THE SEARCH FOR MY FATHER by John Stepney of Findon.......

My wife, Pam, often asked me, "Why don't you start researching your family history?"  Never having known anything about my father, (and perhaps even more amazing had never spoken to my mother about him), I was reluctant.  After several times of asking, I finally decided to start my family history.

I had my mother's surname, Stepney, and there was a blank space on my birth certificate where my father's name should have been.  As a child, in Hooley, Surrey, the subject of my father was never raised — perhaps I instinctively knew that it was a "difficult" subject and did not ask questions.

When I was ten, Mother and I moved back to Lancing as my grandmother wanted to formally adopt me and my mother, who did not want this, felt the need to get away from the family. When I was in my teens my Mother married and had another son, my half brother Stephen.  Sadly he was killed in a motor cycle accident when he was nineteen.

On starting my research, the first person I asked "What can you tell me about my father?" was my Aunt Elsie.  She had a wonderful memory and was able to tell me a lot about him.  He was a Canadian soldier called Gerry Staines (or some surname similar).  She knew him quite well as he spent time with the Stepney family, and described him as a quiet softly spoken man.  Over the years she told me she had seen many similarities between me and her memories of my father.

Then I asked my mother and, although we had never spoken about my father since my birth 56 years ago, I did not find raising the subject with her difficult.  I well remember that first time I asked her about "Dad".  She told me he was a Canadian soldier she met while she was working in Chipstead in Surrey.  His name — Gerry Staines (which turned out to be a letter wrong, which prolonged my search for him), his age (wrong again, by six years) and various other details which although interesting were not concrete enough to start my search.  She could not remember his regiment or any service details.  The most important detail she told me was that when I was about a year old, he was sent abroad and after a few weeks she got a letter from a friend of Gerry's saying that he had been killed in action and enclosing a battered signet ring bearing his initials which they had taken from his body. 

"It's no good looking for him as he was killed in the war", she told me as she gave me the ring.  Had she got any of the letters they exchanged, I asked.  She thought she might still have some but was not sure — she would have a look.  After a few days, I asked her again about the letters but she said she did not have any.

Mother told me that Gerry was a little older than her, and she thought he was a commercial traveller for a grocer before joining the army.  My mother was working at the time at a nursing home in the village of Chipstead in Surrey.  The nursing home — Shabden — was three miles from the village of Hooley where she lived with her parents.  To get to work she had to go past a camp of Canadian soldiers who were stationed in some nearby woods.  Gerry Starnes arrived in Chipstead around November 1941 and my mother met him during the early part of 1942.  They started to go out together and he was a frequent visitor to the family home.  He had been married but was now divorced and she told me she had seen the divorce papers. 

After Gran found out about Mum's pregnancy she was banned from having anything to do with Gerry again.  She was concerned that the scandal would affect my grandfather's business.  However, they used to meet in secret and later they used to write using Mum's friend's house as the address.  Gerry had seen me when I was a few days old at a property Gran had at Lancing where mother was "sent" to have me.  Unfortunately, Gran was present one time when Gerry tried to see us and she sent him away with a few scratches on his face.  Later he was stationed at Caterham before being sent to France a month after D-Day when I was about a year old. 

I then wondered if mother did have some letters and did not want me to see them so Pam and I hatched a plot so that she would be out of the house, thus enabling me to do a search.  We arranged to take mother out to lunch one day at a nearby restaurant and when it came to selecting a sweet, I said I did not want one.  While she and Pam ate theirs, I said I had to return something to a friend, thus giving me the opportunity to visit her house and do a search.  I did not find anything.  I felt awkward deceiving my mother like this but felt I had to do it — sorry, Mum!

I then asked my uncles and aunts for information on my father and they were most helpful.  Two of them did give me the correct spelling of his name — Starnes, but as mother had written to him I thought mother's spelling must be right.   I would have saved months of my search if I had started off with the correct surname.  They told me all they could remember, about his personality, his army life and their memories of him.  Nobody had heard the story of his death that my mother told me.  Who did I believe?  He had spent two Christmases at Kingsley in Hooley with the Stepney family so they all knew him.  I then found out that my mother did not tell my Gran of her pregnancy.   One day, Gran had a phone call from the matron at Shabden Park (the nursing home where mother worked) asking if they could meet.  They met halfway, on the seat outside Chipstead church.

"Do you know your Peg is seven months pregnant and the father is a Canadian soldier with a wife and baby who he has not seen back in Canada?" said matron. 

I hate to think what Gran's reply was, or even worse, what was said to my mother when she got her alone.