A Lie About My Father (3 page)

And no one ever did find out where my father came from. He really was a nobody: a foundling, a throwaway. The lies he told were intended to conceal this fact, and they were so successful that I didn’t know, until after he died, that he’d been left on a doorstep in West Fife in the late spring of 1926, by person or persons unknown. He had gone to considerable lengths to keep this secret; in the end, I only discovered the truth by accident, when I was visiting my Aunt Margaret, seven years after we had buried him. To me it was shocking news that, as soon as I heard it, made perfect sense. For a while, I even managed to convince myself that it explained everything.

It was the first time I’d visited any of my relatives since I returned to live in Scotland in the mid-nineties. Margaret was my favourite aunt, mostly because she was so close in age and temperament to my mother. I had gone round to her house, more or less unannounced, and she had welcomed me in, a little surprised to see me, but just as hospitable as I remembered her. An hour later, I was asking if she knew anything about my dad’s adopted family, who had supposedly come from High Valleyfield, not far from where she lived. According to my father’s stories, he had been adopted by his biological uncle, a miner and lay preacher, after his real father, a small-time entrepreneur and something of a rogue, had abandoned a girl – a sometime employee in one of his shady business ventures – he had made pregnant. A slight variant was that he was the son of a moderately wealthy industrialist who had paid one of his factory girls to move away when she turned out to be in the family way. Or he was the son of a lay preacher who had strayed. Or he was the son . . .

It went on, depending on his mood and how much he’d had to drink. All that mattered was that he was
somebody’s
son. He’d had a father and a mother. For practical, or social reasons, they had given him over to the care of others, but they had at least existed. I had heard all manner of variation on these basic stories over the years, some of them patent contradictions, some elaborately styled; the only consistent details were that his foster-family, usually the Dicks, though sometimes the McGhees, had lived in High Valleyfield, that my father had had a half-sister, much older than himself, possibly by the name of Anne, and that his foster-father was a quiet, upright man, well respected in the pits, and an occasional preacher.

Aunt Margaret was confused. ‘I’m not sure I understand you, son,’ she said, looking faintly worried, when I enquired about these imaginary half-relatives.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I know my dad was adopted.’ I went on to explain what I knew about his history, including the lay-preacher detail, which made her smile grimly.

‘Oh, your father,’ she said. ‘He had some stories in him, right enough.’

‘How do you mean?’

I watched as she considered her words carefully. My aunt is a good woman, and she has always been kind to me; she is also a person of particular tact. Like my mother, she moved to Cowdenbeath when she married, and the two sisters had stayed close, supporting one another through the various trials of life until my father moved us all, suddenly, to an East Midlands steel town, in the mid-sixties. During that time, she must have seen – and guessed – much more about what went on in our house than she had ever acknowledged. Now she was an old woman, still bright of eye, still capable of lighting up with a smile whose warmth had always cheered me; but I imagine she was also tired, and perhaps a little fed up with the very mention of her brother-in-law Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was. He had brought too much pain to her favourite sister, he had embarrassed too many people she cared about, and I think she had heard a little too much nonsense over the years to let this particular deception pass. ‘Your dad wasn’t adopted,’ she said. ‘Or, not in the way you mean.’

‘No?’

‘He was a foundling child,’ she said. ‘The people who found him did take him in, but only for a little while. I don’t think they were from High Valleyfield, though.’ She fell silent, thinking back to a time just before she was born. ‘Those were hard times,’ she said. ‘It was around the time of the great strike, and people didn’t have much. From what I heard, he was passed about quite a bit. Of course, there weren’t the social services they have now.’ She studied my face, looking for a reaction, before she went on. ‘So, I wouldn’t say he was adopted. When you adopt someone, you make a choice. But nobody chose your father. He wasn’t chosen so much as – passed on.’

A foundling child
. I don’t think I had ever heard that phrase before, outside the world of fairy tales. It becomes confused with changeling, with the bewitched child left for innocents to take in, a cuckoo soul with a nature he cannot change, or even understand, marooned in the human world. I try from time to time to imagine the morning when he was found, wrapped in nothing but a blanket according to the story Aunt Margaret had heard, a thin, squalling child of the General Strike, wrapped in a blanket and left on a doorstep in a West Fife mining town. Nobody I have ever known was there to witness his abandonment, so I can imagine it as I like: as a scene from a fairy tale, perhaps, the unknown baby left at the door of some unsuspecting innocents, who take him in and try, as well as they are able, to bring him up alongside their own children, only to tire of him after a while and pass him on, first to relatives and then, as seems to have been the way of such things, to near strangers. I could imagine it wet and windy, the blanket sodden, the child crying plaintively, weak with hunger and terrified. My father wouldn’t have liked that image, which is why he put so much work into imagining alternatives, some fairly close to the truth, though never as desolate or as cruel as this abandonment must have seemed.

I could stick to that kind of grainy, wet Thursday morning realism, and I would probably be fairly close to the truth; but what I choose to imagine is a summer’s morning. It would have been sometime in late May or early June, so there is a slim chance that it was one of those days when the sun comes up warm and, in a matter of minutes, burns off the dew on the privet hedges and the little drying greens between the houses. At that hour, it would have been quiet in the coal town: the men on early shifts already gone to work; the children drowsing in their beds; women in their kitchens, boiling great bundles of linen in huge cauldrons, or kneeling at the door to polish the front step and the little bit of linoleum at the threshold. Though early June offers no guarantee of warmth in West Fife, I try to imagine a pleasant day because, in this story, the baby on the doorstep of one of those coal-town houses is my father. He is about to be discovered by one of the many foster-families he will know during his childhood, people with whom he will dwell for a few years before being passed along, in the years when the General Strike was turning into the Great Depression. He will learn the names and faces of each family in turn, and he will try to feel that he belongs to them as much as any child belongs to its given parents; then they will explain, awkwardly and with as much kindness as the occasion allows, that he is going to stay with an aunt, or a cousin, or a neighbour, someone more able to feed him, someone with fewer children of their own. He will move several times between this June morning and the day he signs up for the air force and leaves the coalfields for what he always thought of as the best years of his life, yet the houses he knows, the people, the towns, the self he feels himself to be, will not differ much from one temporary home to the next. The houses are tenements, mostly; the families working-class miners. The General Strike hit them hard, perhaps the hardest of all, and nobody had much to spare. It is possible that my father had been abandoned for some reason connected with the strike, or with the conditions that had preceded it; either way, people had other things to worry about that year. Once they had passed him on, they would soon have forgotten the sad waif in his pitiful blanket. After a while, he would be a boy: big, hungry, awkward, always underfoot. Someone they would rather keep a week as a fortnight.

Until he joined the air force, my father lived in Cowdenbeath and its environs. I don’t know what the town was like during the thirties and forties, when he was a boy, growing into a young man, but I cannot imagine it was very different from the Cowdenbeath I knew in the fifties and early sixties. The town had been known for its poverty and overcrowded housing conditions early in the century; when I lived there, things had improved, but the overall impression was of an ordinary pit town, with its slag heaps and grey streets. Opposite St Bride’s, the school I attended for six years, the pithead still stood, its wheels turning; even if, by then, the onshore mines were starting to run down. In my father’s day, everything would have been going full tilt, though the miners wouldn’t have seen much of the fruit of their labours. So I’m guessing that my father’s Cowdenbeath was nearly identical to the town where I grew up, only a little darker, a little more crowded, a little smokier. The houses he passed through, as he moved from family to family, would have been dimly lit and almost bare, but there would have been gardens and allotments where people grew essential vegetables to supplement their meagre incomes, or wartime rations. Later, no matter where he lived, my father tended a garden of sorts, but he never grew flowers. I used to think it was a masculine thing, that he thought flowers were sissy; but he probably just remembered those allotments of the Depression, the taste of fresh leeks or new potatoes dug from your own patch of ground. The most obvious sign of his collapse, later in life, was the fact that the last garden he had was overrun with weeds and volunteer bedding plants, and not a potato or a cabbage plant in sight.

It’s odd, imagining my father as a baby, or a growing boy. The first image I have of him is a wedding photograph: in it he is gawky, but proud of his air force uniform. His prominent teeth suggest that a smile was a calculation for him, a calculation he has failed to get quite right as he looks straight at the camera and gives it all he has. My mother is more natural-looking: pretty, already a little roundish, she is obviously happy. They were married on another June day, twenty-six years after my father had been abandoned and, again, it is easy to imagine a warm summer’s morning, the lilac in bloom in her father’s garden and sparrows brawling in the hedges around St Kenneth’s Church. I try to imagine bells, but all I hear is the crank of the pithead wheel across the street and someone unloading crates of soft drinks in the yard of the nearby pub. Yet here they stand, arm in arm: her waxy-looking bouquet curdling in her hands, while he adopts that smile I never saw in thirty years, boyish and awkward and marred by his buck teeth, yes, but at the same time
almost
confident, and only a hint in his eyes of what he knew was fear, before he learned to call it love. I have always been puzzled by this picture. Were these my parents? Why did they never look like this, all the time I was growing up? Most of all, did they really have not the least inkling of what was to come? On their wedding day, did they really know nothing at all about one another?

I’ve seen other weddings. Strangers in California, friends in Croydon or Devon; Mexican weddings, Russian weddings, Finnish weddings. In one of the most beautiful ceremonies I have ever seen, I’ve watched processions of couples coming from the
casa de matrimonios
in a mid-Transylvanian town, the dark-eyed Romanian girls smiling, the men solemn, as they stand for photographs in the gusts of charcoal smoke and the burnt-sugar scent from the braziers along the river bank, where local women cook little sweets called
floricele
especially for the newlyweds and their guests. Every time I see a wedding, I wonder what the bride and groom expect from it all, and why none of the others there, the old ones, the long-married, do not step up and warn them about the enterprise. I think this, because I watched my parents torture themselves and one another for twenty-odd years, before my mother finally gave up and died, from disappointment more than anything, leaving my father to sit alone in the house, rehearsing what, for him, approximated grief. At my own wedding, I remember the fear I had of making a false promise, but also the sudden realisation that this was exactly what mattered: that we were here to take exactly that risk, to make promises we could only hope to keep, in sickness and in health, madness and sanity, joy and fear, all of them inexplicable, even inexpressible, so that, as often as not, one is mistaken for another.

I imagine that, for the first time perhaps, my father felt wanted that day in a way he had never felt wanted before. It’s in my mother’s face, that small, but perfect victory a woman of her nature feels when she chooses to love a man who is loved for the first time. I have no idea what goes on in the human heart, but I do know, if I know anything, that men and women love for different reasons. I imagine most men love what pleases them, and think no more of it – but for women, love is an imaginative act, a choice, an invention, even. Maybe it has to be. I don’t doubt that there were people who wondered aloud what she saw in him. He was a nobody from nowhere, an illegitimate child, and a non-Catholic into the bargain. Not a great catch, even in his uniform. If they’d known the man she’d supposedly jilted when my father came along, their thoughts that day might well have been with him.

There is something sad about wedding photographs seen long after the event. The picture I have of my mother and father shows hopeful, brave, smiling people that I never knew: all I saw were the disappointments and the lies that, for them, were still to come, still unimagined. Yet now, looking at him in his RAF uniform, with his white bride by his side, I can feel a little better about my father than I did when he was alive. He lied all the time, even when there was no need to lie, but I don’t think he ever thought he was being dishonest. I think he had a sense of himself as someone who had as much right to a history as anybody else, but when he asked his ‘relatives’ to tell him about himself, he must have been received in embarrassed silence, or with kind inventions, part-truths that had served, for strangers and others, in the absence of anything else. That wouldn’t have been enough for him, though. He needed a
history
, he needed the sense of a self. By a process that demanded some wit – perhaps a little more than he possessed – and only very casual deception, he invented that self. It took more than a little doing, and who can blame him if he wasn’t altogether successful or wholly consistent. If the world says you are nobody from nowhere, then you can choose not to argue, or you can invent yourself as someone other than you first seemed. Nobody wants to be a foundling child, and being something has to be better than being nothing.