Prospectlife
Illustrations by Kate Hazell
Home front Family secrets
Hephzibah Anderson
As a story-loving child more likely to be found playing detectives than the now-suspect doctors and nurses, I yearned for a family secret. My parents had both been raised with them: in my mother’s case, her dad’s Jewishness was kept hidden from her; in my father’s, paternity remained an unsolved mystery (Pétainist French Catholic priest or local milkman?).
But I wanted my own, preferably one that, hewing to the family theme, permitted a new and improved pa to step into the frame. Nowadays, I’d have done what every teenage sleuth is presumably doing and ordered a DNA testing kit online. Instead, I fired hopeful questions at my mum as I grew older: had there really been no passionate affair at the time of my conception? Even a tepid indiscretion would have sufficed—my parents met in a commune, after all.