"Love etc"
Article for The Times, 23rd May 2006. Interview by Penny Wark.
www.timesonline.co.uk

My mother was an actress and my father was an actor and they got married just before the war. He managed to produce myself and my older brother Pieter, but he wasn’t there much. My mother then fell in love with another bloke called Jack Morpurgo.

My father came back to London from the war in 1946 and he discovered that his place had been taken. He made an extraordinary decision: his feeling was that if my mother wished to live with Jack then he didn’t want to be around like a spare father because he didn’t know us, and he thought it would be an intrusion. So he said, fine, I’m absenting myself and you and Jack will bring up my boys.

My parents divorced, he emigrated to Canada. I was aware early on of a tension within the household: noone ever talked about my father because at the time in middle class England divorce was a shameful thing. What happened was that a pretence was created that we were all one big, happy family, a stepbrother and a stepsister, plus Pieter and myself and we were all called Morpurgo. I wasn’t allowed to call my mother Mum or my stepfather Dad, I had to call her Kippe, and he was always Jack. The reason for that was that there was an awkwardness about calling him Dad and if I wasn’t gong to call him Dad it would be awkward to call her Mum. We didn’t speak of this removed father, he wasn’t there and he didn’t exist.

Then when I was 19 I was watching Great Expectations on the television one Christmas evening with the family and in the first scene up from behind a gravestone rears a hideous convict, Magwitch. My mother was sitting next to me, grabbed my knee and said ‘Oh my God, it’s your father’. We didn’t meet until I was in my mid-20s by which time I had a much better idea of my mother’s relationships. Although she was always kind and attentive, she wasn’t very tactile. It was considered soppy to cuddle. There’s no blame, it’s just how she was, expressing affection was quite difficult for her and since she was so concerned to keep the affection of my stepfather I think it became a great strain to her.

She died in her 70s, my stepfather died about four years ago, my father died last year. I had got to know him a bit and a rather extraorindary relationhiop built up that was a love between a father and a son but without the baggage of bringing a son up. I think he liked that, he could stand back and see me for what I was, and I could see how he was as a man, not just as a father. When he died he said that he wanted his ashes to be split between a beach in Bermuda where he’d gone for walks with his second wife, and my garden in Devon, because this is where my mother’s ashes are buried. He never expressed it, but his love for my mother had never left him.

When it came to my own marriage it became the most important thing to have a relationship that was solid. I got married stupidly young, and certainly it was a very instinctive moment and Clare had lived a lot longer than I had in terms of maturity. She was the first person who made me think as an adult, so I went off to university and became a teacher and we had three children very young, two boys and an adopted girl. I don’t think you have any objectivity when you’re 20, 21, you’re so busy growing yourself that you can’t stand back. Whilst I don’t think I was a terrible father, I don’t think I gave enough of myself in terms of time and empathy. Clare did, but it took me a lifetime to learn and I’m more at ease and less anxious dealing with my grandchildren.

Now I’m something to climb on, we do ridiculous things like rolling down fields, I become a bit childlike again, which is a wonderful enrichment at a time of life when people feel they might be tailing off. They refresh our spirits and we give them a degree of security and contentment, we don’t ask questions, we don’t have expectations because they’re not our children. I feel very much more equal to them than I ever did with my children when they were young, and I think it is because there is both deep affection and a certain amount of detachment. We’re a little side show they need, and they’re a sideshow we need like crazy.