What a lesson to us all. The Archbishop of Canterbury's public acknowledgement that the man he grew up with, believing to be his father, was not his actual father, is an example of dignity and grace in the face of enormous adversity.
Growing up with parents whose identity you never question, is something I've always taken for granted. I am sure I am not alone in this.
I know that my mother as a child in a household where money was scant, sometimes imagined that she was in reality, a princess, carried off by gypsies as a baby, and left on her "parents'" doorstep. She was however, an imaginative child.
My father on the other hand, was brought up by three women: his grandmother, his mother, and his aunt. His mother had divorced his father when he had got "the railwayman's daughter with child". The two of them fled to Australia.
His mother re-married when my father was 13. A difficult age to accept a new step-father. It was not an easy relationship for many years. However, Grandpa Jones was the best of grandfathers, and through being a wonderful Grandfather there finally developed a mutual affection between my father and his step-father.
My father never found his real father; his own premature death at the age of 55, meant that he died before the age of the internet. He also felt that in some strange way, it would have been an act of disloyalty to his mother.
I suppose that I, armed with even the most basic of information, could attempt to track down the Australian family branch.
It would be scratching my father's itch. Only time will tell whether it will become my own. Or whether it would be an act of disloyalty to my father.
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