Nobody's Child

The night I was conceived Norma, my biological mother, was at a party and met the man who would be my father but whom I would never meet, and about whom I would eventually discover only the barest facts. That’s all she can remember of the event, or so she has told me on the few occasions when I’ve plucked up the courage to enquire about it.

My official files, which are the only means I have of finding out who I might be, tell me that he was a Pakistani called Khan. My mother has never plucked up the courage to mention that fact. I suspect that interracial relationships were something of an embarrassment to a working-class girl at the time. The Sixties might have been “swinging” in London, but I doubt very much if they were in the suburbs of Manchester. I was also later made to feel that having an Asian father was in some way shameful.

Norma was old enough to know better than to get pregnant by accident. She was twenty-two by then, not sixteen, but it seems that pregnancy still took her by surprise. Perhaps she’d led a particularly sheltered life until then. She lived alone with her mother, her father having been drowned at sea in 1943, just before Norma was born; at least that’s the story that has found its way into the files. Maybe my grandmother went to a party as well and was infected by the sudden drop in inhibitions that times of war can sometimes bring about. Perhaps the “lost at sea” story was just a useful cover for the truth.