The Secret Child
When a hidden past comes to light, it reveals a family’s joy and heartbreak
My father was born in England under a veil of secrecy, amid the ominous air raids of the early 1940s in London. He was the illegitimate child of a naive English girl, Dotty, who at 17 had succumbed to the alluring charisma of a young, off-duty American serviceman visiting port during World War II. On realising her predicament, Dotty had gone to great lengths to hide her forbidden pregnancy from her old-fashioned and authoritarian parents. She took refuge on the outskirts of London with her eldest sister and creatively named the baby Philip, the same name as her sister’s new-born so as not to draw suspicion.
However, as the charade was unfeasibile to continue, my father was secretly adopted by Dotty’s eldest brother and his young wife, Hilda, who was unable to have children. Hilda was a war bride separated too soon from her newly wed husband, who was deployed to serve with the British forces in Burma behind Japanese lines. She convincingly raised the child from a young infant as her own, under the watchful eye of his real mother, known to him as his aunt.
My father had never known of his real parentage or had ever wished to know; he adored his adoptive parents, unaware that his doting Aunt Dotty, and later his two cousins, were anything more than just that. Being one of the lucky
few to return from Burma, Dotty’s brother however suffered recurring bouts of malaria until a heart attack took his life prematurely; but not before he had watched his infant son mature into a successful, young married man.
The secret of my father’s adoption was only revealed many years later, when he was in his 60s, upon the death bed of his elderly mother, Hilda. With his ‘Aunt Dotty’ passing away soon after, the mysterious web of unanswered questions went with her to the grave. Without fear of causing distress to the two women who had so vehemently protected their secret, my father finally took it upon himself to fill the gaps in our family history and to attempt to uncover the missing link.
A rather fortuitous DNA search via a DNA home kit from an ancestry website revealed an elderly half-sister living in America, whose lifetime had been spent searching for the name of her absent father. Eventually through a maze of genetic coincidences, we miraculously unearthed my real grandfather’s identity; a biological revelation which carried part of the genetic code to my own children.
A man named Tom; a bit of a playboy it seemed, with a different woman in each port as he travelled the world as an American Navy serviceman, leaving a trail of progeny in his wake.
My father, it turned out, was just one of his many war babies. The irony was not lost on us when we discovered that having finally settled after the war with an older American woman, it appeared they couldn’t have children of their own and had in fact adopted a son.
Unaware of his trail of offspring, a post-war obsession with alcohol and depression eventually took its toll on Tom. A distant cousin provided a photo that proved the family resemblance and provided a visual insight into the mystery of the man who was partly responsible for my own very existence. Despite learning of Tom’s rather volatile past, it was a considerable feat to put a face to his name and add the enigma to our family tree.
With or without his presence in my father’s life, I would be forever thankful to the incredible connection between siblings that enabled my father to grow up in an adoring family, unwittingly under the watchful eye of his real mother. It was an enormous secret that must have weighed heavily on all those who loved him, in surreal circumstances. I wonder about my grandmother’s secrets, imagining her implicit strength of character. The heart-breaking moment when a young girl handed over her new-born son to her brother; the brave young woman, who took on the role of my father’s mother so willingly and without judgement, to raise him as her own without arousing any suspicion.
There are endless unanswered questions about the incredible secret that had given my father the chance to stay a part of his maternal family against all odds. I marvel at the opportunities and privileges afforded to me. I am profoundly grateful to those two women for the courage and resilience it took to raise their secret child, my very own father, and proud to think that perhaps they are partly responsible for the woman I am today.
THE ENORMOUS SECRET MUST HAVE WEIGHED HEAVILY ON THOSE WHO LOVED HIM