My lost family and the father I never knew

Yes she was my mother but it has been a long time since anyone asked me. My mother died 33 years ago when I was 11. Who could be asking about her now? I looked at the sender’s name: Stephen Glenn Traynor. Now my head was swimming.

I sent back an e-mail confirming that my mother was Betty Poulton. Minutes later another message flashed up. “At last!” it said. “I have been looking for you. I am your long-lost brother.”

Overwhelmed, I burst into tears. I had been searching for this link to my past for decades but with such little progress that I had convinced myself he did not want to know me. And now there he was, talking to me via the computer screen, telling me that far from not wanting to know me, he had been searching for me, too.

As a writer I have frequently recounted the impact on me of growing up without a father. My earliest memory is of my father, Donald Vincent Traynor, handing me play-bricks, bending down to kiss me on the head and then walking away. For ever as it turned out. It was 1967 and I was three.

For years I pondered over this rejection, wondering if my father ever thought of me. Did images of me flit through his mind at Christmas? Did he remember my birthday? I had no idea – and I resented him for it deeply.

I grew up in a small village in Gloucestershire with my two older half-brothers Bernard and Gerald, and my half-sister Teresa, who are 13, 11 and seven years older than me. Their father Bernard Poulton senior was my mother’s second husband. He died of cancer and some years later she met and married my father Donald.

B y all accounts he was charming and intelligent, an aircraft designer and drummer in a jazz band. I came along and then three years later he was gone. Thereafter he contributed nothing to my life. I knew very little about him – not even what he looked like because I didn’t have a photo. But I always wondered about him. Did we share any traits? Was he squeamish like me, for example, and did he hate bad manners as much as I do?

There was no one I could ask – no grandparents or other relatives apart from my mother and asking her was not an option. She was ill through most of my childhood and I did not want to put any extra strain on her. In fact, I think I realised from an early age that she was dying.

She passed away when I was 11. She was only 49 and suffering from polycystic kidneys, the same affliction that had killed her own mother and grandmother. But I think she was just worn out by life. Her childhood was difficult, she had been widowed with three children and then deserted with four young children to bring up.

From my siblings I knew that my father had been married before and had at least two other children called Stephen and Christine from that earlier marriage. I wanted to know them too because I had always felt acutely aware of my lopsided family, with nobody from my father’s side. I felt incomplete but before I started trying to fill in the gaps I had a lot of anguish to work through.

After my mother died, social services wanted to put me in a home. My half-sister Teresa actually married at 18 so the authorities would allow me to live with her. But I was a nightmare adolescent. By 12 I was shoplifting, at 13 I was smoking and by 15 I was bunking off school as a matter of routine. At 15 I was bulimic (and remained so for five years) and by 16 I was drinking Bacardi and Coke by the bottle at weekends.

A nd so it went on until I was 30, when I suffered an emotional breakdown and sunk into depression. Therapy saved me and once I had emerged from the fog I began to search for my paternal family. The birth of my daughter Shaye when I was 34 spurred me on even more. I tried the Salvation Army and missing-person websites. I scoured telephone records and electoral rolls in Yorkshire, where my father came from originally and where I believed his older children still lived. All to no avail.

Last year my sister-in-law Hilary discovered from a genealogy website that my father had died in 1997 just 16 days after the birth of my daughter, his granddaughter. All hope of finding his other children, my Traynor siblings, faded away.

Then came that fateful day last autumn when I saw Stephen’s name on the Facebook message. In an instant I felt a weight lift from me; I now had at least the possibility of answers.

Later that evening Stephen e-mailed me again with his phone number (he lived in Leeds, proving my instincts about Yorkshire were correct) and asked me to ring but I panicked, suddenly fearful of knowing.

Two days later I dialled the number with shaking hands. A woman answered – his wife Cathy. She sounded warm and welcoming. Stephen was still at work (he is a car salesman) but Cathy told me they had been married 34 years and Stephen had always talked about his little sister Sonia who was “somewhere out there”. I cried at that, whether in sorrow for all our lost years or the sheer tenderness of her words, I don’t know.

Stephen and I spoke later that night. In practical terms we were strangers. Emotionally we felt an immediate bond as if we had known each other all our lives. In some respects we had. He is 52 and has three sons and nine grandchildren, which means I am an aunt and great-aunt. It was his granddaughter Katie who suggested he look for me on Facebook.

It appears that after my father left us he returned briefly to his first family. Steve told me: “I need to put your mind at rest. Dad never forgot about you. Sometimes he would sit in his armchair and cry. He wanted to go and get you and bring you to live with us.”

I sobbed my heart out again and Steve comforted me. We talked for over an hour and I went to bed feeling blessed.

Several more conversations followed with Steve and his sister – my half-sister Christine, who is 49, and we all agreed to meet. I travelled to Leeds and as soon as I saw Christine waiting outside her corner shop I knew who she was. Like me she has shoulder-length red hair with a kink. We’re about the same height and build. We just look alike. We hugged and hugged in the manner of people who’ve waited years – in my case a lifetime – to do it.

Steve was waiting for us at his home. We look alike too. We sat down to dinner and got to know each other. We discovered we all have the same long, slim fingers, which my daughter has also inherited. My daughter, Steve’s eldest son Shaun and three of his grandchildren all share the same birthday, September 15. There was no ice to break, no awkwardness. I could feel myself starting to heal.

For years I assumed my father had deserted me for his other family but now I learned he had been no more dutiful to them. He returned to them for about a year but left again, this time for good. He went first to Australia and stayed there 10 years. Then he spent several years in America before coming back to live near Steve and Christine in Leeds in the Eighties. He died in 1997 of prostate cancer.

My newly found siblings described a larger-than-life character who liked his whisky and was nicknamed General Patton because of his dominant manner. Funnily enough I was a bossy boots at school too, with the nickname Bossy Sossy.

But it was when I asked about grandparents that I learned the most startling fact about my father: he was a foundling, left on the steps of the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate in August 1919 when he was just days old. The owner, a Miss Collie, took him in and brought him up as her own – which many believed he was anyway. Local rumour had it that the unmarried Miss Collie had given her baby away only to reclaim him by pretending he had been abandoned by someone else.

Suddenly it all made sense. My father had grown up with no real knowledge of family or himself. No wonder he was never able to commit to anything or anyone throughout his life. In one way he had done well for himself, attending grammar school, winning a scholarship at the Birmingham School of Music and becoming an aircraft designer. But emotionally he was completely adrift.

Nine months have passed since I saw Steve’s message on Facebook. Steve and Cathy and Christine and her partner Gavin have visited me in Cirencester. They’ve met my Poulton siblings and despite my fears they all got on like the proverbial house on fire.

As for me, I realised I’d been lying to myself all those years when I told myself that knowing about my family didn’t matter. It was a defence mechanism but who was I kidding? My father is 50 per cent of my DNA. Even if he wasn’t physically with me, how can that not matter? It makes me fearful for anyone growing up fatherless.

And now at 44 I have finally seen a picture of my father. I look at a man with a wide smile and apple cheeks and I see myself staring back. I know now that he had to overcome huge odds in life. I can forgive him for running away from us. And I can say I am proud to be his daughter.