after 1st July.
The date mentioned at the end of that passage is, of course, the date on which my parents had originally intended to be married – in a ceremony that would have been very different from the one to which the pregnancy obliged them to resort.
My mother had written to all of her immediate family with the happy news of her engagement and her elder – and favourite – brother, living in London at the time, had been the first to reply. Many of her numerous and widespread relations would have been invited to the wedding. Since her father had died in 1947, she had asked her brother to ‘give her away’. He went on to respond to this in his letter:
Well, Beattie, as I’ve said I shall be very happy to do the honours. It is, of course, the elder brother’s place to give the bride away and if you had not asked me I should have pushed myself forward! Seriously, however, if Dad had still been with us, he would have been taking you up the aisle, and I feel, apart from the fact that I shall be more than pleased to do it for you, that he would have liked to know that I would take his place on such an occasion.
Had it taken place as planned, the whole affair would have put my mother, given her competitive streak, on a par with her older sister whose large church wedding had been celebrated some years previously.
Her pregnancy made this impossible. For her to have walked down the aisle obviously pregnant – as she would have been by July – would have caused a scandal. The wedding had to be moved forward. Its location had to be changed to a registry office. And it had to be converted into a small-scale, discreet affair. At last I had the story behind those differences I had noticed as a child between my uncle’s and my parents’ wedding photographs, why there was no church step shot of my mum and dad. It was now obvious why my grandmother had seemed so reticent about them.
Knowing the effect it would have on her plans, my mother must have been disappointed when she discovered that she was pregnant, so it was doubly reassuring that she had described my conception as happy. But she must also have been happy – though secretly so, given all that was concealed – that she was now going to have a child that she would keep, the child of her pending marriage.
I vividly remember the moment I asked Bea my next question. My wife, who was visiting the family home with me at the time, immediately shot one of her classic ‘old-fashioned looks’ in my direction. Unable to imagine ever asking her own mother such a question, she was visibly uneasy at my doing so with mine. I had mentioned that I was going to ask Bea about the date of her marriage in order to clear up – at least in my own mind – what had happened and when, back in 1950. But I hadn’t told her what else I planned to ask.
To my mind, the next question – asking Bea where I was conceived – was even more significant. If my birth had been the conventional nine months or so after the wedding, I would have just assumed my conception was on the honeymoon. But this was not the case.
Still – good for her – Mum took it all in the spirit I had intended. Her answer, and the details she provided, proved to me that my romantic notion had not been wide of the mark. Far from it, in fact.
* * *
My mother and father had met in the late ’40s at Ratho Park Golf Club just outside Edinburgh. They had initially been part of a large and fluid group of friends, so they didn’t constitute a couple from the outset. My father had a rather impressive list of Christian names to choose from. Although he had been known as Tom Johnstone in the RAF during the War, by this time he had reverted to the name by which his parents had known him – Gilbert, his third forename – which was in fact his mother’s maiden name.
I can imagine that this rather distinguished name would have appealed to my mother, always one for a touch of class. Oddly, she must have misheard it at first, probably in the general chatter of conversation. Her recounting of the incident has stuck in my mind. Bea had thought my father was called Gordon. Whether it was that misunderstanding that brought them together, I’ll never know, but amongst the many stories Bea told was one of her first addressing my father as ‘Gordon’ and him emphatically correcting her. She would have remembered the correct name after that. And soon Gilbert and Bea became a couple.
Living not far from each other, in Edinburgh’s inner suburbs – my father in ‘digs’ in the Shandon area and my mother still living at home in Merchiston – they spent their time going for runs in Gilbert’s car. They would motor out to the Hillend Roadhouse for games of skittles or further to their favourite hotel, The Open Arms in Dirleton for lunch or afternoon tea. They would head along the coast to the beaches or golf courses at Gullane and North Berwick or down to South Queensferry to watch the ferries from Fife come in. In town, they’d meet their friends in the cafés and cocktail bars of the city centre, going on to dinner dances and balls. But whenever they had the opportunity, they’d be playing golf and relaxing afterwards in the clubhouse bar. This sport was to be their abiding interest throughout their lives. Despite continued encouragement, I never took to it. I myself am what might be called a ‘golf orphan’.
My father must have been introduced to my grandmother around this time. She had been widowed not long after the end of the War and Bea – her younger daughter – was still living with her. Mother and daughter were shortly to move into a compact main door flat – as apartments opening directly onto the street are known in Edinburgh – but at this time, they were still rattling around in the large family home in Merchiston. My uncle’s letter shows concern that their mother will be left on her own, but, as he says:
Mother will be very pleased & happy to know that you will have a husband to look after you, and although she can not do other than miss you a great deal, at least you will, I gather, still be in Edinburgh & no doubt you’ll be popping in to see her every other day or so, to say nothing of ringing her up on the phone.
But my uncle needn’t have worried. Both of my father’s parents were long dead by this time. He hit it off with my grandmother right away. This is perhaps why he was every bit as devoted to her, for the rest of her life, as my mother was.
When the time came for the move to the smaller flat, Gilbert – then my mother’s fiancée – was there to help with the packing and the heavy lifting, assisting my grandmother in her dealings with the removal men. In later years, he would do all sorts of odd jobs at her new home; cutting the grass and looking after her garden, even spending time renovating the sub-basement in the flat so Grandma could rent the rooms out for a bit of extra income.
Gilbert would take his mother-in-law for trips in the car and was always happy to have her along on the annual family holiday until, in the early ’60s, she became too frail to travel. He also played a great part in helping Bea care for her mother in the old lady’s twilight years. Initially this was in Grandma’s own home but, becoming increasingly incapacitated, she stayed with the family in Morningside for a while, up to her death in 1966.
* * *
This bonding with Grandma would have helped cement my father’s relationship with my mother. Their shared interests were pulling them closer together. In their early snaps as a couple, their strong physical attraction is almost palpable. Each looks delighted with the other.
Clearly my parents were falling in love. When the actual proposal of marriage came, and where that took place, is one thing I never got round to asking either of them. But whenever that was, it was not before Hogmanay of 1949. And it may even have occurred in the wee small hours of the following New Year’s Day.
That evening, my parents – or Gilbert and Bea, as I must call them in this part of the story – were out at a dinner dance, bringing in the New Year in convivial company. Perhaps it was the very one at which we have them captured in a photograph of the time. They are in a group with another couple I can remember visiting us at home when my brother and I were small. Everyone is beaming, but no-one more than my mother. Behind them, a white-suited barman is serving drinks from a generously stocked bar. Gilbert, like the other men, is spruce in his dinner jacket and black tie. Bea is wearing an elegantly cut evening gown, its sweetheart neckline and cap sleeves offset by a triple strand of pearls at her neck. Cigarettes and drinks in their hands, they are clearly having a fine time.
It was the start of a new decade and a step in time away from the decade that was synonymous, in the minds of their generation, with the War. Both had lost many friends then, and both would be hoping to leave some of that sadness behind in their new-found love for each other. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how, later that night, they would have fallen into each other’s arms; how they’d have wanted to make the New Year unique with their love.
And so, it turned out – as Bea told me many years later when I asked her the question. Her response convinces me that it was the romantic occasion I imagined. That was the very night on which I was conceived, on the sofa in my grandmother’s front parlour as the first hours of the new decade moved in and the mid-point of the century slipped into the past.
Turning the Page
He’s the air force sergeant
likely man about the house,
sweeps her off her feet, she tells him,
smiles to break her heart.
But doesn’t do that this time,
says she’s the one he’ll keep.
Proposes, swears he loves her, so
he’s never out of step.
All that and now the ’50s,
the war’s the past decade –
hope will seize her one more time,
he’ll help her turn the page.
He dances in the new year,
she’s counting down the days.
He’s handsome in his DJ,
she’s dolled up in lace.
Lying in his arms hours later
she knows what they have made.
Nine months till the boy is born.
Four months till they’re wed.
On the first night of their honeymoon, those four months later, Gilbert would take Bea in his arms again. Mum told me what Dad had whispered to her then.
‘This time, it’s for good,’ he had said.
And for twenty-six years – long enough to celebrate their silver wedding in 1975 – it was.