Mum’s mad mission to find me a father
She was six when her father died. Now, in a poignant new memoir, filmmaker SARAH ASPINALL describes her mother’s eccentric global odyssey to find a new ‘Daddy Man’
My FATHER died when I was six years old. almost immediately, my mother and I packed our bags and left southport, the Northern seaside resort, and set off to spend the next few years in search of what I came to think of as ‘the Daddy man’.
many children hate it when their parent finds a new relationship, but for me it became our shared goal, the mad mission my mother, audrey, and I fanatically pursued across the world throughout my childhood.
That didn’t mean I hadn’t loved my own father very much, nor that I wasn’t hurt she now mentioned him so rarely, but as the only child of the rather dazzling and overpowering audrey, I had no choice but to throw myself into our crazy adventure.
my mother was now 39, a beauty and a chancer who had already escaped her childhood in the slums of liverpool with spectacular success. as a wartime evacuee to southport, she had become a hostess at the american airmen’s Club, where she was given the job of showing movie star Clark Gable around and followed him to hollywood.
after seeing Gable again, she toured america with a band before heading back in london where she got engaged to a member of the wealthy Guinness family. It was only when she became accidentally pregnant by my terminally ill father that she found herself back in southport with no money. having lost this exciting future she had dreamed of, she was determined to get it back.
she had an old address book held together with elastic bands from which she pulled crumpled pieces of paper with scribbled addresses and phone numbers for someone she had once met on a train or the friend of a friend. Wherever we were in the world, she managed to produce one. A
T TIMES we felt like a desperate pair, pitching up at a hotel in hong Kong or Cairo, hoping ‘ he’ might be there, that special someone who we were looking for. I was a crucial part of our double act. looking around the hotel bar or lounge, if there was a lone man who looked suitable, we would swing into action. ‘shall I get a coke?’ I’d suggest. This was code. I’d make my way over and wedge myself next to the solitary man as I ordered my drink.
‘hello’ I’d say with a cute smile, and then I’d give him an innocent look: ‘I don’t suppose you can look after my mummy when I go to bed.’
he might then ask me ‘Which one is your mummy?’ Then I knew we had a win, as once I’d pointed her out with her red-gold hair they were almost always hooked.
she would look across at us with a puzzled smile, as if she didn’t know what I was doing. she might even act shocked if they told her what I’d said, but inevitably they would suggest she join them for a nightcap and she would laugh and shrug, ‘Well, why not?’
soon I’d be getting ready for bed in our hotel room, as she painted her lips in gleaming coral and stepped into a cloud of her estee lauder youth Dew perfume.
sometimes our pick-up technique would lead to a relationship that seemed promising, and even lasted for some weeks. We arrived in Penang once, after a scary plane crash and brief unplanned stay in Borneo.
We were pretty shaken up, but despite our recent shock my mother was already excitedly making plans.
a woman she’d befriended on the wrecked plane had given her a contact for something called the Penang Club.
The club was dire, with elderly residents and not even any dancing for my mother, but it was there we met a local businessman, ‘Uncle les’, and were soon installed in his gloomy colonial-style villa.
While they got to know each other better, I was left with a Chinese lady called an ‘ayah’. each morning the strangled sound of the peacocks in his garden woke me up to another day of boredom and loneliness.
luckily, even in her desperation, my mother realised after a few long weeks that ‘Uncle les’ was ‘a bore’ and we were once again on a plane.
I would often feel stranded and quite in the dark as to why we were in a particular situation. Once, I was totally baffled as to what we were doing in a godforsaken motel in Kill Devil hills, North Carolina, where the promised pool was a tiny hot square in a parking lot.
I knew the place was vaguely connected to a story of heartbreak from long before when my mother toured america with a band called the make Believes just after the war.
The mystery was partly solved when a sad man called George arrived to drive us out to his farmhouse. his wife had recently died leaving him with a teenage son, Danny, who rather reluctantly let me play with him and his dog.
as the days went by and we sat awkwardly round their kitchen table, even my mother’s stories ran dry and poor George looked more morose than ever. Of course it didn’t work out, romantically speaking, and my mother cried on the Greyhound bus out of town.
Other times our quest would be great fun as we hooked up with wildly unsuitable but attractive men on cruise ships or beaches in Fiji.
sabet sabescue was my own find, discovered in the garden bar of a luxury Cairo hotel where he and his friends often spent the evenings. he had a huge office with a wall that was a giant tank of tropical fish.
he drove us around in a big white open- top car and wore dark sunglasses. I adored him.
sabet had many moods; he could be mysterious and quiet, or fun, childish and full of mad games.
he paid for me to have a pedicure, choosing my nail colour and laughing when I screamed as the lady rubbed a cheese grater on my feet.
he told me: ‘When you grow up you’ll learn that you have to suffer to be beautiful.’ he’d put an arm round me and say, ‘me, I love kids’ and then soon forget about me again.
With the other men I didn’t mind being forgotten, but with Sabet I wanted him to love me.
I think my mother felt the same; her usual pragmatism had disappeared and his extreme youth, playboy lifestyle and general unsuitability wasn’t mentioned.
BUT ultimately, he was too much for us — too young, with his confidence and dazzling smile. He was like the Cheshire Cat and that fabulous smile hung on for years.
He promised to meet up with us and ‘get together in Swinging London and have some fun!’ but we never saw him again.
Perhaps the reason I could cope with our day-to- day life being a roller coaster was that my own fate hung in the balance.
One winter, back at the gloomy house we called home in Southport, my mother announced we were going to be spending ‘a real Christmas’ in a stately home, with log fires and grand dinners.
It belonged to Lord Lilford, whose fourth marriage was apparently not going well.
We arrived at a tudor manor house with a vast Christmas tree in the hall, and I felt vaguely hopeful . . . until we entered the living room. It soon became clear the party, smelling of whisky, had no interest in children at all. I was sent to a wing of the house where various offspring bickered and fought, overseen by a nanny.
the following days were total misery. to my huge relief our host, Vernon, made it clear that if he and my mother got together, I would be dispatched to boarding school and, to her credit, my mother declined.
Eventually another Sabet type appeared in the guise of the crooner Ronnie Carroll, who called me his Ring a Ding girl after his Eurovision entry song.
He was kind, funny and totally charming, although my mother pointed out he was ‘a bit of a hellraiser’ and had once flown to Vegas and gambled £20,000 away. He almost married her; but then he didn’t and she cried for days.
Our hunt for love seemed to be failing. She was 41; I was nine. I was sad she hadn’t married someone fun like Ronnie, or Sabet, but desperately relieved it hadn’t been Vernon or uncle Les.
I wondered if she was just impossible to please. But deep down I shared her belief that eventually we would find true love.
One day we were back in Southport and it was a warm summer’s evening. the car was still hot from the sun as we drove in a rare silence to a mystery location, then stopped by a large house behind gates, as she gazed in.
After a moment she started the engine, threw the car into reverse and roared backwards, smashing deliberately into the gatepost.
I was shocked and furious as she pulled me from the car and dragged me up the driveway to ring the doorbell.
It was answered by a man with a stony expression, who did all he could to resist her determined efforts to get into his house for a glass of water after her ‘awful accident’.
I soon realised this poor, reclusive middle- aged widower, Peter Aspinall, must be her latest target. She had often said ‘any old port in a storm’, but this unhappy man seemed more like a shipwreck on a deserted beach.
Many of Southport’s single ladies had attempted to meet him but he never accepted social invitations.
WHEN we left, I was sure we would never hear from him again, but she soon told me she was going to dinner with the ‘ gatepost man’ and within weeks they were engaged.
He was initially rather shocked by us — her total lack of domestic skills; my feral ways and total lack of education — but he married her nonetheless. He saw his job as to rescue us both, and he was quite transformed by his love for her.
they were terribly happy, and we finally had the new Daddy we’d been looking for. He would come home from the sweet factory he ran and call out ‘it’s the Daddy man’ as we rushed to hug him.
It had all worked out rather late for me, as I was almost a teenager, and soon went through that angry rebellion teens are so good at, but Peter Aspinall saved me.
I had missed so much school all I could now do was wander Southport looking for trouble. He took me in hand, coaching me to get O-levels and into university.
I changed my name to his, and loved him very much. throughout that long hunt we’d made together, my mother had been searching for the wrong thing in the wrong places, but she got there in the end. Chasing the shy widower had been a shot in the dark but it changed us both in all kinds of ways.
those early years were a painful, hilarious, sad, happy time, but our harum-scarum life did me no harm. this was never a story of damage.
Instead she passed on an eccentric box of tools for life, but one I could adapt and use very well.
It was genuinely a shared mission, a search for what we both needed and finally found, and that is maybe why I have felt able to celebrate her with an exasperated, but very real, love.
Diamonds at The Lost and Found by sarah aspinall (4th Estate, £14.99) is out now.