Europe Day, May 8, 1945. I was a victory celebration baby, born into austere postwar Britain, where cold houses, rationing and shortages of everything were our way of life.
Meanwhile, back in Canada with his English wife, my father Patrick Johnson (not his real name) was setting out on a successful career which ended, I am told, with him working as head foreman of the Vancouver water company. He had four children, two boys and two girls, one of them born around the same time as me.
Alan Franklin is the editor of the Surrey-Hants Star in Aldershot, England. His Canadian father has refused contact.
My mother had married another Canadian soldier, Corporal Franklin of the Paratroop Regiment, who also swiftly followed the pattern of the abandonment of British wives and girlfriends at the war’s end. So we were left to manage as best we could, my mother working at the post office telegrams department, doing administration for the Surrey Police and other office jobs to support us both. Meanwhile my grandmother kept house and cooked meals for my mother and me, my grandfather (a steam-engine driver) and my aunt (a civil servant).
Single parenthood was not fashionable then, and I knew no other boy without a father present. Sometimes I wondered who and where he was, but questions were discouraged and I just got on with my life until, in my teens, as a young reporter, I interviewed a private detective. This man traced missing relatives. I asked him to trace Corporal Reginald Franklin, not knowing then that he was not my real father. He did, with a “last trace” of him detected through a contact with the Canadian Legion.
When I revealed my research to my mother she was horrified; Franklin was even more of a dead loss than Johnson, whose last communication with my mother, some months before I was born, was a card posted from Canada in 1945 “wishing you well next year” — at my birth. This was the full extent of Johnson’s help to his secret English family.
My attempt at tracing Franklin flushed out the hitherto-unsuspected existence of Johnson. My mother was a little hazy about where he had come from and, Canada being a large country, I presumed I had no hope of finding him, so I forgot all about it until 1984, when I had just been appointed to my present job as editor of the Surrey and Hants Star in Aldershot, Hampshire, England.
Stories of the Canadian war children appear frequently in the Surrey-Hants Star.
My colleague John Walton, an experienced journalist and formerly the deputy editor of Soldier Magazine, also based in Aldershot, said he was off on a trip to Canada and would look up Johnson in the phone book. As he was headed for Vancouver he immediately discovered P. Johnson — there was just one in the phone book — and returned with his address. I then wrote a simple letter to my father, asking him to get in touch. He never did, although he subsequently claimed that a letter had been sent to me and that he even tried to visit me at my home in Alton, Hampshire.
This seemed unlikely, as I have never been hard to trace, being a well-known local journalist all my adult life, with my byline and picture appearing in papers going through tens of thousands of doors. Additionally, when I was a reporter I called every day at all the local police stations, so I was not exactly unknown to them! Neither did a letter come back marked “address unknown,” so my letter was certainly delivered.
Having deduced that my father didn’t want to know me, I again got on with my life, enjoying my family and career. Then, in 1998, Mark Maclay wrote a book called Aldershot’s Canadians, which told the stories of the 330,000 Canadian servicemen stationed in the Aldershot area during the war years. I reviewed it and sent a copy to Lloyd and Olga Rains, whom I knew as the couple who discovered fathers of war babies.
This was now the computer age and everybody, more or less, was easily traceable. It took Olga just a few minutes on her computer to come up with the address of several Johnsons, one of them my cousin Linda who, in turn, led me to my dad.
Linda and another cousin, Jeff, were friendly and helpful. I sent Linda pictures showing the family likeness, which I think is obvious, and saying that if there was any doubt I would happily arrange a DNA test, which I subsequently tried to do. But I hadn’t reckoned on the cold refusal of my father to show any interest in me, or agree to anything which a court didn’t order.
To say he didn’t want to know was an understatement: Linda told me he was a Shriner (a branch of Freemasonry) and a member of the Lutheran Church, and it was obvious that the last thing he wanted was me rattling a few skeletons round his doorstep. I thanked Linda for not doubting me and explained all the reasons why I was telling the truth. If I had wanted a “Canadian family” or to live in Canada, I already had my birth certificate stating that I was the son of a Canadian serviceman — my mother’s husband Franklin. So I could get a Canadian passport at any time. Because I am married to an American I could also get U.S. residency and, eventually, citizenship, so I was not motivated by a desire to move to Canada.
As for money, my wife and I presumed that if we ever traced my father he would probably be a bum on the streets. What other kind of man would abandon an unborn child and never inquire as to his welfare? In our view, he would need our help, not the other way around, and our help would have been gladly given.
I had two phone conversations with Patrick Johnson at that time, both of which were a trifle odd. He claimed to have flown to Britain with his wife in 1984 or 1985 and spent some time looking for me, even asking the police my whereabouts. We moved from the home in Alton, from which I had written the letter, in 1985, but we sold the house to close friends who could have located me in two minutes. I also told him in my letter that I edited the local paper, so finding me would not have taxed Sherlock Holmes. Mr. Johnson also claimed his wife has written me a letter, but I didn’t receive it. Very odd.
In his first phone call he said coldly, “I am not your father” — which begs the question of why he would claim to have tried to find me. After his first phone call, I dashed over to Guildford to talk to my mother and she was contemptuous of his denials.
I called him back and he said something that struck me as curious: “I can’t change my story now.” He admitted he had “been intimate” with my mother, but claimed it was only before his wedding in December 1943. My mother disputes this and says that in 1944, when both she and Patrick operated different switchboards in the Farnborough area, Patrick chatted to her and asked her over to the Canadian hospital to meet him. This led to their affair, which lasted some time. She was then posted away, and they resumed their relationship in 1945. She says he was aware she was pregnant and sent her the postcard wishing her luck.
Patrick claimed to know the name of my “real father” but wouldn’t reveal it. How this ties in with his claim that he didn’t see my mother after his marriage, I don’t know . . . I think that Patrick is ashamed of “playing around” shortly after his wedding. Had my conception happened first, perhaps he would have admitted it. However, the dates make him look bad, and he is ashamed to admit fathering me.
He promised to see me when he next came to England, in the summer of 1999, but I felt this was too long to wait. Foolishly, in 1998 I wrote a long and detailed letter to Johnson about my life, hoping this would interest him in my family. Instead, he has subsequently used it to make unpleasant points about me.
I last spoke to Patrick Johnson on September 3, 1999, when the phone rang at home at 9:30 p.m. He had been on his annual summer trip to the Isle of Wight, an island off the coast of Britain, where his first wife came from. He stays there with his late wife’s sister, who, I understand, lives in a house bought by Johnson.
He was calling from Liphook,
