Alfred Downs, by Jacqueline Downs - part two

"Now I had two half-brothers, both called Mick..."

In December 2014, I wrote a piece for Ted Kessler’s My Old Man website about my dad, Alfred Downs. In it, I told the story of how he’d died when I was ten, on my parents’ wedding anniversary. And if that wasn’t sad enough, I threw in how he’d found his mum dead when he was around 13, and then how his first wife had left him and their toddler to run off with his best friend.

A year later, Ted got in touch to ask if he could use the piece in a book he was compiling of tales of people’s fathers. In May 2016, I attended a launch party for the hardback, and the paperback came out the following year. That, I thought, is that.  

But it wasn’t.

In the early hours of 2 February 2022, returning from a drunken night out, I had a sudden urge to check an email account that I rarely look at. It’s linked to my neglected blog, and on the rare occasions I log in I find hundreds of mailing list messages and the occasional former student who’s tracked me down.

Amongst the unread Duolingo reminders and theatre token offers, one email from August 2021 caught my bleary eye. In the subject header were two words: Alfred Downs.

Oh, I thought. This must be someone who’s read my piece in Ted’s book, tracked me down via my blog, got my email address from the contact page, and is writing to say that they liked it.

Well, yes.

And no.

After an introductory paragraph in which the writer, D, mentioned having read the piece from the book, came this:

‘This is a little difficult to say, but I believe there is a possibility that Alfred was my natural grandfather, from an earlier relationship.’

I felt suddenly, sharply sober.

D gave information that left me in little doubt that the man in question was my dad. He had given an approximate year of birth based on some other info he had; he knew my dad’s job and where he had lived.

I replied to D, to acknowledge the email, apologise for my tardy reply, and to confirm a few of the details he had given. It was the early hours of the morning, and I had nowhere to go with this new information. I sat with it for hours.

D was awake in those early hours, too. He emailed me at 3am with specifics – things he had clearly been holding back until he had heard from me, such as my dad’s full, correct date of birth.

Oh, and he attached my parents’ black and white wedding photo.

I knew it was possible to get most of this from the internet, with a subscription to an ancestry website, some basic information, and access to public records. But D gave details. My favourite was this:

‘He may have sung in local pubs and clubs in his spare time.’

Yeah, he did. I talked to my existing half-brother about this. Michael, known as Mick, was the toddler whose mum left him with our dad when she disappeared with another man. Mick remembers our dad singing in a pub run by friends. (My dad didn’t pass that talent onto me, and I’m pretty livid about it.)

D also said that he’d heard my dad had ginger hair, but that it wasn’t clear from the wedding photo.

It was a black and white photo; I assured him that my dad was a ginger.

And, after a few emails back and forth, I found out some more about how it went down.

Settle in.

My dad, recently a single father, met a woman, R, at a party. She was widowed with a son of a similar age to my dad’s son. My dad and R had what we might refer to as a fling. She became pregnant.

This is where it gets all Victorian novel.

R’s in-laws were wealthy factory owners of some social standing. R worked in their factory while her son was looked after by her mother-in-law. For R to be pregnant out of wedlock in the early 1950s was considered shameful. R was given an ultimatum – agree to give her unborn child up for adoption or lose her existing child to her in-laws. They held all the power.

To further protect the factory owners from more ‘shame’, R was sent to another part of London to live with her sister during the pregnancy. She became yet another woman who disappeared from my dad’s life.

Over the course of several emails, I discovered from D that R’s new baby was adopted and renamed – wait for it – Michael. But he prefers to be known as Mick.

So, now I had two half-brothers, both called Mick. It didn’t take long for them to become known – for the sake of clarity – as Mick the Elder and Mick the Younger.

Mick the Younger traced R in the 1980s, having had a very happy and loving upbringing with his adoptive parents. He found that R had remarried and had another son, a child with severe Down’s Syndrome who needed full-time care, which she and her husband lovingly gave him. This bit is going to become quite important, so pay attention.

Mick the Younger found, via the adoption agency that traced his birth mother, that R had fought hard to keep him. During their meetings, which lasted until R died in 2000, she found it impossible to talk about the circumstances around his conception and adoption. It simply hurt too much. For years, all the information Mick the Younger had about his birth father was a first name, a rough age, and a profession. There was nothing on his birth certificate where his father’s name should have been; the only information he had was that which the adoption agency had told him – the first name, approximate age, and occupation.

Then one day R gave him a surname. I’d assumed that he’d asked, and she’d eventually given in, and given up. But it didn’t happen like that. One day she told Mick the Younger that her youngest child’s condition was her punishment for giving Mick up for adoption. Because ‘your dad’s surname was Downs’.

That killed me when I was first told it; it kills me now, still.

At R’s funeral, Mick the Younger met R’s sister.  She said, ‘It's not a conversation for today but let's get together soon, and I'll tell you all about your father.’ 

Soon never came, because R’s sister died before she could talk to Mick about his dad. My dad.

I did say it went all Victorian novel, didn’t I?

There is so much I don’t know about this story, because as my sensible sister-in-law Sue (wife to Mick the Elder) says: ‘There is no one alive who can tell us.’

So, I don’t know if my dad got R pregnant and abandoned her. I hope not. I don’t want him to have been that guy. D always said in his emails to me that they don’t think my dad knew that R was pregnant. It seems that she just disappeared from my dad’s life, as women were wont to do, in his experience.

But what I do know is that I have a new half-brother, a new half-nephew and two new half-nieces, one of whom was born on the 14 February 2003, the 24^th anniversary of her paternal granddad’s death.

And finally.

In April 2022 I went to stay with Mick the Elder and Sue. Mick the Younger and his wife, J, drove to meet us in a pub for dinner. We’d shared photos, so we knew who to look for. From our place at the door, to their table in the middle of the restaurant, our smiles beamed a bridge across the room.

We hugged. ‘Let me buy my little sister a drink,’ he said. We started talking and we did not stop, for hours. It was where I heard more of the stories included in this piece. It was where I first saw my new half-brother cry. It was where we toasted our dad, and R, and all that they had been through, together and separately.

It was where my family grew.

And it would not have happened if there hadn’t been a beautiful space on the internet where I was welcomed to write about My Old Man.

This is a place where we can share tales of our mothers or fathers. All posts edited by Ted Kessler. For any submission, please email farfromthetreeTK@gmail.com. Thank you for reading. Please do share.