My father believed – wrongly – that I wasn’t his child. If only there had been DNA tests to reassure him
In this magazine two weeks ago, Melanie McDonagh suggested that DNA testing is tough on children whose apparent fathers turn out not to be anything of the kind. In particular, she had sympathy for the child whose TV presenter ‘father’ discovered that for years he had been paying child support for somebody else’s offspring. No doubt she has a point, but what of the children whose true fathers doubt their paternity?
For me, DNA testing would have been a blessing. My father doubted I was his child, though I didn’t know it. I just knew that he didn’t seem to care for me very much. ‘The cuckoo in the nest’ is what he called me. When I was about six, he would ask me if I knew what the phrase meant. Pleased to show off, I would tell him proudly that I did know about cuckoos and how they laid their eggs in other birds’ nests. What I didn’t know or understand was the implication that I was not his child. In the 1950s, young children in the middle classes were not enlightened about sex and reproduction.
Of course, I knew there was something wrong with me. At the time I thought it was because I was a mere girl and he had wanted a boy. Or perhaps he didn’t like me because I had too many childish illnesses. His other description of me was ‘runt of the litter’.
He and my mother, a professor’s daughter, were an ill-matched pair. There didn’t seem to be any moment when they did not argue. So the taunt was aimed, I now realise, at her, not at me. It dated back to 1944, the year of my birth, when both of them must have realised that they disliked each other intensely.
Living in an isolated tiny village during wartime, with no transport out of it, their marriage was a torment for both of them. He was like a character in a Surtees novel, passionate about hunting, shooting, drinking and large meals. She thought those things ‘coarse’. She enjoyed painting, playing the piano and flirting. The latter explains why when three Italian prisoners of war were assigned to the farm, the marriage took a downward turn. ‘Such charming men. So romantic,’ my mother would recall. ‘Bloody Eyeties’ was all my father would say, though their labour was welcome on his wartime farm.
I cannot believe that my mother had an affair with any of them, but my father, searching for a reason why his marriage was such a disaster, suspected she had. He wouldn’t have been the first man to think that infidelity explained the failure of a relationship, when more often the failure of a relationship explains infidelity. Indeed, for a few weeks, they split up. Heavily pregnant, she went back to live with her parents in Cambridge and it was there that I was born. At the time of my birth, it was not clear whether he would accept me as his child.
I shall never know why he did. Did her parents pressure him? Or was it just that people in those days stuck together? There were no DNA tests to tell my father whether or not I was his child. So he took me on, not certain if I was his child. He and I never talked about it. It was my mother who — when I was an adult and their disastrous marriage had come to an end — admitted that he had thought I wasn’t his child. ‘A ridiculous idea,’ she said.
But, ridiculous or not, what had it been like to look at his second child and wonder every day whether she was his or some other man’s? When I had disappointed him in some childish behaviour, had he attributed this to the Eyetie genes? When I failed to be the tomboy he wanted, had he put my cowardice down to my bastardy? Never able to know for sure, he had alternately ignored me or made taunts about me. He concealed his pain by his contempt for me. I was, presumably, a living blow to his male pride. My mother must have suffered too.
A DNA test would have removed all that doubt in his mind. Luckily, as I grew older, I grew into the family face. My younger brother and I looked alike. I still have an extraordinary photo that shows me, a seven-year-old girl, dressed exactly to match my two-year-old brother, in the same shorts and T-shirt. A point being made by my mother, I suspect. It worked. Around this time there were no more remarks about ‘cuckoo in the nest’. He must have concluded that I probably was his.
Much later in life, when I was grown up and he was an old man, we became real friends. In the last part of his life, he was ill in hospital for almost a whole year and, apart from my stepmother, I was his most frequent visitor. I like to think that his generosity in taking on what he suspected was another man’s child was rewarded then.