My tide of grief for the daughter I lost ...
and why I fear I betrayed her as she lay in her coff in
LAST week, Alan Johnson gave an emotional but brilliant account of his reunion with the father who abandoned him in childhood. Now, in the second and final extract of his compelling new autobiography, the former Cabinet Minister pays a moving tribute to the daughter he found, loved – and then tragically lost.
MY DAUGHTER died on July 14, 1999. Natalie was 32 and pregnant with her third child. She’d gone to see her GP the previous morning because she was feeling ill. Her doctor, suspecting a pulmonary embolism, had insisted that she summon her husband Lee from work, and go straight to High Wycombe hospital.
Natalie spent the entire day having every kind of test except the one specifically designed to determine whether or not she had an embolism. It was not deemed necessary for her to be kept in overnight for observation. She died the next morning, alone, on her bathroom floor.
Natalie was 15 months old when I met Judy, her mother, at a New Year party at my sister’s home.
Judy was unmarried at a time when there was still a stigma attached to having a baby out of wedlock. She had been engaged for three years to Natalie’s biological father, Beppe, an Italian student she had met while at teacher training college. But when she discovered she was pregnant, Beppe fled back to Italy. The 1960s may have been a liberalising decade but the process was slow and, in working-class communities, glacial.
Judy and I married in the summer of 1968, and our daughter Emma was born on Christmas Eve. Less than a year after our wedding, the four of us moved out of the crumbling grandeur of North Kensington to the one council house offered to us, take it or leave it, on the Britwell estate in Slough. I transferred with the Post Office from Barnes, SouthWest London, to Slough, where we lived happily for 19 years.
I’d never considered Natalie to be anything other than my own daughter – indeed, nobody in Slough was aware that, biologically speaking, she wasn’t – and she’d never known any other father.
I adopted her when she was ten, and old enough to understand and give her approval. As the process entitled her to a fresh birth certificate, she got to choose a middle name. Not having one had always rankled with her. For some reason that Judy and I could never fathom, as she didn’t know anyone by that name, she chose Anne. And she was adamant that it must be spelled with an ‘e’. In her 20s Natalie decided to track down her birth father. She talked to me about it first and I reassured her that it was a natural desire and that I completely understood.
However, I advised her to make sure, given Beppe’s radio silence throughout her life, that she was willing to take the risk that he might not share her enthusiasm to make contact. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, Dad – I’m doing this purely out of curiosity,’ she replied. I don’t know how she tracked Beppe down, but she went to Italy, met him and came back sad and hurt. She told me he had been cold and distant, and that the experience made her sorry she’d sought him out in the first place.
I have to push my pen through these paragraphs because I cannot write about my life without recording the devastating effect of Natalie’s death.
We all came together at Natalie and Lee’s house in High Wycombe. There was Judy, who I hadn’t seen for over a decade; Emma, who was raising three sons on her own, having decided to split from their father; and my son Jamie, who was by now working with artists such as Paul Weller and Robert Wyatt as a recording engineer and musician. He’d just met Jane, who would become his wife. Lee, his and Natalie’s children – Carmel and Jez (aged 12 and four) – and a close friend who lived nearby, completed the sombre gathering.
Day after day, we met there, making our separate journeys from London, Bracknell and Slough, where Judy still lived – now with her second husband – in the house on the Britwell we’d moved into 30 years before almost to the day.
We gravitated to Natalie’s home because it was all we could think of to do. To be with one another and spend the day drinking tea and talking in disjointed conversations, punctuated by sobbing and the occasional laughter at the remembrance of some long-forgotten incident that resurfaced as we reminisced.
AT THE house we’d sit on the front step, or in the back garden, as if being together would stem the tide of grief. I asked Judy to bring over our old photograph albums. We’d sit turning the pages. The early snapshots were neatly displayed on thick, grey paper and properly captioned: ‘First day at Lynch Hill school’; ‘On holiday at Cobb Cottage, Camelford’; ‘Britwell Carnival’.
The mountings became less meticulous as the years passed until they petered out altogether. The later photographs, complete with negatives, were shoved unceremoniously into the back of the album.
We’d break away from our reverie to carry out the grim bureaucracy of death, with its certificates to be collected and funeral arrangements to be made.
The day before Natalie’s cremation, we all went to the funeral parlour to say our farewells. She lay in an open coffin, the lid leaning up against the wall near the door.
As we left I glanced at the little silver plaque on the lid recording her married name, Natalie Ann Diggins. The ‘e’ she’d insisted on for her middle name was missing. I said nothing, walked on and left it as it was.
I can’t help thinking it was a kind of betrayal; that I let my daughter down by neglecting to insist that the plaque be removed and corrected. But I didn’t.
Sometimes it’s the small things that niggle away, like a dull pain when the agony has passed.
© Alan Johnson, 2016 The Long And Winding Road, by Alan Johnson, is published by Bantam Press on September 22, priced £16.99. Offer price £13.59 (20 per cent discount) until September 18, 2016. Pre-order at mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640 – p&p is free on orders over £15.