Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 20

1942 – OCTOBER 18TH

This is my mother, Kathleen Lillian Muntz, and my father, Edward Alfred Willment. From a technical point of view, this photo would have benefitted from a longer exposure, but my parents weren’t together long enough for that.

They were divorced when I was too young to remember my dad. My mother then went through all her photo albums and cut out every single picture of him. So I didn’t even know what he looked like until I got my grandmother’s albums.

Having been brought up to believe my father was the Devil Incarnate and the nastiest child-hating creature in the universe, it was wonderful to be told by my cousin Sheila, who I met for the first time many, many years later, that my father had been a lovely man and she had adored him more than her own father – my father’s only brother, Uncle George. It was so nice to hear that, but it was too late to undo all the unrelenting damage my mother had done.