Banks’ folly is one shared by many fathers

What is a father? John Banks is bound to have intense feelings about that now that a man he doesn’t know, or seemingly want to know, has been declared by a judge to be his son.

It’s like a plot line from Game of Thrones about who should be king of what. Antony Shaw, 47, has finally won a court battle to be acknowledged as possibly Banks’ only genetically linked offspring, which comes as no surprise when you’ve seen his photograph, where he looks eerily like Banks’s clone.

The background is a time when values were very different and abortions were impossible to get unless you had access to names in Australia that were passed around on an informal underground. The pill hadn’t been here all that long and some pompous family doctors still refused it to unmarried women on moral grounds (theirs). Women had to shop around or rely on medieval devices like diaphragms and condoms. You’d wonder why people bothered to have sex. It was irrational.

The threat of pregnancy hung over every encounter, though this was a time of emerging, casual sexual freedom. And when it happened young men could shrug a woman off with no consequences. No doubt they reasoned that she should have been on the pill or that having an abortion was no big deal. There were no metrosexuals on the horizon then.

Women I knew had babies and gave them up for adoption, never expecting to hear of them again. Some married in their teens. A very few kept their babies. This is what happened with Shaw. It sounds so long ago, but it wasn’t, and neither is the issue of paternity. People need to know who they come from, and will go to extraordinary lengths, as Shaw has done, to hunt down old secrets, whatever the potential for hurt.

I’m grateful to my mother for making sure I kept in touch with my father, who abandoned her when I was born. They were married and I was born a respectable time later, but his family loathed my mother and he lacked the courage to back himself in an adult relationship independent of them.

I adored him as a child when he visited. I loved his smell, a mixture of him, cigarettes, and sometimes beer. My hands are smaller replicas of his. My feet, with their oddly shaped toes, are too. Recently I gave up on a pullover I used to wear because I suddenly, eerily, looked too like him when I wore it.

I crafted a father out of his short visits, when he made me laugh and sang songs for me while I was tucked up in bed. He could sing. I can’t. The curtain would be pulled across the doorway afterwards and in the other room my mother would shout and scream her fury at being abandoned. But she had the discipline not to undermine him to me while I was young, when it would have hurt me deeply. I wish I’d known to respect her for that, but I was just bewildered. For all his flaws, which I discovered mercilessly later, as children do, I’m glad I knew my father. I’ve never wished he was different. I just wish I’d known him better.

This is the context, then, from which I wonder about the future for so many fellow children of solo mothers who’ll never know their fathers for many reasons, and possibly only hear about them in anger.

It’s evident that Banks, like many men in his position, resented his lack of choice over whether he’d be a father. He wouldn’t have refused to give a DNA sample or participate in the court process if he felt otherwise. Can a father, then, be merely a reluctant sperm donor? Many years later Banks and his wife adopted three children of strangers from the other end of the world, and I imagine he does his best to be a model father to them, with all the frustrations and pleasures having children involves. He can be a father, then, but not to his own flesh and blood. There are many men like him. Maybe blood ties are too intimate for them.

No-one gets off lightly for their mistakes. Shaw will likely be able to argue for a claim on his estate when Banks dies, whether or not they ever meet. The canny businessman and sometime restaurateur will then pay in what maybe matters most to him, the ultimate proof of his lifetime’s endeavour.

Where there has been no love there will quite possibly be money, the perfect dish, served cold. But warm would have been better.