Thread: Finding Fathers; Dangerous world

I totally agree Kate you should defo look at getting it published... its fascinating!!

Glad you are feeling good whilst writing it!!

Luv

*********

The quest continues...

Sometimes it hurts to look back at the seventeen year old me, sometimes I laugh, sometimes I think "You daft cow!".

At this point in the diary I hinted at something that was taking up alot of my mental space. My english teacher had always been an inspiring presence. Not the getting people to leap on desks-type like Robin Williams in "Dead Poets Society", just quietly suggesting books I might like and going along with my mad scheme to start a school magazine (mainly because I wanted to get out of having to spend breaks outside in the cold). When I went back to school the week after leaving home, while conversations stopped in corridors when I walked past, he just joked about how I'd made the front page of the local paper. Without fuss he gave me a lift to the first meeting of a new youth drama group and laughed at the irony as the Del Shannon song "Runaway" came on the radio as I got in the car.

"His presence is a comfort" I told my diary on 7th October. Of course, I had a huge crush on him, but my fantasies mainly involved me rescuing him from various unlikely situations like him breaking down in the middle of nowhere, and me happening past. Yes, some people imagine stockings and suspenders, I just fantasised myself as a glorified version of the RAC. I think I knew it then really, and I certainly know it now, that more than anything he represented the consistent, kind (without being too "in my face") and accepting father figure I was yearning for. And actively looking for...

I kept going back to the library to check if they'd got the microfiches in, and just before the October half term, they finally had.

I slid the black rectangles of plastic under the glass and switched on the reader. The warm light hummed. At first none of it made sense. Just pages of figures and official company speak. I scanned through, looking for anything in 1973, 74 or 75. These records went back right to the fifties and the company seemed to have changed hands several times. I wrote down some names on the back of the brown envelope the records had come in. Scrawling them messily in my rush. I was drawn by one name particularly- a John Broadley. For some reason that sounded right. I could hear that as my father. I double underlined it. He was a director right through from the sixties.

It would be poetic wouldn't it, if that was his name? If I just knew. But, without knowing it, I have also already written my father's name down in smaller letters. He was a director through the seventies as well. For some reason "Norman" sounded too unfamiliar.

I rang Neil M- twice more. The first time I run through all the names I've written down and wasn't sure either he said. Their addresses would help. He knew the house he visited was somewhere in Eccleshill. The second time, he said "Yes, definitely, that's him". Norman Reynard.
Back in my bedsit I looked at the name on the envelope. I've never known anyone called Norman. Well, Norman Wisdom. Can't even picture him really. I know that "Reynard" is near the French for fox though- renard. I like that.

So. What next? The search was driving me on without me having to think about it. Step by step. I had a name and his address through the 1970s, but the company has no records that mentioned him after then. It was back to the library the next day after school and on to the electoral roll. It's funny to think I could have had his number nowadays with a couple of clicks on "192.com". But there I was, poring over big books of addresses and microfilm. I'm glad in a way though. It felt almost physical, like I was actually doing something real to find him

The last time Norman featured in the electoral roll at the address I had was 1980. But, I noticed that in the 1992 electoral roll, one of the next door neighbours who had been there in the seventies, was still there now.

Back to the phone box. I was used now to resting a pen and paper on the little black shelf while I cradled the receiver between my ear and my shoulder. And used to the distinctive phonebox smell that was half metallic, half wee. And to feeding enough coins in so that you wouldn't hear the beeps. The way my heart speeded up as the last 10 p counted down number by number. I found it quite a safe place though, a little box where you can see out at the world going by around you, secure behind the glass squares. The directory enquiries woman gave me my father's former next door neighbour's number. I stared at the digits underneath his name. Jack Hartley. I imagined some sort of down to earth Yorkshire war veteran. I knew I would need a plausible story for this one. The truth probably wasn't going to be too helpful if he'd known what was going on for his neighbour in the mid seventies.

"If you're going to lie, keep it as close to the truth as possible"; Jim's words echoed in my head.

"I'm er...tracing Norman Reynard's family tree and I wonder if you'd any idea where he moved to after he left your street?" I said to the gravel voiced old man who answered the phone, sounding unconvincing, even to myself.
"I don't know and anyway I can't give information like that out", he said sounding slightly angry.
"But I'm just wanting information about this branch of my family" I said, "I'm sure he wouldn't mind". I slipped unconsciously into a slightly posher voice in the hope of sounding authoritative.
"Absolutely not" he rapped and promptly put the phone down.
"But-"
Oh. My stomach dropped. I felt reprimanded and guilty. Like I'd been caught out doing something wrong.

Jack Hartley spoke directly to the voice in my head that said "you have no right to do this, who are you to know, digging into things that are none of your business?".

My flurry of searching ground to a halt. It would take me another three or four weeks to overpower those voices and get back to the quest. All the while wondering if my father was still in Bradford, if he was even still alive. The next enquiry was going to yield fruit surprisingly easily. Next time I would get my father's address and telephone number. If I'd known that would I have carried on straight away? Was I scared of finding him or scared of not finding him? Probably, as so often with questions like that, the answer was, a bit of both...

So, back to the phone box again.

Time has moved on. It's November 17th now. Bradford was doing alternating grey days and drizzly days and grey and drizzly days in the way that Bradford can do so well.

I have the phone number and name of the current managing director of the company my father had worked for. As I dial I imagine him reclining in some sort of office chair, filing cabinets half open under the desk, in-trays piled with papers. He answers the phone, sounds relaxed, easy going, not like the brittle suspiciousness of Jack Hartley.

"You're looking for Norman Reynard? Yes, I've got his address. Spoke to him the other day actually"

He is alive. He spoke to the man I'm speaking to now. And as I take the address down, it turns out that he still lives on the other side of Bradford, just seven miles or so away from me.

That evening I take the address to my friend Jean's house. I went there most Tuesday nights. Liked the easy familiarity of how I would make the coffees for us in the white kitchen of the small semi. Two Sweetex for her, one for me, always carrying my mug on the left into the living room. She was divorced and still bruised by the break up. Her husband had left her for another woman two years earlier and she still sometimes spent Saturdays in bed. We were both still trying to work out our pasts and would circle round and round the same topics again and again. Her husband. Jim. My family. We'd approach them from different angles as if we were hoping for a different conclusion. We listened to each others circles, more patient than other people who would have wanted us to move on, to spiral on from what we couldn't come to terms with. I went to school with her daughter who was glad her Mum now had someone to circle with.

Jean was pleased I finally had an address for my father and we sipped coffee as I wrote a letter to him, reading out sentences as I went along. She suggested that I could get him to ring her house since I didn't have a phone. We also concluded that I should put a deadline in the letter for him to contact me so I wouldn't have to wait forever, poised in case he did. Both me and Jean knew the tension of hoping for an outcome that depended on a man making contact.

I read the letter now and I think it's the strange work of someone who wasn't used to including feelings in communication. Who was being careful. Who was trying hard not to seem needy, not to ask anything at all. Scattergunning through relevant facts, without filling in too many details. Hoping he might fill some in himself.

I remember the dilemma of how to start the letter.
Dear Norman? It felt like that I couldn't call my father by his first name. (and also that I didn't want to). But Dear Dad was obviously far too presumptuous. I solved it by not addressing it at all. The letter just goes straight in. My neatest handwriting in black pen on a sheet of lined notepaper.

I do hope this letter is not too much of a shock. I don't want to cause you any distress.
I am Jennifer G-'s daughter and believe that you may be my father.
I am contacting you entirely on my own. The rest of my family have no knowledge of what I am doing.
I found out that I was adopted only a year ago and would appreciate a chance to get to know you. I realise that this may put you in a difficult position because of your family commitments.
A friend has agreed to let me use her telephone number so that you can contact me if this is what you decide to do.
Ask for Jean on 814569
If you wish to contact me at all, telephone the above number by Monday 30th November and leave a message.
If you haven't phoned by then I will assume that you would prefer not to make contact and I will understand
Yours,
Kate

OMG hun!!!

lol re the phone boxes!
awww re Jean!
oooh er re the letter and the deadline......

Enthralling stuff, lady!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Goose Bumps................

Can't wait for the next installment xxxx

Dear Kate

This is so enthralling. I really hope this is not hurting you to write all this down.

I so hope you have the courage to look for a publisher.... I devour books and this thread is causing me such a dilemma... I REALLY want to read the next instalment... but SO don't want to reach the end - hope that makes sense!

Can't you tell I don't have your way with words

Hi Kate,
This is a must to be published i know myself i would not be able to put this down until the end, i am on tenterhooks ....

Wonderful writing cant wait to hear more .

Love Julie XXX

Bless , thanks all.
(and Helen G- I suppose the good thing is that unlike a book, there's no end to this cos I've not written it yet if you see what I mean!). In the midst of a big school arts project so won't get to update til tomorrow night, poss Friday night at the latest. Thanks for reading. xxx

The same dilemma as addressing the letter. How to end it?
"Yours sincerely or faithfully" would have felt too formal and "love" didn't feel possible yet, writing to this stranger. The "Yours" wasn't completely unconscious. As I wrote it I was aware of the double meaning. I was his. I was saying that I belonged to Norman Reynard. But he had let me go once in circumstances I still didn't really know about. Was there any chance he would want to change his mind seventeen years on?

I posted the letter on my way to school the next morning. Holding the white envelope poised half in, half out of the red pillar box slot for a few seconds before letting it drop. I remember sitting in the dinner hall that lunchtime. Cutlery clattering all around me, kids voices rising and falling in the school hall. This was normality now, this was safe. But I knew sending the letter meant that I was back in the world of the unexpected, where my fate depended on the unpredictable actions of others. Potential chaos. I was used to that, after the upheaval of leaving home. It was exhilarating, but also didn't feel quite real.

Somewhere in an alternate universe, another Kate was carrying on her life before the summer of 1991 when everything crashed. Her parents weren't swingers who blackmailed sex partners, her Dad was her Dad, she hadn't left home with a 46 year old gun runner, she hadn't been arrested after ten days and lived in a bedsit on her own since March.

Because none of these things were thinkable or possible, my brain hadn't fully processed them.

It was going to take a long time to bring together the Kate of "Before" and the Kate of "After", so I often felt like I was viewing the world from behind a glass screen. Finding my father was the latest surreal episode in the strange dream my life had become. No wonder that Salvador Dali poster "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus" felt like the right one to have on my wall. The rest of Dali's poem;

When that head slits
when that head splits
when that head bursts,
it will be the flower,
the new Narcissus,

The next morning as I woke up in my freezing bedsit I looked at the time on my clock radio. 7.30. Would he be opening the letter yet? Was it sitting on his mat? Would his wife see the letter? How would he hide it from her?
I hardly considered the possibility that he would tell his wife. I saw it as something he would keep secret. I now had more faith than I wanted to have that people could keep huge secrets if they needed to.

I can't remember how I spent that weekend. I don't think the letter was on my mind all the time though. My brain kept coming back to it. The Letter. But I was also imagining that Norman wouldn't decide what to do straight away and just casually pick up the phone immediately.

I now know how what he was thinking in those first few days after The Letter. But that interrupts the narrative. And at this point, for once, it feels comforting to have a story that flows from A to Z. From Action to Consequence, Cause to Effect.

So. It is Tuesday. As usual I walk up through the estate of semis to Jean's house. Ring the doorbell. As usual. Jean answers the door. As usual. But looks agitated, ushers me in, says "He's ringing, in twenty minutes." "Wha-?" "Your Dad's ringing. I told him I was expecting you tonight and he's ringing back at 8.30".

My heart was thumping in my chest. Again, that strange mixture that characterised my life then of the normal and surreal. Jean saying "your Dad" made it sound so comfortable. But...

We went into the kitchen as she boiled the kettle and kept talking. A solicitor had rung first she said. "A solicitor?" I was shocked. Jean said that she'd told her a little bit about me but had insisted she wouldn't tell her any more because it was my story to tell but that I wasn't just some teenager who had run away from home on a whim. Then later, my father (there was no question now, he was my father) had rung. He sounded "nice" she said. Jean had reassured him that I didn't want anything from him apart from the chance to get to know him. She thought he was glad I'd sent that letter. She had said I would be visiting later that evening, so he had suggested that he ring then.

This was so much to take in. It felt odd that a solicitor, Jean and my Father had all been involved in this process of what sounded like negotiation. It was real. My hands were shaking as I held the coffee cup. What would I say? What if we couldn't talk to each other? What was he going to sound like?

The phone in the living room rang. Me and Jean looked at each other. She answered it. "Hello?" Smiled; "Yes, she's here. I'll put her on". I swallowed and held out my hand for the receiver.

Oh Lordy - hurry up and write the next bit, babes!!!!

I'm with you Isobel - what a cliffhanger!

I'm so gripped

Sorry to have kept the cliffhanging! Still doing school projects and brain-knackered when I get in. Also maybe finding the next bit harder to write. Onwards though...

**********

"Hello"

"Hello"

Father and daughter speaking for the first time. I am sitting on the edge of the settee. Looking at the phone handset as if he is somehow in there.

I wish I could remember the exact words. I wish I had a recording of that conversation.

Instead just fragments remain.

"This is strange isn't it?" I say at some point. "It is", he agrees matter of factly.

Down to earth, gruff, typical Yorkshireman I'm thinking. But something sharp as well. Somehow I know I can say what I'm thinking and he'll get it.

"I've waited seventeen years for you" he says. I am surprised but I believe him. Relief is spreading through me. He wanted me to get in touch. I can talk to him.

"You've got an older brother" he says. "Born exactly eleven years before you". There's a smile in his voice as he says this. Teasing almost. "What, exactly?" I say, thinking I'm misunderstanding in my love of coincidences. "Yes, May 31st is his birthday too", he says, "as if I could ever forget". It is strange. My birthday, the day that has had significance to me for seventeen years, now being spoken by him. He talks more about his son with obvious pride. Andrew, is a salesman for a paper company, travels all over the country, is married to a Policewoman.

Did I wonder in this first conversation what our birth had meant for his eleven year old son? Was it too much to take in just then?

At some point, in response to me saying something about how we were speaking as if we knew each other but we didn't know each other at all he said;

"Blood's thicker than custom". I hadn't heard the phrase before. Typical Yorkshireism it sounded like. But I knew he was cutting through the fact that we'd never met before, through seventeen years of other families and separate lives, to say that we were tied by the blood we shared. It was in those words more than any others, that I knew he thought it was right that I'd suddenly come back into his world.

"Blood's thicker than custom". Those words are in a poem that I've performed hundreds of times now on stage. The phrase is like an incantation as I remind myself over and over "You were part of him, he was part of you".

He's talking about his wife, saying that he's told her and it's brought a difficult time back up again but "there will be no more secrets".

He describes the solicitor who told him my letter didn't sound like the result of a teenage tantrum a" white witch". And he doesn't sound like a man who usually uses the words "white witch" in conversation.

"Me and my wife will come and take you out for Sunday lunch" he says, "Would that be alright?" and as if anticipating a question I probably couldn't have asked he adds "and you can call me Norman and her, Rosemary".

I say that the story of my leaving home is a long story and I'll tell him in person; "Just say what you're comfortable with" he says. "Let's get to know each other".

He says he'll ring Jean's again before the weekend to confirm times. How did we end the conversation? "Goodbye" is a fair bet. But I can imagine me choking back sentences. Opening my mouth, intaking breath, knowing "Goodbye" was hardly enough.

I do remember swallowing tears as I came off the phone. A wave of choking emotion coming up my throat, which, out of habit, I quelled straight away. Sent it back down. I still couldn't let go. "He sounds so nice" I said to Jean as she brought another coffee, and kept saying throughout the evening, shaking my head in disbelief.

"Will he like me?" the unspoken question I worried over as the countdown to meeting him began.

Thank you hun.. I really hope this is helping you ... in my mind Jean's house is on a street like the boswells in that programme Bread????? just the picture I have in my head...

take care hun xxxx

Sweetie - that has taken me back to my first telephone conversation with my father after 20 years....only your's was a lot nicer.

How lovely of your dad to emphasise your blood ties and to tell you outright that he'd been waiting for you.

Bless you, darling!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks Isobel- so sorry things weren't better with your father.
And hi Gen- I've known plenty of houses like the Boswells, and lived in some- but Jean's was more like a house on Brookside Close, if that helps the picture!

***********

I only had a one word description of Norman's wife. My Mum's ex-fiancee had met her briefly at a party and described her as "officious". I pictured a woman with severely swept back hair and twinset and pearls. A frosty businessman's wife. I wasn't looking forward to meeting her. The part of me that still somehow identified with my Mother saw her as someone on the outside of the triangle that had let to me and my brother beign born. At the same time I was glad that my father was insisting on "no more secrets". That felt right.

I wasn't expecting to speak to Rosemary before I met my father and she wasn't expecting to speak to me. But a couple of days before we were due to have our Sunday lunch, Norman rang while I was at Jean's to arrange what time to come and pick me up.

"I'm looking forward to meeting you” he’d said. Then, in a surprised tone, “Oh, Rosemary would like a word. I’m going to put her on”.

Rosemary has told me hundreds of times in the fifteen years since then, what happened. She’d been walking past his office while he was speaking to me, then, just on impulse come in and motioned to him to pass her the receiver. I didn’t know it then, but she was definitely not usually a woman of impulse. “You’re so spontaneous” she’ll say to me, “I’m too cautious”. She’d just had a sudden urge to speak to me before we met, she said.

I think in that first conversation I said something about being sorry to have brought everything back. It had been a difficult time she said. Her Yorkshire voice gentle and quavery. She didn’t sound officious at all. “I could write a book”, she said emphatically. I realised that there was still lots I didn’t know about the circumstances of my birth. All these stories which had been carrying on weaving themselves untold for years. I felt like I also knew about stories that twisted and turned and that it was difficult to tell, but needed to be heard. I still didn’t know how much of the story of my leaving home I would be able to tell in return. “It sounds unbelievable” Jean had cautioned my father when he first rang that week, “but it’s all true”.

Then there I was with Jean and her daughter Linzi in Topshop in the centre of Bradford. Saturday afternoon jostling and bustle. Teenage girls with crop tops and gelled back hair looking for sparkly outfits to go clubbing at “Maestros” or “Cloud Nine” that night. Me, in cover up denim shirt and leggings wondering what on earth you wore to meet your real Dad for the first time. “I wish I could lose two stone overnight” I said mournfully as we flicked through the rails; “too tarty”, “too small”, “too expensive”. Eventually I tried on a plain dark purple blouse and a long black skirt. Jean and Linzi nodded approvingly as I came out of the changing rooms, standing awkwardly, only half glancing at myself in the full length mirror outside the changing rooms. “That suits you” they said. I didn’t really have any smart clothes, very few clothes at all after having left home with hardly anything, kept saying “they’ll do for parties as well won’t they?” to convince myself that spending my entire weekly budget on an outfit was okay. I tugged at the buttoned up to the neck collar and cuffs feeling constrained and uncomfortable.

I was still tugging at them the next day. Pacing up and down in Jean’s kitchen. Watching the clock tick down the minutes both unbearably slowly, and too fast at the same time, until my father and Rosemary were due to come and pick me up.