My dad wasn't around while I was growing up. I was the product of a bit of a scandal of a relationship, my mum was 5 years older than him and let's not dwell too long on her being a youth worker and him being a youth club member. They got pregnant with me to force approval of their relationship, had somewhat of a shotgun wedding and he disappeared 10 months after I was born, after spending a significant amount of time after my birth in the pub.
All I knew about him was his name, and that I wasn't important enough to stick around for. I knew where he was from, the basic details of their relationship but not the really crappy bits, and I knew I was somewhat of an isolated case.
Back in the seventies and eighties, married parents were the norm rather than the exception. My granddad did his best to fill the consistent father figure role until his death when I was 15, but when things got rough in my life, there was always an idle fantasy kicking around about how one day he would come back and scoop me up and all would be right with the world.
I would watch programmes like Surprise! Surprise! - and they would reunite people who hadn't seen each other for a long time, and it would all be emotional and tears and happy ever afters. That's what I expected to happen one day.
And then, shortly after my sixteenth birthday, that day came. I had just come downstairs from a trip to the loo as the phone started to ring. I picked it up. A gentleman with a Scottish accent asked if he could speak to me. I confirmed that I was me, and he asked if I knew who he was.
My powers of deduction were strong that day. I knew who he was. We excitedly stumbled through an introductory conversation, while in the background my mum anxiously chewed her way through half a pack of nicotine chewing gum. I learned I had two half-sisters, and a stepmother, and a whole other family in Scotland that I knew next to nothing about. I learnt I had missed the opportunity to meet my grandfather as he had passed away a couple of years earlier, but that I had a living grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins.
Mind. Blown. Earlier that year my quota of grandparents had been somewhat decimated by the death of my mums father and 10 days later my step-grandfather - who had accepted me as a grandchild better than his son did as a stepdaughter, and so this whole new family was amazing to hear about.
He explained that he had called up my grandmother on the only number he had for her, once he felt I was old enough to make my own mind up, and asked if he could be given a phone number for me.
I don't know what thought processes went through her head but for whatever reason she decided that was a reasonable request at this point in the proceedings and handed it over.
Had he left it another four weeks or so, that ship would have sailed, as she too passed away, having never really recovered from the loss of her husband earlier in the year. I remember my mum telling me that the doctors had said that she was physically well enough to have withstood numerous attacks of the bronchitis that sits on her death certificate as the cause of her demise- but it seemed her heart and mind could not and she had given up any thought of fighting it.
After that phone call had ended, I was so excited and full of hope for the future. I DID have a dad and he had arrived just in time to make a positive difference in my life. No longer would I have to sit and enviously listen to all the stories from my friends about their own dads silly behaviour, I could join in! The next day I had school, and I couldn't wait to get there and share the news with my friends, and more importantly, be just like them.
What was to follow was not what I envisaged. A letter followed the phone call, with a handful of photographs of my new family in another country, and containing shakily written paragraphs, all full of the excitement of having found me once more.
It was a huge amount to take in for a girl preparing for her GCSEs, and who was shortly thereafter also grieving the third grandparent to depart via the local crematorium in eight months.
It gave me something positive to cling on to during that time, which in hindsight I should probably be grateful for, because at the time I did not know what was ahead.
If I had, I might have wished for that phone call to have arrived that little bit too late.
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