Thread: Finding Fathers; Dangerous world

Delighted you have carried on with your story and I await eagerly the next installment

Love Mini xxx

This man in a small airless office in Bradford might be my father.
It’s an ordinary estate agent. Photos of houses filling the window. Each representing someone’s ending, someone else’s new beginning.
I picture my Mum here in the seventies. Tapping away at an Olivetti typewriter, filling pads with her Pitman shorthand.
Maybe she drove to work each day in Josephine, the battered yellow Mini she and me and my brother would encourage up hills when we strapped in twin car seats in the back; “Come on Josephine!”.
Maybe she imagined moving into one of the houses in the window. One with a drive and a garden and a bedroom each for us and a master bedroom with double wardrobes for her and-

-I test John W’s name out in my head again. I didn’t plan what to say. I think you don’t have to plan if you’re being honest. What comes out, as I sit, demurely, crossed ankles on the swivel chair, is that my Mum worked here around the time I was born, I’m trying to track down my father. Does he know where my mother was working in September 1974?

I say honesty. But I was still working with the version of it my family lived by. Honesty expunged of all feeling and quite a lot of fact. The big, unspoken question, so buried I didn’t even have to ask it in my head while I spoke to him and my pulse rate didn’t betray it by speeding up; Are you my father?

It’s okay. The white haired man with the grey suit and posh-Yorkshire accent quickly answers the unasked. My mother wasn’t pregnant when she worked there. She left in 1972 or 1973, to work for a textile agent. But it’s odd that I’ve turned up he says. Just a couple of weeks earlier the man my mother used to be engaged to came into the shop with a house to sell. He hadn’t seen him for seventeen years and then, just before Jennifer’s daughter turns up out of the blue, there’s her former fiancée too.

I loved coincidences then. They connected things together in a world where everything seemed to have got too easily disconnected. It felt like the universe or fate or something was smiling on me. I wondered if it was strange for John W though. Was it painful to see an old rival, remembering what the letter had said about him being “mad about her” too? It’s weird how I wanted these men to still have feelings for my Mum. Didn’t want to see her as an abandoned woman. . I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I hoped he’d lower his voice and look off into the far distance wistfully saying “Did she ever…mention me?”. This bloke didn’t look remotely traumatised by the resurrection of this supposed old rivalry though. Matter of factly he said he had got my Mum’s ex-fiancee’s number. Yes, it was fine to give it to me (these were the days before the Data Protection Act). He wrote it down on the back of one of his own business cards.
Neil M-.
The names of two potential fathers (now reduced to one) on one piece of white card.
He wished me good luck as I left. Through the same door my mother must have done for the last time seventeen years earlier. Both of us heading to an uncertain future…

Bless you, Kate. I'm there with you, every step of the way!

Are you ready yet to continue?

Your audience awaits when it's ok for you to do so.


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Ooooh Kate, i have goose bumps, you write wonderfully hope it helps you to write it down !
love julie XXX

Fascinating story Kate, can't wait for more! Poor you though! Hugs!

((Kate))

Bluddy hell, I feel at a loss for the right thing to say...

You're one hell of a woman

Kitty xx

Thanks all. Feeling glad I've started this again.

***

Memories are unreliable. Floating images, movies scenes, snatches of conversation, other people's memories, our memories of their memories, our memories of our own memories...

So far this story is accurate as I can make it. But I've just had to go back to the summer of 1992. Not the summer of 1992 I hold in my head, which consists of lots of pictures of a brown carpeted room with a single bed, the walk across an old mill field to school, dog eared settees in the sixth form common room. Not that 1992. But the one in documents I keep in carrier bags. Which I think are the first thing I'd rescue from my flat if there was a fire. These coffee cup stained papers and letters and small notebook diaries sometimes feel like the only real evidence of that time. Thank goodness, I sometimes think, it wasn't all happening now, when texts and emails would have seen that section of my confusing history vanish into cyberspace.

So-
something tangible;

My hardbound A5 black notebook with red corners. Labelled "Journal K.E.H" on the front in blue biro. I sometimes read writer's diaries and gasp at their breadth and depth. But the seventeen year old me gave the barest of details and rarely gave much clue about what she was actually feeling (if anything). But, tracking back the beginning of the father story I found, buried amongst irrelevant details that I seemed to give equal weight to, the forgotten beginning of the search.

"21st April

...At school the Bean Party won the election and in the big world the Tories surprisingly achieved a 21 seat majority. Met a real live poet Peter Sansome at a library reading and been to Meadowhall. It's the Easter hols and I've had a palmreading party at Denise's (seven people) and shopped at Manorgrove. Also got my birth certificate and went to the address. Spoke to Madge who was very upset at the rift but didn't know who the father was. Have written to Mum today (!) Will she reply? The letter was semi-grovelly but probably a bit cool. Dad (My StepDad) is the schizophrenic (?) villain. I'm sure he's brainwashed her. "

Ah, you see, I'd forgotten that bit.
I'd been to the registry office in Bradford and bought a copy of my birth certificate. I already knew from having asked there just before I left home that there was a blank space under "Father's Name". But it was only when the beige and red sheet of A4 with careful black ink copying was in my hands that I saw my mother's profession was given as "secretary to a textile agent" and there was an address in a suburb of Leeds that I recognised as the one I'd lived in until being three. I took advantage of the holidays and set off on the bus. Two buses it must have been. One down the hill the four miles to Bradford Interchange. Then another, a few miles into Leeds.

I don't remember the journey but if I could have I'd have sat on my usual front seat on the top deck and rested my feet on the metal bar that protruded above the seats. Maybe I'd have checked my hair by looking up into the angled round mirror which was how the bus driver could check no kids were running riot on the top deck.

I can see myself wandering round the terraced streets, hunting for memories. Hoping something would hit me with the nostalgic charge of a pine tree smell at Christmas.
I saw a small, walled park. Remembered swings, swinging higher, and higher. "Push me, no push me!"

And I can see myself sat in a cosy living room with a woman called Madge. Was it our old front room or had I asked down the street if anyone knew the woman called Jennifer who lived there with twins seventeen years earlier? The name Madge did ring a bell from all those years ago. She had one leg, deathly pale and circled with blue and yellow, laid out in front of her on a stool. It wasn't like flesh, but china. Well, that's what the toddler me remembered. When the teenage me asked her if she'd ever had a broken leg, she said no. That's the one detail I remember of our meeting. Did she have a broken leg and just forget? Did chilblains or strange tights look like a broken leg to a two year old?

I wrote none of this at the time. Just;

" 1st May.

Yesterday the letter from Val came. My Dad seems to be one of two people-John W or Neil. I'm on the trail and I never thought I would be. I feel slightly numbed though. But this week I had had a funny feeling something would happen."


Then I added nothing until;

"June 17th

Spent my birthday at Jean's (A schoolfriend's mum). It was okay though she got news that Cliff was moving to Wakefield which put her off balance. I wrote to Jackie (the Godmother I mentioned earlier) on June 1st because;
1) It was a new moon
2) I felt unwanted after my birthday-8 cards all in.
3) I wanted something to aim for/think about
4) I want more clues in the quest for knowledge re father."

My Godmother had answered that letter by return. Here it is in front of me now, typed not word processed. The paragraph about my father still the one that stands out;

"I can understand that you want to find your natural father Kate, but not so sure if it is a good idea. I cannot help you as I do not know his surname. Your mum and natural dad parted when she was carrying you. He provided for you and your brother until your mum met your dad and married him. He adopted you both and was so very good to you. I thought they had told you and your brother about it. I think as time went on they just kept putting it off.

If your natural father has chosen to keep out of the scene I think you will have to respect that decision. From the little I know (I never actually met him though saw your mum frequently) he is a very nice person and would not have deliberately chosen to abandon you. It was just the circumstances."

My Godmother continued to be a voice of good sense, breezy middle class normality and eventually bafflement as she realised that things were seriously amiss in my mother, her former best friend's family. A few weeks later she wrote begging me to think about coming to live with her family as she thought I shouldn't be on my own;

" Told your mum I spoke you you. I don't think she seemed keen on a reconciliation and has a strange view about you going to university, I really can't think why she doesn't understand what a wonderful opportunity it is...

Hope you're enjoying your studies and are able to start putting the past behind you. It's such a shame everything developed as it did and I hope it hasn't affected you too badly. Its been especially hard for you to face these things on your own. However, you seem to have some good friends."

She was lovely and she meant well. She meant more than well. But "putting the past behind me" felt like a suggestion to put a plaster on a severed leg. All my attachments were in the past, and fractured, confused and unresolved. I couldn't see a future without the past and I still had no idea what half of the past meant, or where it was.

Summer passes and my diary mentions voluntary work doing storytelling sessions in libraries for kids, an audition for "Blockbusters" (the TV show, not the video shop), thinking about universities, a trip to stay with my Godmother and having "occasional spells of depression/loneliness but lots of positivity". Hmm. I've heeded my Godmother's words about respecting my father's wishes not to be on the scene. My visit to the estate agent wasn't in the summer after all, it wasn't until the autumn. Little did I know, as the days passed, that time was short.

But the diary also says I resolved that August not to spend so much time at Jean's house because I didn't want to "cut in on another family". This was a reference to the friend's family I'd stayed with for the six months immediately after leaving home. They didn't have space for me really, and I was desperate not to depend on anybody again, so had moved out into my bedsit and carried on at the same school doing A-levels. The feeling of not belonging had started in my own family, and just seemed self-perpetuating. So I was dragging my heels in finding my father. Driven by a need to belong somewhere, hindered by the fear of not belonging...

You write so vividly. I can see everything... you paint pictures with your words...

Kate.. words really cannot explain how much this thread touches me. I'm with you every step of the way and only wish that I could have been when you were going through it.

You are an amazing person and i just want to send you massive hugs as I'm sure this is bringing up a lot of emotions for you.

lots of love and hugs to ya darling

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It means alot to have you say that- thank you Mini and Gen.
People being with me in the writing is oddly comforting. Though I'm able to do it now because I'm feeling nourished and nurtured in a way the poor seventeen year old me just couldn't have. Feel like I need to have a section about my Stepfather before I can move onto the next step of the search for my father.

*************

I am four, I am on the spinning teacups ride at Disneyland. The sun is a yellow bulb, illuminating everything into even brighter primary colours. The sky is electric blue. My brother, with his curly blonde hair, and me with my straight, brown bob are screaming with laughter as we hold onto the wheel in the middle of the teacup. Daddy spins the wheel faster and faster with his strong, brown, hairy arms and we whirl faster than anyone else’s teacup, warm and laughing in the California heat, sliding on the shiny plastic seats and leaning into each other as we spin. Later we’ll have icecream in sugar cones and burgers without the gherkins and Daddy’ll take polaroids of us wearing black mickey mouse ears and being cuddled by Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and we’ll take it in turns to have piggy backs on the way back to the car when our feet can’t carry us anymore as day turns to dusk and the windows of Sleeping Beauty’s castle glow orange in the darkness behind us as we step through the turnstiles back into the real world.

In Disneyland everyone is a child and characters from books come to life and Walt Disney asks you to leave Today behind.

In September 1992 I was about to set off on the Quest for my Real Father. In this fairytale, I was first going to have to have my final encounter with my Evil Stepfather before I could go any further on the quest. My conscious mind might have tried to deride this version by smugly saying that I didn’t believe in turning people into fairytale baddies. Meanwhile my subconscious had no such compunction and regularly turned him into a madman out to murder me or bury me alive or set poisonous snakes on me in nightmares that saw me wake up with a racing heart.

How does a man who was the Best Daddy on the Spinning Teacups become the Evil Stepfather? How does a boy who got teased as Billy Bunter at school for being fat and wearing thick, black glasses become the Lord Mayor’s n’er do well alcoholic son? Then how does he marry his father’s young, blonde secretary, become an instant Dad to toddler twins, join Alcoholics Anonymous and take over the family business?

My Stepfather was a man who knew the power of magical transformations. In every fairytale and in the life of every magical transformer, you don’t usually have to look far before a lost parent turns up somewhere. Or rather doesn’t turn up but disappears. The photo of the Mother he lost when he was twelve, looked down from his office wall. Angelic faced in black and white, lost and leaving him to the loneliness of being called Billy Bunter and failing to live up to his father’s expectations.

Maybe he thought he could rewrite the ending of his own fairytale when he begged and cajoled and threatened his temperamental young wife into being the star of his home movies and playing out his worst fears on tape. When he pressed “Stop”, she chose him again, and again. The coach never had to turn back into a pumpkin and Sleeping Beauty was never going to wake up.

You can’t have two heroines in a fairytale though. As is so often the case, when a Stepdaughter reaches those awkward adolescent years, it would be easier for everybody if she just stayed a child. I was not going to be subject to my Stepfather’s remote control, and no matter how much he pressed “Rewind”, things could never go back to where they were before I grew up, before I knew he wasn’t my biological father, before I knew he made my mother sleep with other men and before the lies he told about me after I left home to anyone who would listen.

I can hear my anger underneath those words. Sometimes I wish I could feel it more. In 1992 it was easier, and maybe safer, to feel sorry for him. I could still see him and me on the spinning tea cups, him on his own, lost mother, being teased at school, me on my own, lost mother, in a bedsit. The magical spell that abusers can weave so they’re not on their own anymore; making somebody else feel what they felt.

“8th September

So much for “all’s well”. Coming out of Sourheads I saw “Dad”. I was going to ignore him but he said hello. We than had nearly an hour’s worth of conversation/row. He said like a stuck record “You won’t be sorry until you’ve reached your lowest”. This is an excuse because surely I can’t get any lower. At times he was convincing and I can understand why Jackie is okay with him-he was unreasonable but restrained. He kept calling me evil and wouldn’t admit I had any justification to do what I did. As we left the cemetary a man was concerned enough to ask if I was okay as he’d heard a commotion. He said confidently he was my Dad and we were having a serious discussion. He said he’d “get” Jim (the man I left home with) who may be in Austria. I found it hard to be overtly disbelieving of things he said. I went to Jean at the chemist after and then spent the evening with her.”

“26th September

New moon in Libra today indicates secrets or past re occurring. Saw Dad in the Co-op today. I was in the queue. He walked right past and said expressionlessly as if I was an acquaintance, “Hello Kate, alright?”. I said “Oh hello” and felt panicked. Helen (my younger sister) was outside with Cocoa and I said hello. It was foggy luckily so I don't think she saw exactly which door I went into ”

I can hear my confusion in those diary entries. My difficulty in smashing the glass that seemed to separate his reality from mine. I threatened the fantasy of a stable family life he had built up and he wasn’t going to let anything or anyone destroy that. His fear, and his fantasy world made him terrifying to me and it seems strangely apt that we went our separate ways into the fog after a last meeting in which we acted like strangers.

Above my desk I have a framed photo of the plaque at the entrance to Disneyland where I went again last year with my sister and her young family. The first time in over twenty years. The thrill of the invitation to escape as I said a fervent and obedient “Yes, I will” in my head to Walt Disney’s instruction; “Here You Leave Today And Enter The World Of Yesterday, Tomorrow and Fantasy” was as powerful as it had been when I was four. Somewhere in another world, I'm still whirling in the spinning teacups, safe from everything that can happen when you grow up.

Fifteen years ago I was on the verge of rewriting my own story…

Loving your work hun... hope this isn't too painful for you... you are right in doing it in installments.

We are all behind you one hundred per cent

sending you lots of hugs and love

Gen xxxxxxxx

Bless you, hun xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks lasses. It's not painful at the mo. More, illuminating and a weird sort of relief.

*********

The power of October 1st...

Rewriting my own story?

Discovering it maybe. Digressions, digressions. What happened next?

I am torn, because I have October 1st 1991 to talk about and October 1st 1992. I want to move forward with the narrative- I'm on the verge of actually finding something out about my real father in 1992. What is my Mum's ex-fiancee going to say to me when I ring him? But as ever for me, I have to go back before I can go forward.

I woke up in my bedsit, probably put a pound coin in the electricity meter that ticked round slowly on the wall next to my bed, got the bottle of milk that was just about cold on the windowsill and poured some into a bowl of Coco Pops. I was trying to be in the moment, in the present, but kept being dragged back to a year earlier, the day I left home.

It's as if I thought if I remembered hard enough I could reach through a portal in time on a day with the same name and speak to Jim, my first (unwise) love and the man I left with. "Where are you, where are you?". A year earlier, after I'd stepped off my flight from Leeds then through passport control at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris he had given me the briefest of hugs and we'd started walking quickly; the steel and glass atrium of the terminal building arching above us. "Let's get out of here", he'd said, looking uneasy. "I've only been in here half an hour and I've seen three people I know already".

The story of the ten days between the "Interpol Hunt Missing Girl" headline in the local papers and the "Missing Girl Found" headline is, as they say, another story. Suffice to say that after those ten days, Jim rang me to say he was on the run and would get in touch. A year later I was still waiting.

What's that quote from Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest"? ; "To lose one parent is unfortunate, to lose two is careless". Well, I'd lost two father figures in a year and was looking for a third. Talk about repeating patterns...

It is even more obvious now that the desperate need to end the uncertainty of not knowing underpinned both my search for my father and my hope, back then, that I would see Jim again. In the blank under Father's Name on my birth certificate and the pause before Jim signed a false name on a German hotel register, I was looking for myself. But I was never going to find me in those gaps and nothing could fill the gap inside me that had been there so long it felt normal.

"Perhaps today will prove to be as significant as last year was" I said in my diary. I set off to school, as I had done the year before, but this time I actually arrived, rather than taking a diversion via Leeds train station and Yeadon Airport. This October 1st I had lessons in Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" and Napoleon's Empire. I chatted to the girls in the sixth form common room at lunchtime. Then when the 3.15 pm bell rang I walked up to the village, got the bus down into Bradford, found the estate agents where my mother used to work and saw John W-.

My diary adds two things to my earlier account. I recorded that John looked like Arthur Daley. And he only met my mother's fiancee again after seventeen years because he was actually standing in for someone else on an appointment and unusually, had been the one that went to the house Neil M- was selling.

After having stalled this search over the summer, I wasn't hanging about now. After leaving the Estate Agents, I went straight to a phone box in Bradford Interchange, lifted the heavy black receiver and dialled Neil M's number.

"Who are you?", he repeated. This was harder than I'd thought. He sounded suspicious and hostile. "How do I know you're Jennifer's daughter?". Then suddenly, perhaps after getting over the out of the blue-ness, he changed his tone and spoke directly but kindly. Like John W, he didn't sound in the least bit emotional about his relationship with my Mum. I told him what my Godmother had said about my father. A married man. Partly braced in case Neil suddenly confessed to paternity, I was relieved and amazed when he said that he had met my father, when he was my mother's boss, at a party at his house. He was tall and balding. Had a wife, who was "a bit officious" and two children. He said the office was up a certain street in Bradford, that he couldn't remember my father's name but would probably know it if he heard it and that I should ring back when I had some possible ones.

I was astonished. This sudden flood of information, after what had seemed like the impossibility of finding anything out. Even a description of my Dad. Okay "tall and balding" wasn't alot to go on, but it gave me a clearer image in my head. He was really real, an actual person.

Back at my bedsit, I found the list of textile agents I had photocopied from an old copy of the Yellow Pages in the central library a few weeks earlier. There'd been eleven textile agents listed in Bradford the year before I was born. Sure enough, one of them was on the street Neil M- had mentioned. Oddly, another coincidence, I had actually circled that one in red pen already. Its name had the same initials as me and my brother "K and R". I realised that the night before, on my way home from rehearsals for the pantomime I was in, I would have walked past the building where my Mum and father used to work.

It's the ultimate office cliche isn't it? The boss and the secretary. There's even something particularly seventies about it, the stuff of sitcoms and comedy sketches "Anything you'd like me to take down for you sir?, nudge, nudge, wink, wink". But somehow being able to imagine the place where they worked made it, again, more real. Also, because I had had a secret relationship that ended in disaster the year before, I thought I knew how they must have felt. The arenaline high of an illicit relationship, the anguish of not being able to be together. Neil's description of the wife as "officious" fed my wish to believe that they weren't doing anything wrong. I was constructing my own romantic fantasy of their "tragic love" based on the few details I had and a big dollop of projections from my own experience with Jim. I was giving into the inevitable temptation of rewriting the story of how I came to exist.

Despite all that romanticism, I had a logical head too, and knew that I would need to find out more about the textile agents, in order to find my father. The threads of my origins were being woven together. A pattern was emerging slowly.

The next day I was back to Bradford Central Library. I loved that place. A sixties concrete monstrosity on the outside, inside calm and space and clean tile floors and rows and rows of books that, like anniversaries, were portals to other worlds. No entry for the company in this year's Yellow Pages. Nor the year before, or the year before, but it had still been there until 1989. A librarian said that to get more information I'd have to send off to companies house for their records on microfiche. I filled in a form and went back to the phone box to ring Neil M. Yes, it was the company I was looking at he said, definitely. He didn't think my father was either of the names in the company though, but he definitely had been one of the directors. There was no edge to his friendly voice at all, it felt like he was happy to help me on this quest if he could.

I felt like a private detective.
This gathering of the information together piece by piece was exciting and also somehow reassuring. If I could find the answer to the question Who Is My Father? I felt like the answers to any question could be extracted, sequenced, logically assembled and revealed. Nothing could be hidden really if you were persistent enough. So I still had a family full of secrets and no idea where Jim was? Maybe I could solve that too.

Gaps to fill, puzzles to solve and all the while still failing to get very near the key mystery we all have to face. Who the heck was I?

Darling - you really do have to get this published when it's completed.
xxxxxxxxxxx

If someone would that would be great-
I'm not sure if they would though- and I'd need all my courage to publish the whole story after keeping quiet for so long. That's why blogging it here is a great way in

Thanks for saying so though

xxx