When they died I was left all alone

he called Uncle Tom and Aunty Lil, visiting every weekend.

Whatever about their family life, business was thriving at the Lido. By the mid 1960s the couple could afford their dream investment – a large guesthouse, Rushmere House, in Tramore.

By this stage their son was 13 and heading to boarding school. He now called them simply ‘Tom’ and ‘Lil’ and had lived with them full-time for 10 years. ‘It may seem hard to believe, but it never occurred to me to question whether or not they were my parents…,’ he writes.

‘That was my world, and I had no reason to even consider questioning it. They were the personification of love and adoration.’ It wasn’t until they died when he was a schoolboy that Tom learned – from one of his mother’s employees – that Tom and Lil were in fact his parents. ‘In my heart I had known it all along,’ he writes about his phlegmatic response to the news.

Tom and Lil had good friends in Waterford, but minimal contact with their own families, so Tom heard nothing from them after their deaths and he was quite alone. He watched the first moon landing the summer he was 16. ‘I watched it on my own, as I did most things. I had no brothers or sisters or any cousins that I was aware of, and my parents were dead.’

But he had met his future wife Asun, from Bilbao in Spain, a few nights earlier at a dance in the Haven Hotel in Dunmore East, Co. Waterford, and his life was about to change. Asun’s family took him under their wing until Asun moved to Ireland for marriage in 1976, settling in an apartment in Rathmines while her husband trained as a solicitor and she did her PhD.

As the years passed, Tom’s desire to find out about his family became more insistent, particularly when his children were born. In 2015 he commissioned a genealogical report into his parents’ families and discovered that while his dad was of humble origins, his mother came from a family of wealthy landowners in Cork.

More interesting still was the revelation of a multiplicity of first cousins, aunts and uncles owing to his father being one of 10 children and his mother one of seven. Tom describes the string of emotional reunions that followed between his own family and long-lost relatives.

Tom’s daughter tracked down the niece of his father Tom Sr’s first wife Mary Fowler who, after assuming that her soldier husband had died in battle, had taken up with another partner.

The existence of this first marriage condemned Tom and Lil to ‘living in sin’ with all the repercussions that had for their only child, while Mary Fowler could not remarry until Tom had

‘In my heart, I had known all along that they were my parents’

died. But it was hearing from a neighbour about his father being a prisoner of war that was the defining moment in Tom’s detective story. It set Tom on a quest to uncover his father’s war record – a labour of love that unearthed the dumbfounding revelation of his mother’s illicit pregnancy and the existence of a half-brother.

Unspoken is a fascinating account of one man’s search for his identity and perhaps an encouragement to all of us to delve deeper into the past.

■ Unspoken: A Father’s Wartime Escape, A Son’s Family Discovered is out now.