First person
My grandfather left instructions for My Way by Frank Sinatra to be played at his funeral, and listening to those unrepentant lyrics belting out across the pews as I followed my family up the aisle, I was struck by how remarkably apt they were. For my grandfather - a working-class boy made good, a Midlands industrialist, a mason, a golfer and a bigoted, sexist egotist - lived a life of self-serving lies and deceit the magnitude of which, only days after his death, was finally becoming clear. He certainly had done it his way.
Having married my grandmother in 1939 because my mother was well on the way, my grandfather apparently resolved not to let this mishap change things and continued to live as a carefree bachelor, albeit with a wife to cook and clean for him. Every Wednesday and Friday evening he went out, on Saturday and sometimes Sunday too. He did this all his married life - for 58 years. My grandmother had absolutely no idea where he went.
My mother recalls frequent rows, especially in the early years of their marriage when she was little. My grandmother, standing at the bottom of the stairs in their little terraced house, would shout up at him as he was getting ready that she was coming too, or she would threaten to have him followed. While he - completely ignoring her, whistling and singing all the while - washed, crimped his hair with a curler, changed into fresh clothes on the landing (not forgetting clean pants) and went out. She never did have him followed.
Where was he going? For years we all speculated, even in front of him. I remember that he found this amusing. Sometimes, he even offered various, casual explanations: he had been playing golf. What, in January, with snow on the ground? OK, he'd been fishing. In the dark? No, he'd been in a pub with some young people. He often mentioned these "young people". Only after he died did we realise who they must have been.
While arrangements for his funeral were under way, a letter arrived addressed to my grandfather. My mother opened it. It was from a woman called Joan and she was anxious about him. Where was he? Was he ill? She included a telephone number. That evening, with my grandmother safely in bed, my mother dialled the number. A woman answered and - with ever a taste for drama - my mother said, "I always knew about you." (She hadn't.)
When she heard that my grandfather had died, Joan confessed that she had been his mistress since meeting him in 1954. It was 1997. Nervously, my mother asked if they had any children and Joan said yes, they did. How many? There was a brief silence and Joan said, "Five."
She explained that their first child, a girl, was born in 1954 with the other four arriving between 1960 and 1965, two more girls and two boys. I was born in 1966. So, my grandfather's youngest daughter was in the same school year as me. It was a lot to take in, especially coming hot on the heels of my grandfather's death. My mother told Joan that she would ring again when the dust had settled and continued the business of burying her father and looking after my grandmother who was bereft and utterly unaware of the unfolding drama. My mother lost no time telling us - my father, brother and me - all about Joan and her newly discovered half-siblings, but she protected my grandmother from it and as far as we know she never found out. She died in 2005.
Gradually, through letters, phone calls, photographs and an eventual meeting with Joan, we gained a fuller picture of the secret life that my grandfather had been living for more than 40 years. It's a picture almost wholly acquired from Joan's version of events but corroborated by their children and photographs (my grandfather giving their daughter away at her wedding, for example). In meeting the youngest of her half-siblings, and seeing photographs of the others, my mother was struck by their undeniable resemblance to her father - particularly the boys. It has been a difficult path to negotiate for everyone, not least because Joan's children were not told, until after his death, that my grandfather - this man they knew only as a close friend of their mother's - was actually their father.
Joan was not my grandfather's only extramarital affair. When he met her, in a pub when she was 24, he told her he had been seeing a woman called Eileen; they had apparently broken up over an argument involving a coat and she had had an abortion. He also told her he was two years younger than he was - then 37 - and correspondingly shaved two years from my mother's age. He came clean about having a wife and child but didn't manage to include a mention of their five-year-old son, Terry.
In some ways we were not surprised that my grandfather had had another woman; it was the most obvious explanation for his absences. Indeed, we had often imagined it, only to discount the theory on the grounds that no one else could possibly put up with him. How wrong we were. And it was certainly true that my grandparents never had what you might call a happy marriage: he kept her short of money and they bickered incessantly.
And so, outside his marriage, my grandfather fathered five children (that we know of), two of them sons. Ironically, with my grandmother - through a series of pitiful tragedies - they lost two baby boys (one during pregnancy and one at a week old) and a son who was on the cusp of adolescence when he died. They were left with but one offspring to show for their life together, the very child who had joined their fate in the first place - my mother.
So why did my grandfather stay with my grandmother if he had created a family elsewhere and found comfort in the arms of another woman? Probably because he didn't love Joan either, and even if he did, he loved himself - and more particularly the life he had made for himself - more. He was a vain man, his image paramount. He had to have the fancy car, the big house, the golf-club membership, his standing in the masons (he was grandmaster twice), and with that went the respectability that marriage confers. Besides, why embark on an expensive divorce when you can have your cake at home and eat a slice with your mistress as well?
And what of the mistress, Joan - what was in it for her? She, too, has died and so her reasons went with her to the grave, but her youngest daughter, my half-aunt, says her mother loved him to bits. Why else agree that their children should call him uncle and never know him as their father? Why else allow him to visit at his convenience, retiring to the bedroom and telling the children to run along outside and play? And why else bear children to a man who offered no support, either financial or practical, with the result that when one child was seriously ill in hospital, the others went temporarily into foster care because there was no one else to look after them?
While my grandfather enjoyed motor holidays abroad in his brand new Vauxhall and lived in a large detached house on the posh side of town - built with the proceeds of his booming factory business - his "other" children lived "on the social", a hand-to-mouth existence, in a very different neighbourhood. To say he gave them nothing would be an exaggeration. There was the time a large number of toys that had belonged to my mother and her younger brother, Terry, went missing, in particular lots of toy cars. My grandmother was baffled and wouldn't stop going on about it, until my grandfather eventually offered the unlikely explanation that he had decided to donate them to poor children living near his factory.
No doubt the recipients of those toys were deprived and in need of something to play with, but with the benefit of hindsight, they were probably more closely related to my grandfather than he let on.
As with all lies, the devil is in the detail. Here were two families living parallel, un-touching lives with one same constant - my grandfather. He was their common thread, weaving between them, changing everything for everyone, leaving in his wake emotional scars that would fester for years. Deceit of this magnitude casts long shadows, reforming and retouching the past, adding new twists to ordinary events, fresh pathos to extraordinary ones.
Take one night in 1961: it's late, the eve of Terry's 14th birthday and my grandmother is nursing her son, alone, in his tiny, airless bedroom. He struggles to breathe, his thin, bony chest rising and falling in rhythm with the terrible rasping; a sound that anyone who has witnessed a full-blown asthma attack can never forget. It's a common enough scene in this house, but this time it's worse, much worse. My mother, 21 now, returns from an evening out with her fiance. She calls an ambulance but by the time it arrives the desperate gasping for air has stopped, the pitiful chest no longer rises and falls. Terry's body is limp. The ambulance crew carry the boy downstairs. He is damp. My grandmother thinks he's wet himself. She goes with him to the hospital. Where was my grandfather that night?
The next day, on the other side of the city, a mother has a birthday tea for her one-year-old son. Perhaps she makes sandwiches and waits in the front room for the guest to arrive - the child's father. But he doesn't show. She's not surprised, hardly disappointed really.
The tea party goes ahead, a somewhat subdued affair, just the three of them: Joan, the little girl, who is six and their baby son. A few days later, a note arrives. Sorry he couldn't make it to the tea party, he's been busy burying his 13-year-old boy - a son she didn't even know he had.
Names have been changed.