How gardening helped me dig up family secrets
Unearthing Kyo Maclear One £18.99
Just after her adored father died, Kyo Maclear started spending every Monday in the glasshouse of a botanical garden, finding solace in the lush foliage. As she mourned her father among the greenery, she couldn’t know how much turmoil his death would unleash.
Michael Maclear, an award-winning British war correspondent of Irish descent, had always refused to tell his daughter much about his family history. After his death, she did a DNA test in the hope of finding out more about her father’s ancestry. The results were startling, revealing that on the paternal side she is descended not from Irish stock but from Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. ‘Mazel Tov!’ her Jewish husband texted her when he heard.
Her mother, Yoko, was evasive when Kyo broke the news, leading her daughter to suspect she might have been conceived using donated sperm.
Eventually, through DNA matches, she traced two men who are her brothers. From them she found out who her biological father, now dead, actually was. He looked ‘vaguely like Clark Gable’, had been married five times, was a racing driver and ‘had a way with the ladies’.
Kyo decided to tackle her mother to find out more and, with a great deal of patience, coaxed fragments of the story from her. In 1968, Yoko was living in London and ‘had recently cut her hair in a precise, Vidal Sassoon-ish pageboy and made herself a Mary Quant-ish minidress’. Her husband was ‘out of town, yet again, travelling for work’.
She met the man who was Kyo’s biological father when he offered to help her fill out a passport form. He was three decades older than her, the son of Russian-born drapers, and they began an affair.
He gave Kyo’s mother an apartment where they could meet, and they travelled abroad together. ‘The more my mother told me, the more I felt there was a stranger inside her… a being I knew not at all,’ Kyo writes.
When Yoko discovered she was pregnant, her lover offered to marry her. Instead, she cabled her husband with the message: ‘Baby is coming.’
Her father must have known the baby wasn’t his, but he also knew he wanted to be a father. Before he left Vietnam he bought his unborn daughter a lacquer box, which he gave her on the eve of her wedding: ‘The simple but loving ceremony of a father who always made me feel he had eyes on my future.’ Her parents separated when she was in her 20s, but never divorced.
Once she heard the story, Kyo longed to know all the details of their relationship. But the more she quizzed her, the more Yoko retreated. At first Kyo put this down to her mother’s stubbornness, but eventually she realised her vagueness was the beginning of a slide into dementia. As Yoko’s memory became increasingly unreliable, Kyo stopped asking about the past, and instead the two women found comfort in their shared love of gardening. Unearthing tells this complex story with delicacy and charm. Kyo feels compassion for her mother and both her fathers. The man who raised her with love and kept the secret of her paternity is, she decides, her ‘real father’. When she visits his grave she tells him: ‘There is nothing to hide any more.’