When my parents wed in 1950, the last thing my mother would have expected was the reappearance of my father’s ‘long-lost’ daughter. Catrina and her mother had been living on another continent for a good number of years. He had been divorced from his estranged wife. Father and daughter had long lost touch. To be fair to Bea, how likely can it have been that Gilbert would ever see the child again? Surely that’s what she must have thought. How likely is it, they’d both have reasoned, that Catrina would ever return to Britain?
Nonetheless, the situation in which my father and his daughter came to be trapped was undoubtedly down to my mother’s reaction to Catrina’s later reappearance. It is not my mother’s insistence on the original decision to hide my father’s divorce that troubles me. Rather, it is her subsequent rejection of any possibility whatsoever of Gilbert revealing his past and introducing Catrina to his sons. This is the real knot at the heart of the whole tangled state of affairs. Of course, Bea had her own secret to keep, of which we knew nothing at the time. Without doubt, the maintenance of that secret would have informed her insistence on my father keeping his own past a secret.
We will never have any idea whether my mother ever let my father in on her own secret – the birth of her illegitimate child during the War. The more I think about this, the more I am inclined to think she did not, could not have done so. Cousin Lil bore this out in one of her letters when she said:
Whether your father knew anything, I can’t possibly know but I always felt he didn’t. But if he had, it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to him, I believe. We can never know definitely, but their relationship was strong enough to withstand any revelations.
However strong their relationship, we can never be sure how such an admission might have panned out. But what we should really consider is not what might have happened in that event, but what my mother thought could happen, and how those thoughts would have troubled her. If Bea had never told Gilbert about the existence of this child, she would have been that much more exercised about his own daughter. This could have manifested itself psychologically in two ways. She would have been unable to avoid feelings of jealously and envy that Gilbert and Catrina had been reunited, that he had been able to meet and bond with his daughter, something she believed she’d never be able to do with hers. And she would have been worried that any opening up about Catrina’s existence could affect the keeping of her own secret. Both of these feelings would have nagged away at her psyche and tied her up still further in knots.
Bea would also have had a considerable emotional response to Catrina’s eventual reappearance. Despite the fact that it is a daughter we are speaking of, not anyone like a former lover or an ex-wife, I think the circumstances must have undermined my mother’s feeling of being my father’s sole partner. Had Gilbert ‘gone public’, this undermining would almost inevitably have been seen by Bea as a humiliation – a psychological blow. She would have felt threatened – and felt the integrity of her family to be threatened.
Despite my own belief in the likelihood of my brother and I being able to accept my father’s situation, Bea must also have worried as to how it might have affected us. We had no inkling of our father’s previous marriage, nor of his daughter’s existence. Bea was right to be worried. It was an entirely unknown quantity. At only sixteen and fourteen at the time Catrina first made a return visit to Britain, my brother and I were pretty sheltered and immature for our age. Remember, we were an uncommunicative and emotionally bottled-up family. Who is to say how we would have reacted? Bea, and even Gilbert too, could well have been concerned lest my brother and I had rejected our half-sister out of hand. Far from resolving the situation, such a reaction would only have added further to its complications.
While it is a hurt that we were never brought together while Gilbert was alive, for which I do hold my mother responsible, I know in my heart that I was more than capable of causing hurt myself. Teenagers of that age, or even older, are unpredictable. Self-centred and self-important is how I remember it in my case. Giving any consideration to the feelings of my parents came very low down on my list of priorities. I am not one to dwell on regrets, but in my parents’ case I do have one major regret, one thing I could have done for them that would have cost me nothing. But one thing I failed to do because of what I can now see was my own posturing.
On completing my university studies, I had the option of graduating in person or opting to receive my degree through the post. My parents were looking forward to attending my graduation and proudly watching their elder son – even now the only person in the family ever to do so – receiving a degree, and doing so in a suitably formal and dignified manner. My own petty objections to the ‘bourgeois’ traditions of the graduation ceremony denied them that pleasure. That I was so tied up in my own self-proclaimed and simplistic political standpoint as to prevent them from happily enjoying a ceremony I could have taken part in with ease, still saddens me.
Being capable of that level of self-centredness at twenty-two – no longer with the excuse of adolescence – has led me to realise that I could easily have taken some similarly ‘pig-headed’ position on my half-sister. It would be obtuse to pretend that such a consideration might not have been part of my mother’s reluctance to reveal Catrina’s existence to her half-brothers. She may have worried that, in one of my headstrong adolescent moods, I might have scorned Catrina as a family member and refused outright to accept her. That I might have influenced my younger brother to do the same. Such a reaction would have hurt Gilbert even more than having to maintain the secret. And, had Bea agreed to the secret coming out, she could also have feared such a response. It could have led to a rejection of her, on the back of a negative reaction to her supporting any decision of Gilbert’s to introduce us to his daughter. How was she – how were they both – to know that their sons wouldn’t merely round on them as liars and dissemblers?
In her earlier life Bea had, it seems clear, been rejected by the father of her daughter, who had abandoned her to face the consequences of the illegitimate birth on her own. This put her in the position where she had no option but to reject her daughter in turn. This memory, haunting her past, would have made her more wary of creating a state of affairs where she, and my father too, might be rejected by one or both of their sons.
There are other considerations. My mother might have felt that setting Gilbert’s relationship with Catrina on a more open basis was a threat to the unity of our ‘four of a family’. She had been deserted in one way or another at least once in a previous relationship. This could easily have been a background concern to her decision, even if it wasn’t paramount. Revealing Catrina’s existence to her sons, she might have felt, could mean that Gilbert’s love for us would be compromised. But I do not think this would have been so. Our father would have found more love to extend to his daughter as well as his sons, as he must have done since Catrina re-entered his life. I had been living away from home since the very year she had moved back to the UK. My brother was on the verge of marrying and moving out too. Our formerly close-knit family was already undergoing a change in its dimensions.
But it is necessary to face facts. However charitable I attempt to be, I am forced to admit that propriety seems to have been my mother’s principal consideration. Propriety required by other factors in her life – but propriety nonetheless. It drove her to keep our half-sister, Gilbert’s cherished daughter Catrina, apart from us, the two sons he loved. And it drove her to maintain the fiction about my father’s past. But it was propriety wrapped up in her need to maintain her own secret and her desire to avoid what she would have seen as social and personal humiliation. My mother must have suffered a great deal of moralising and criticism at the time of her illegitimate pregnancy. Secret discussions of her predicament would have been frequent. Whispered conversations about her ‘lapse’ would have begun to wear her down. Many value judgements must have been made and plans laid without her input – or even her consent. She must have genuinely feared any ‘talk’ that would have resulted from breaking with propriety and acknowledging her step-daughter’s existence.
* * *
Is an individual’s capacity for love finite? Could my parents have welcomed either of their ‘lost’ children into the family and offered them their love in that context? Is it always a case of dividing up a finite quantity of love between all those in receipt of it? I rather think not.
Is it not that one’s capacity to give love is directly related to the number of individuals potentially in receipt of it? That the growth of love is relative to the extent to which it must be spread? One proof of this in my family is the fact that Bea and Gilbert showed a great deal of love for their daughters-in-law (or potential daughters-in-law, one being still a fiancée to my father, who died before my brother’s wedding). Similar proof was my mother’s love of her grandchildren, whom my father, regrettably, never lived to see. Both parents could have loved their opposite number’s first child. Not quite as their own, it is true, but as a nevertheless welcome and cherished family member. The bleak fact is that circumstances, coupled with at least one previous and mistaken decision, conspired to prevent this.
It is easy to see that my father loved his daughter every bit as much as he loved my brother and me. I wouldn’t expect otherwise. His intense desire to bring all three of his children together, which my mother opposed, suggests he might have been less concerned with propriety than she was. Did he set as much store by what people thought of him, how they judged his behaviour, as my mother clearly did?
I can easily see him, had my mother agreed, cheerfully sorting the situation out in the easy going, convivial manner I came to recognise as I grew up. This would have been all the simpler had he survived his heart attacks. The shock of the second of these, and its severe impact on his health, had resulted in an intense sharing of feelings. That would have ‘reset’ family relationships. I feel sure my brother and I would have reacted sympathetically to the introduction of our father’s daughter as our own sister, given how much it meant to Gilbert. And how much his well-being would have meant to us both had he lived to accomplish this.
But whenever he had chosen to take that step, I think he would have been capable of making the original cover-up of his first marriage and his divorce seem an entirely reasonable reaction given the culture of the period in which it took place. Neither my brother nor I were completely ignorant of differing standards and mind-sets. He could have characterised his subsequent decision to open up about it as the obvious and right thing to do at that point in time, in contrast to the hidebound attitudes of the past. We would both have responded to this angle. I feel sure he could have carried it off.
Few would have been surprised. Gilbert could have presented the facts – how it had made sense not to mention his first marriage back ‘in those days’; how attitudes to divorce that were prevalent in 1950 had stayed his hand. Our grandmother had died in 1966 and few of her generation were still around to be scandalised. Even if not everyone, most would have been happy for him that he had reclaimed his daughter and welcomed her into his life and his family circle. Everyone was aware by the time Catrina reappeared in the late ’60s that social attitudes were changing. They were bound to go on changing, even in staid and straight-laced Morningside.
* * *
Certain clues to my father’s less hidebound attitude should have been more obvious to me at the time. I have already mentioned Gilbert visiting a couple of times, while he was in Fife on business, during the year or so my wife and I were living together before we were married. We had never stated directly to my family that we had ‘shacked up’ in our student house, so I worried that these unannounced visits were likely to let several cats out of several bags. This was in the very early ’70s. The judgemental term ‘living in sin’ was still employed freely and that state of affairs was still very much frowned upon. It had been vital for my wife-to-be to use a different address for her letters to go to, in order to conceal what the university authorities described as cohabitation from her parents. Landlords were known to ask student couples if they were married and refuse to rent accommodation to them were they not. It had only very recently become possible for unmarried women to be prescribed ‘the pill’, and only then if they assured the clinics offering this service that they were in a stable relationship.
I was, therefore, somewhat embarrassed when Gilbert, full of cheerful greetings, had arrived at our door. But, as I said, I need not have worried – his supportive approach was maintained. It must have been obvious we were living as a couple, both of us finding ourselves welcoming him to our flat in the student house. Gilbert never batted an eyelid, implying an open-mindedness I hadn’t expected of him. But despite this, he never referred directly to the situation or acknowledged it in any way.
He was also hugely supportive of us when, to the emphatic opposition of my wife’s parents, we decided to get married. My father backed us up in every way, refusing to accept the objections of my future parents-in-law. Both Gilbert and Bea were happy for us to get married, despite our young ages, and went out of their way to be sympathetic. Despite their obvious disappointment at not being able to host the traditional family wedding, due to my wife’s parents flatly refusing to have anything to do with our union, they invited relatives from my extended family, and those prepared to be tolerant from my wife’s family, to a formal dinner they arranged for us. Gilbert even made a long trip down to the Borders to plead our case with my parents-in-law to be. Fruitlessly, it turned out. Given the nine months it took them to resume contact with their daughter, it’s clear they had considered our marriage to be one of necessity, rather than love and commitment.
Who knows – perhaps Gilbert thought the same to be the case? Perhaps his own past made him more sympathetic to what he – erroneously – might have seen as an awkward predicament we had found ourselves in. But I hope he simply believed his elder son when I told him I had found the love of my life. As indeed I had, and still have over forty years later. At any rate, I’ll always be particularly grateful to Dad for all he tried to do for us. And for generously stepping out of the more rigid social attitudes that still held sway at the time.
* * *
Knowing my mother – who died when I was in my late forties – over the twenty-plus years of her time as a widow, and having grown up under her care as a middle class boy in Edinburgh, only reinforces my belief that, to her, keeping up appearances was paramount. The usual minor things from our childhood are evidence of this – her forbidding us to eat in the street, her objection to us wearing jeans, her banning of vernacular in our speech, her horror at ‘bad language’. This even went as far as an incident I remember with amusement – her claiming to be outraged at my first use of the word ‘sexy’. And I was only using it to describe my fashionable new sunglasses. So unmentionable was the word ‘sex’ that I remember deciding it was better to lose a game of scrabble I was playing with my mother rather than play that word to get the higher score the large number of points would have given me.
In my early teenage years it was through working for our local newsagent that I discovered sex – but at the same time, unfortunately, suicide. We had been with the same newsagent’s as long as I could remember, having first been customers there when back in our tenement flat in the ’50s. We had The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch delivered every teatime, The Weekend Scotsman on a Saturday and The Sunday Post on the Sabbath. Taking a job there as a paper boy, delivering a round of evening papers after school, I found I was carrying hot property. The Profumo scandal broke in 1963, when I was twelve, and I would prolong my round by sitting in the dim light of a common stair and lapping up the salacious details of the case. Although euphemisms such as ‘call girls’ and ‘hostesses’ were used for the principal female characters, it rapidly became clear to me, reading between the lines, what was going on. The subsequent demise of one of the main male players also made me conscious of the reality of suicide in a way that no amount of mentions overheard in sotto voce adult conversations had ever done.
What had happened to the newspapers my parents had at home? Would these stories not have been covered? Hidden from youthful eyes, I suspect, like the brown-paper-covered gynaecological handbook my brother and I had discovered hidden behind the Walter Scott novels. But my parents’ preferred newspapers were nothing like the more sensationalist rags that I was delivering on some of my round. These filled me in on enough of the goings-on of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davis to fuel many a teenage fantasy. Years later, when I heard Morningside referred to as ‘all fur coat and nae knickers’, it would remind me forcefully of those furtive reads in the close of some tenement, while indoors, customers were doubtless wondering why their evening papers were so late.
* * *
There were many, many things my mother couldn’t abide. Stickiness was one of them. She always had a damp cloth handy to wipe sticky fingers or jammy mouths, or to run over the Formica table-top in the kitchen after we’d finished eating. Condensation too she abhorred. This had an unfortunate effect on our enjoyment of bath times. She would insist that the bathroom skylight be kept open to ensure the egress of the damp air – not just while the bath was being run but while it was being taken and afterwards too. And this in an unheated room. We got used to frantically towelling ourselves dry before hypothermia set in. Likewise, grubby footprints on the carpet, drip marks on the lino from wet hands, fingerprints on the glass door to the front hall – all were to be avoided at all costs and any evidence of their occurrence was to be immediately removed lest it be thought by anyone that they were tolerated.
One unfortunate incident – strangely emblematic of the welter of family secrets – must have reduced my mother to despair. My brother and I were enthusiastic readers of the weekly Fun Section in The Sunday Post. Here was the safe side of the ‘lower orders’. The characters may well speak in Scots vernacular, they may well be working class – but they ‘kent their place’ in the scheme of things. To this day I am an admirer of the cartoonist skills of Dudley D Watkins, but as boys it was the knock-about humour of The Broons and Oor Wullie that attracted us. Speaking a sort of cod Scots – almost, but not quite, the actual ‘bad English’ my mother railed against – the characters would get into hopeless scrapes in an environment that was immediately recognisable to us. My mother may have insulated us from ‘such-like folk’, but the Broon family and ‘Oor Wullie, a’body’s Wullie’ brought us all the couthy humour of these salt-of-the-earth working class characters in the sanitised version publishers D C Thompson promulgated.
Such was my own devotion to the Fun Section, a detachable double-page spread in the newspaper, that I would race my brother to be first to extract it. In order to make the section more comic-like, I took to folding the pages and running them under a heavy weight to put in a proper crease. A leg of the kitchen table was my preferred means. This worked fine until one day my brother beat me to the doormat and grabbed the paper first. Having taken note of my convoluted folding routine, he went to do the same. What he had not reckoned with was the table being set for breakfast. Raising the nearest leg, he slipped the Fun Section below it. At the same time, four bowls of cereal, a jug of milk, a pot of tea, the butter and marmalade dishes, together with every single piece of crockery and cutlery slithered, in what seemed like slow motion, down the now sloping surface of the table. Hitting the wall against which the table stood, the entirety of our family breakfast dribbled slowly down its painted surface as I watched horror-struck. Corn Flakes, milk, marmalade, margarine, tea, sugar, butter and toast, all flowed over the skirting board and dripped onto the lino, where it joined the cutlery, the tea pot and the fragmented remains of the crockery.
This was the ultimate mess. My mother was more than furious. I was obviously the one to blame, she asserted, as I had given my brother the idea in the first place. Being the older, I should have realised this could happen. The family outing planned for that day was immediately cancelled. We were banished breakfastless to our room. And Bea began the hours-long task of restoring the kitchen to a state of calm and rectitude.
Despite buying my mother a new butter dish – out of my own pocket money too – she would refer to the incident, and my part in it, for ages to come. The marmalade dish, still usable since only part of its base was broken, stood on the breakfast table as a constant reproach until years later. The new butter dish, a cheap plastic one, went on for years as well. But it too was eventually broken. My mother was still using it, its two halves stuck back together with matching red insulating tape, when, quarter of a century later, we came to clear the family home for her move to sheltered housing.
* * *
A general belief in maintaining appearances was my mother’s driving force. This was deferred to in many ways. During my father’s brief period of unemployment in the late ’50s, which resulted in a change of companies, she insisted that he leave the house daily at his usual early hour. It had to look as if he was off to work. Gilbert, she insisted, had to spend the day in the Central Library going through the adverts and making job applications. This did lead to success in finding a new post and my father must have been happy to go along with it. But it was surely also motivated by my mother’s desire that the neighbours think he was still in work.
Even maintaining appearances within the house was absolutely paramount. Another incident is almost symbolic of her attitude to that. It has always stuck in my mind because of the classic remark it produced from my mother. Returning home after some sort of youthful accident – I forget what, a fall off my bike or something similar – I came into the kitchenette as usual through the back door. I was displaying an impressive collection of weeping grazes plus several dripping gashes to my legs. I got no further than the doorstep as Bea’s never-to-be-forgotten words stopped me in my tracks.
‘Don’t bleed on the lino!’ she cried out, hustling me out into the garden to be patched up. Appearances – this time of the precious kitchenette linoleum – winning out again.
Propriety and that old ‘what would the neighbours think’ attitude were all wrapped up with this. I don’t know how common in other Morningside households were the strange quirks I noticed in my mother. I had to guard myself against laughing at her attitudes on occasion for fear of hurting her unnecessarily. Some of her notions were just too ludicrous to be taken seriously. Things like her insistence on keeping the curtains partially drawn at either side of the windows since she insisted that, if her curtains weren’t visible from the outside, people would think that she didn’t actually have any; she preferred a dimmer room to being considered lacking in curtains. Things like her keeping an old unmatched teacup, which was reserved for any workmen doing jobs in the house, but was never used by any of the family or by guests. Bemused by this segregation of crockery, I cheekily tried moving the cup in the hopes that she’d have to use one of the day-to-day cups for the window cleaner or the gardener. But, as this poem shows, I didn’t get away with that.
The Working Class Cup
This is the working class cup. She takes it
from the cupboard where it rests, a lonely
afterthought upon the shelf, its only neighbours
anything she can not quite fit in space elsewhere.
I stand and stare. Can it be true that she has kept
this cup solely for tradesmen, as she says?
I cruelly taunt her with accusatory remarks but
can not dissuade her, cannot turn my wit,
show her this absurdity’s completely out of date.
I hide the cup discreetly in a box, in hopes that
she’ll forget it over time. Some chance. It knows
its place. Next visit, on the bottom shelf, replaced.
* * *
Lurking in the background, behind my mother’s desperation to keep up appearances, was her own secret. A secret I believe my father was not aware of. Were the facts of Gilbert’s earlier life to come out, Bea would have been worried that one revelation could lead to another. It is possible she believed that her own secret, in some coincidentally symmetrical way, would then come out as well. I’m inclined to think she would have felt humiliated if my father had decided to be open about his past. But I am certain that she’d have been distraught had her own secret been revealed. Rarely can the Gordian Knot of deception and counter-deception have been so tightly or painfully tied.
Because of this, I am relieved that Maria made contact with the family only after my mother’s death. If Bea’s illegitimate daughter had got in touch with her, especially if that had happened during the period of ill health towards the end of her life, I think the shock could have resulted in a severe mental breakdown, or even hastened her death. We are fortunate that contact was never made at that time. And, despite all I have said about secrets, my mother is fortunate she never had to face hers in public.
But there was another prospect. Suppose Maria had made contact while my father was still alive? By 1971 she would have been thirty. She might have been longing to know about her birth mother, as many people do at these milestone birthdays. So this could have happened. Would my mother have confessed all, revealed her secret to my father? It would have made her own stance on Catrina seem hypocritical, so I don’t see it as likely. Any letter from Maria would have gone straight into the bin – almost certainly unanswered. If she had risked replying at all, I feel sure she would have instructed Maria never to make contact again.
Such outcomes have happened in similar cases. By no means all birth parents welcome contact out of the blue with a ‘lost’ offspring. This often depends on the parent’s attitude to the child at birth. Should the baby be one that was given up reluctantly, the potential for a loving relationship, even many years later, is still there. However, returning to Jane Robinson’s study, the author is unable to give a single example from her research of ‘an aggrieved mother forgiving her child for being born.’ This sounds not entirely different from Bea’s rejection of both child and father at the time of Maria’s birth. ‘If a birth-parent was resentful at the time of the child’s birth’, Robinson explains, that attitude is unlikely to alter in any way.
This is my mother’s situation, I feel. The rejection of all men – all marriage, even – which Cousin Lil reports, together with the unfortunate circumstances of the conception she suspects, would seem to support that. It is probable that my mother would have rejected out of hand any approach from Maria. In effect, had Bea been alive when contact was made, the situation would have been worse for her ‘long-lost’ daughter. Put simply, she’d have stayed ‘lost’. She would never have had even the consolation of learning from her half-brother about her birth mother’s life. Nor would she have been able to engage in the albeit brief correspondence with that same half-brother, nor receive the photographs she requested.
I may be completely wrong on all of this. Maria’s appearance when my mother was still strong and fit could have been beneficial. It is conceivable that Bea might – just might – have welcomed her as the daughter she always said she’d wanted. That she might have seen this as an opportunity to unburden herself of a secret of half a century’s duration; that she would have felt, as Cousin Lil had, some relief at that. But I doubt it. The facts of Bea’s behaviour at Maria’s birth and her comments to Lil at the time, coupled with the fact that she’d never breathed a word about her daughter to either of her sons, seem to prove that.
* * *
The consequence of this whole construct – this tangle of deception spun around our lives – seems to me to be no more than an accumulation of loss.
True, Catrina has gained. She has two brothers who are happy to have her in the family and who get on well with her even if, in a strange echo of the extended families on both our parents’ sides, distance means we don’t see her that often. She has one brother who shares many of her cultural interests. She has another who has a large and growing family to whom she is an aunt and a great-aunt. Plus, of course, she was able to spend time with her father in the last ten years of his life.
But Catrina has not gained anything approaching what she might have expected when she made her Atlantic voyage in 1969. She was not welcomed into a family. She was not received as a ‘long-lost’ daughter, except in secret. She did not become a valued and loved member of her father’s social unit. These were high amongst her hopes as she moved back to Britain. And they are all hopes she has lost.
Perhaps Maria too has gained – to an extent. But exceedingly little, by comparison. What frustration and sadness she must have felt discovering that her mother had died only months before she decided to seek her out. She may even blame herself for the delay. Her failure to act in time may well be the underlying reason for her breaking off contact with her half-brothers. She is not to know what I consider would have been the outcome of contact with Bea being made during her lifetime, but that cannot reduce her sadness. Any hopes she had, she has lost too.
Loss, then, is the principal outcome of these deceptions. While popular TV portrayals of such ‘long-lost’ family reunions almost always stress the happy outcomes, I wonder what other dire results are deleted or edited out, never even getting as far as the viewing public. Could there be a whole world of counter-deceptions out there? It seems more than likely. The ‘touchy-feely’ telly programme approach will always go for the happy outcome – parents weeping with joy at being reunited with a child once lost; siblings separated at birth jumping into each other’s arms; adopted children warmly embracing a mother forced to abandon them at birth. Without that, the programmes wouldn’t be such reassuring viewing – we have to believe in the happy ending, to believe that wrongs can be righted. But for every one of those, there must be similar numbers of cases where, for the ‘found’ individual, the focus is still on the abandonment, on the giving up, on ‘it would wreck my marriage to admit to this’ or ‘I have my own life to lead now’ attitudes – cases where there is to be no healing of ancient wounds, no re-evaluation of the loss.
So, in this case, what exactly has been lost? Maria has lost a birth mother and, through our correspondence lapsing, any contact with her two siblings and one sibling’s extended family. Catrina has lost a father in very difficult circumstances. She has also lost the welcome into my parents’ family she hoped for, even expected.
But what of the older generation? Through my mother’s secret, my grandmother lost the ability to share all of her worries with her husband. Mum’s sister, my own aunt, lost the opportunity to be fully open with her brothers. And at least four of my mother’s other relatives lost the peace of mind being able to share such secrets would have afforded them. Although I admit they may not all have seen it like that, duty and propriety being stronger impulses in the past.
My brother and I have lost the secure notion of the nuclear family we were brought up to. We have lost the self-containment and self-belief that family embodied. But, more disquieting still, we have essentially lost our father and our mother – or at least the honest face our father and mother presented to us – more particularly, of course, in Mum’s case. While neither of them were directly dishonest, the smokescreen they erected has had the effect of proclaiming them so. Neither has turned out to be the person we believed they were – the individual we were led to believe each of them to be.
These twin deceptions, and the labyrinth of secrets, deceits and omissions that have grown up around them, have resulted ultimately in loss – almost entirely in loss.