Southend U3A

Writing for Fun

February 2020

Suspicion - Jan Norman

I plumped myself down into the armchair I had recently vacated and accepted a glass of malt whiskey from dear old ‘Uncle Harry’, my unofficial guardian since I had been a skinny whelp in short trousers racing around our coffee plantation in Kenya in the fifties.

Harry had just seen out Gerald Pensett, senior partner of Pensett, Pensett and Gravestock, our revered family solicitors. Mother’s funeral and the reading of the will seemed a world away but in fact had only taken place last Thursday and today’s visit had been unexpected. Gerald’s instructions, left by my dear departed mother, was for him to deliver a letter clearly appended by her to be given to me a week after her funeral. I later came to realise that Uncle Harry knew all about this.

‘Well, dear boy, I think now has come the time for you to peruse the contents of your mother’s letter. I will leave you in peace and take Captain for a walk. I daresay when I return you may have some questions.

With this he abruptly left the room and minutes later I saw him cross the road with our dog in tow heading for St John’s Wood Church Gardens, just a stones throw away from our London home.

For some reason I was filled with foreboding and harboured a suspicion that I was not going to like what I was about to read but that read it I must. Taking a deep slug of whiskey I broke the seal and smoothed out the stiff manilla sheets. A few old sepia photographs slid out from between the folds. Photographs of a father I had never known as he had been killed in the Mau Mau uprising in ‘56. I had been two at the time. Photos of my mother with ‘Uncle Harry’ and me. Some on his neighbouring farm and some of us all on the ship home to England in ‘57.

I put the pictures to one side and started to read. Violet ink surged across the surface of the fine vellum in wild abandon as Mother painted the carefree life as a young lady working in an art gallery in the Forties; how she met and married my father and then emigrated to Kenya to start a new life as wife of a coffee plantation owner. It had been the good life that had turned sour as tensions arose then escalated between the Kikuyu and the white settlers. The Mau Mau uprising had begun. Many Africans had died and some white farmers perished defending their estates, my father amongst them.

This I already knew but what came next was a bombshell. Mother explained that she had known before the marriage that my apparent ‘father’ was a homosexual and would never be a real husband or father her children. The trade off of making him respectable in the eyes of society by marrying him she, in return, would live a life of luxury and be allowed true freedom; to choose her own friends and even lovers if discreet.

Still clutching the letter I dropped my hands to my lap closing my eyes as if this act would force the facts into my numb brain. Who then, in the name of God, was my real father? I read on.

At that moment I heard the front door close and heard ‘Uncle Harry’ calling out, ‘I’m home. Can I join you or do you need some more time?’

I smiled and feeling the long suppressed love well up inside I shouted back, ‘Come on in Dad. Let’s celebrate.’