DISCOVER YOUR DAD HAS A SECRET CHILD

What it feels like to ...

IT SEEMS funny now but we weren’t a family with lots of home movies or many photographs of ourselves growing up. Perhaps we considered ourselves too ordinary to bother. We were a normal Scottish family in an ordinary town – Mum a housewife and Dad an accountant commuting to Glasgow daily, four kids doing well at school and making their way in life. So far, so humdrum.

Family life took its first hit when Dad, out of the blue, announced he’d taken a 10-year post in a place we’d never even heard of – Djibouti, in East Africa. He had four kids on their way to university and needing support, he said, but in hindsight I believe he was having a midlife crisis. A charismatic Cambridge graduate, he had realised he was halfway through a working life in accountancy, and, well … was that it? There was no question of us joining him there. Two annual trips home was as much as we got for 10 years. I was 13 when he left.

A decade later, Dad returned to Largs with a secret he couldn’t keep any longer. He had had a son in Africa, now five years old – and wanted Campbell to be part of our lives. The impact was seismic – the end of my parents’ marriage, the sale of the family home, a child caught between two families and two cultures, and the reappraisal of a man we had all thought we knew.

It’s a measure of my mum’s extraordinary character that despite the blow she’d been dealt, she and Dad continued to live close by each other in Largs, doting on their brood of grandchildren and – to the outside world at least – making a civilised job of their separation.

Mum suffered a devastating stroke in 2008 which brought Dad back to her side permanently as a carer, much to everyone’s surprise. To keep Mum at home – she was severely physically disabled but mentally still her funny, mischievous self – we made a family rota in which I spent every other week back home.

This was when I realised a film could be made – there my Mum and Dad both were, quietly in a room together. I realised there could be no better way to get to know them again than by bringing my camera home and letting it roll. They both quickly got used to filming, Mum looking forward to it as a diversion and a focus for her thoughts, and Dad at times playing up to the camera (he was always a bit of a show-off) yet almost always acquiescing to my requests for us to talk on film, before it was too late. I even travelled to Africa to investigate Dad’s life there.

The editing of the many hours of footage I had took many months, and sadly Mum didn’t live to see the finished film.

When I showed the final cut for