A Lie About My Father Read Free Page B

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.