None of my friends know my real name. I’ve only ever discussed it with my wife, but I was born Gavin Preece.
On the face if it, it’s an unremarkable story. My mum, Geraldine Robertson, was 19 when she married my father, John Preece. She was fresh out of secretarial college; he worked for the Post Office in Aldershot, Hampshire, with my mum’s dad. They had two children and then split up, amid accusations of infidelity.
I was six when it all unravelled, caught in the domestic crossfire. I still don’t know what happened. I don’t possess any photographs of those early days and I have precious few memories. All I have is a patchy recollection of coming home from school to find them always arguing and, once, my dad lying on the bed, crying.
What happened with my mum and dad was never really mentioned at home. On the rare occasions anything was mentioned, all I ever heard, not surprisingly, was my mum’s side of the story. I’m not saying that wasn’t accurate, but I grew up believing that Dad was a bad man. Later, in adolescence, Mum would often reprimand me for some misdemeanour. “You’re just like your dad,” she’d say. I was never sure what that actually meant. All I knew was that it wasn’t a good thing.
In the 1970s, Aldershot was a garrison town, the home of the British army. That’s how Mum met her second husband – and our new dad. Dave was a lance corporal in the Parachute Regiment. A real-life Action Man who jumped out of aeroplanes for a living and could fire guns. He had a sky blue Vauxhall Viva, too.
John also remarried, finding a ready-made family with his new wife and her two sons. For a while, we maintained some semblance of contact. We had token weekend visits, meeting on a Saturday and spending the afternoon in his working men’s club as he had a pint with his brother, Ron, while my brother and I sat in the corner with our Coke and crisps, minding our business. If he did give us some pocket money when we met, I’d just spend it on something for my mum.
That all changed when my new dad was posted to Edinburgh. Moving away from Aldershot signalled the end of what little relationship my brother and I had with our father. Four hundred miles north, the birthday and Christmas cards soon dried up, presumably because of a lack of any kind of response or acknowledgment. There were never any presents.
Like most military families, we moved around a lot with Dave’s job. We left Scotland and went to Osnabruck in Germany, then back to his hometown, Heywood in Greater Manchester. For years, it seemed like I was always the new kid in school, always the one with a different accent from everyone else. At times it was difficult – try being the only sassenach in a class in Scotland – but it was different and it was an adventure.
By the time we had moved to the north-west, any contact with my biological father had stopped. And that’s how it remained, right through the university education he never knew I had had, through my own marriage and on to the birth of my three children (and his grandchildren). Occasionally, I would get snippets of information from my mum about my father. I knew, for instance, that he had been diagnosed with cancer in 1997 and I had heard when he died in 2000, too.
When my mum called to tell me he had died, there were no tears from either of us. Just a short, uncomfortable silence followed by Mum saying how she must arrange for some flowers when she got a chance. I didn’t go to the funeral.
In the years that passed, I barely gave my dad another thought. It seemed pointless. But in 2012, after watching an episode of Long Lost Family on television, I decided to get in touch with my father’s widow via Facebook. I don’t know why. It wasn’t latent guilt, more likely curiosity and a desire to learn a little more about the father I never really knew. I never told my mum, either.
Soon, I received a letter and a handful of photographs of my father, telling me all about him. The letter was sweet, sincere and very revealing. He loved a holiday: Mauritius, Jamaica, Cyprus, Tenerife – they were always on their travels. He had paid maintenance for us until we were 18, which I never knew. He taught his stepgrandchildren how to swim. And he loved a drink and a game of darts. I’ve got that gene, certainly. He would often speak about my brother and me, wondering how we had turned out and what we were doing. He had no idea we had changed our surname.
When he was 57, he had been diagnosed with cancer of the neck. He had been having trouble with a tooth but on closer examination they had found a tumour. Extensive radiotherapy and chemotherapy followed, but after 15 months in remission, the cancer returned, spreading throughout his body. He died in March 2000, aged 60.
The photographs took me aback. The physical similarities between him and me, though hardly surprising, were striking, and much more obvious than those he shared with my brother. Sometimes, I wished I’d never seen the images. But it was one line in the letter that really hit home: “He would have loved to have been contacted by you when he was alive.”
I still wonder why I never made that call or wrote that letter to him, rather than to his wife when it was too late. Maybe it was loyalty to my mum, a fear of upsetting her or raking over some old memories she’d sooner rather forget, but I think about what might have been. Would we have got on? What would he have made of me and my family? What was his side of the story?
It’s a sense of regret and guilt that’s deepened since my mum died suddenly from a heart attack in 2013. And the more I’ve learned about what happened, the more I worry. I worry that my biological father died at 60 and Mum at 69. I worry that time is passing at an obscene and irresistible speed. I worry being around for my three kids. I even worry about the worrying I do. It’s not healthy, but then it’s difficult to see how regret can be anything other than negative.
I’ve shown the photographs of my father to my own kids and they seemed intrigued and confused, not least because in one of the pictures he was cradling two of his grandchildren. They’ve all asked questions and I’ve tried to answer them as best I can, but I still can’t explain why I never kept in touch with my own father. I don’t think I ever will.
