Finding Dennis
My grandfather went missing in 1950, when my father was three months old. This is the story of my search to find him, and repel the long shadow that his disappearance cast over for generations of my family.
Grandmama
My grandmother, my father's mother, was a tough old bird. She drank whisky like a fish until her 80th, every day, by the bottle, but never before 5pm. “I don't want to become a lush,”she used to say, in her clipped, well spoken, English tones.
Dennis
Grandmama had two children by her first husband, Dennis. Geoffrey was the older, then my father, Simon. When my father was three months old, Dennis disappeared entirely. As my father used to put it in his cups, “he took one look at me and disappeared. “Or, “he went out to buy milk and a packet of fags and never came home.”
All my father knew about him was that he was 6’5” “in his stocking feet,” and that he was a violent, bad man, who had beaten my grandmother and abandoned her, leaving her in destitution.
My father
Two generations later, I still felt the loss. My father used to sit drinking and crying, saying over and over, "he could be anybody. If I just knew what happened to him."
I was about seven when I resolved to find Dennis. I would find Dennis and I would heal my father's broken heart and he would be able to be a father to me, to love me, like he had when I was small, and he was well.
The Search
I love little me for her ambition. Bearing in mind, though, that the salvation army and private detectives had already tried, it seemed unlikely. But I was named Ceridwen for the witch, the goddess, the crone in my culture. It is a hell of a name to give a child, even though I'm growing into it now. I feel like when I made that resolution, I was worthy, maybe for the first time, of my namesake.
Long lost family
When I started to watch the TV series, "LONG LOST FAMILY" with my wife Lauren, I had recently finished my PhD.
After every episode, I turned to her and said "if only somebody could do that for my father."
She is a patient woman, so she waited three while seasons before she turned to me and said in her Irish brogue, "well, are you a researcher, or are you not?"
So I started to look.
On the way, looking for Dennis, I found my father's aunts and uncles that he never knew he had, and put them in touch with him.
And I found out my father's whole family tree, my family tree, going back generations. I gave him his history.
But when it came to finding Dennis, I followed hundreds of leads and found only dead ends.
Stowaway
Until, after more than 600 hours of research, I found, by chance, the record of a stowaway on a ship to Australia, in about 1960, who had escaped his chains at Sydney Harbour. The name matched, somewhat, and it sent me looking in Australia.
That led me to a voting record, that was not quite the right name, and a grave, with the wrong name and year of birth, but it was the closest I had found yet. If it were him, he would have died three months after I was born.
Tambourine Mountain
I contacted the local paper, hoping to put in an advert. The owner of the paper ran a half page story with a photo, no charge. Tambourine mountain is like that: it is a small town in a rainforest and there are spirits in the trees and kindness and generosity run through that place like a river.
The newspaper went out, and then my email statrted to ding. I had found him. His friends were messaging me! I had found him, and there he was lying, in an unmarked grave, half way around the world, and 65 years of mystery were solved.
Memories
His friends called him “Tommy,” and he was a “big”man - in spirit and presence and stature. He made coffee tables, ate pies and pasties a lot. He liked to tell stories and when he lit up his cigarette and picked up his drink, the world stopped to listen. He loved the mountain and was, himself, well beloved. He died in his sleep of a massive stroke and did not suffer.
He never spoke of the life he left behind.
I found it very hard to reconcile what my father had told me with the man these people were talking about. It wasn't even “charming man abusive to women,” it was gentle giant, polite, considerate, kind to the woman who cleaned the cafe he owned.
They also told me that he didn't have lipomatitis. And that's the twist in the tale.
Twist in the tale
Lipomatitis is a condition which causes large, painless lumps on the forearms. In males, they are very visible. Lipomatitis is caused by a dominant gene. If you have it, one of your parents must have it. My father has it, I have it. His mother does not have it. Which means that his father must.
Dennis, his friends told me, did not have lipomatitis.
This was confirmed when my father's cousin sent me one of my favourite gifts of my life. It was a book that my grandmother had made of pictures of Dennis. It was full of love. There were pictures in it of Dennis, with his shirt off, at 30. He was completely free of lipomatitis.
Dennis, who I had spent so much time chasing, was not my grandfather.
Which I thought was very weird, because they are the absolute spitting image of each other. Like, the SPITTING IMAGE.
I couldn't figure it out. I just sort of shrugged my shoulders and gave up on finding my grandfather. I found Dennis but that unmarked grave had only led me to more questions.
I talked about this to my father's cousin, who has sent me the album, and who i had discovered during the search. I told her, the criteria for being my grandfather were that you had to look like Dennis/my father, have lipomatitis, and be living near my grandmother when my father was conceived.
Geoffrey the elder
She gave me another photograph. It was of a man with lipomatitis, who looked like Dennis and like my father. We checked the records and he was living near my father at the time of conception. It was a man called Geoffrey.
He was Dennis’ brother.
I checked Dennis’ war record again, and he stayed on after the war. He was away in the army when his wife, my grandmother, had an affair with his brother, Geoffrey, and conceived my father. Dennis went to war. His brother knocked up his wife.
Making sense
Geoffrey, who had six children by four wives, and was married five times to four women, and couldn't meet a woman without making a pass at her, had an affair with my grandmother.
When my grandmother told my father, “your father was a philanderer, a violent man, he deserted me,” she was telling the truth. It’s just that the violent philandering father was not Dennis. It was Geoffrey, and Geoffrey’s six children were my father's brothers and sisters.
Dennis, like so many people would in that situation, ran. And in the aftermath, my grandmother blackened his name to his children and anybody who would listen, and taken the lie about who my father was to her grave.
And that man, lying in his grave on Tamborine Mountain, was the black sheep of his generation as I am the black sheep of mine. And he was my blood.
Journey to Tamborine
In the end, I empathised with him. I couldn't leave him there in the ground, without a stone. I had to go stand over his grave and lay a wreath and tell him what happened, that I had cleared his name and told the truth and uncovered the secrets that my grandmother, my beloved grandmama, had taken to her grave and that he could be at peace.
The community that helped me find him remembered him with love, and I worked with them to make a remembrance service for him, for the 40th anniversary of his death.
I flew out there, and I said a few words, and they laid a stone for him. He went from gunner to captain over the course of the war, so I chose the inscription "there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England."
They had a piper, and a military chaplain and sent him off with full honours and I don't really believe in all that stuff, but when I left, I felt a strong sense of having done right by the other black sheep of my family.
I laid to rest the ghosts that had haunted four generations of my family. I broke the curse with my own hands. I thought of Wuthering Heights and the sleepers in the quiet earth, and how I had, finally, done right by them.
Casting Spells
So did I heal my father's heart, in the end?
Alas, no, some spells are beyond even the clever hands of this white witch. He is still as lost and broken as he ever was. He still cries bitterly in his cups. He is trapped in an iron prison of his own making, and I cannot reach him. Some fortresses cannot even be breached by magic, by truth, by love.
But some magic still remains in me. Some power I have yet. Some spells, I know how to cast, some hearts, I know how to heal.
Paying it forward
I can never repay the community that so generously welcomed me and helped me find out the truth and helped me lay those ghosts to rest, so to pay it forward, I have reunited one long lost family a week since I returned from Australia.
I'm well past 50 families, now, and if I ever think that I'm a bit useless, really, I think that probably, somewhere right now in the world, some of those people are chatting on the phone. Maybe breaking bread together.
Some of them send me pictures occasionally, most don't, but it makes me feel some kind of way to know that it isn't just my heart I've healed. Of course, she who heals her heart, heals the hearts of her children's children.
But I've also healed the hearts of other families, I've been the light that has dispelled shadows that were cast over peoples entire lives.
And if I never do another thing in my whole life worth doing, that'll be enough to say, at the end, it all meant somthing.
Such a beautiful story! I love that you have carried on with finding ‘the lost’. Seems like it could be a podcast!
I love this. My own grandad made up a story about his background which I later found to have been completely untrue, I understand why he did it but I only found out by chance when I was 41 (he died when I was 5). So this tangled tale resonates with me, thanks for sharing