Another sister? Kimberley Leston was thirteen months older than me. She wrote for The Face, the Guardian, the Independent and other publications. She’d died in 1995. Her colleagues said they treasured her vivacity, candour, humour, generosity and optimism. They described her writing as deft, clever and fearlessly frank. When I learned she’d taken her own life, the sadness clutched at my chest. I grieved for her, my unknown sister, familiar now in every photo. If only.
But then the DNA came back. I felt the same seismic wave as when I’d compared my DNA with that of Jo Bonnier’s son. Jeremy called and tried to explain. We were all in shock. Les’s son was not my brother. My forebears came from Lithuania, the ancestral home of the Lestons. He was Scandinavian. Not Jewish.
We did another test with another Leston family member.
I was Les Leston’s daughter. Kimberley’s sister. But Les’s son was not his biological son. The news was not well received. In finding my story, I felt I had dismantled his. I wanted to ask if, for him, the truth was better than living with a lie. If somewhere he’d harboured a suspicion? If it changed his memories around his relationship with Les? But like many bearers of bad news, I was no longer welcome.
Les had died in a nursing home in 2012. He was ninety-one. I’d found my father five years too late.
Les Leston had been born Alfred Fingleston. His parents changed their name when he was a small child. He was also known as Daddio, the jazz drummer in a band called the Clay Pigeons. When he died, Wikipedia and classic racing magazines and websites ran obituaries. There was a lot to say. He served in World War Two as a mid-upper gunner. He was a racing driver with over fifty starts on the F1 and F3 circuits. After racing, he became the F1 pit reporter for the BBC. He drove a red Lotus Elite with the DAD10 number plate around London. He moved to Hong Kong to develop his car accessories business and hosted a jazz radio show there. He owned a large cabin cruiser for weekend forays out into the South China Sea and rode a BMW 1200cc motorbike. In the evenings he propped up the bar at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a bon vivant who talked a big story.
I often think about his number plate, driving around London. DAD10. Another small fact gave me the shivers. Two decades before, I had begun to write a historical novel, The Gallows Bird. It was set in London in the mid-1800s, and one of the characters was a silk merchant and tailor. He’d come to me in the early hours, his name and face clear in my dream: Mr Fingleston. I had described him as like an ivy bush of a man, small and messy, with a moustache drooping below his chin.
Jeremy and another cousin had created a family tree. And there was Mr Fingleston, a London silk merchant. There is one photograph of him — the real Mr Fingleston, not my character. He has a drooping moustache and messy hair — an ivy bush of a man. A platelet of knowledge slipped into my bloodstream.
Around then, Jeremy mentioned another sister. Lucy Leston, who’d changed her name to Teya. She was born in Hong Kong when Les was sixty-two. I found her on Facebook. We did the DNA to be sure. She’d grown up as an almost only child. My sister, the same age as my oldest daughter. She came to visit, awed by so many nieces and their children. The children made labels to help her remember all our names, and we folded her into our family.
I now had all the pieces, but instead of joy, the results plunged me, for a time, into depression. Ambiguous loss, my therapist said. Loss that occurs without closure or clear understanding, such as when your loved ones are missing through abduction or war or terrorism. At the bottom of the list of such losses is adoption. You cannot mourn in public because there is no defined death. As an adopted person, you also have no right to mourn for those you’ve never met.
Over time I let in the spirits of all those gone before. The sadness lifted, and I found myself at peace with them.
I am the terminus a quo — the starting point. I have begun a new dynasty in a new land, just as my ancestors did when they left Eastern Europe.
In this land, my children and grandchildren belong in every way. I tell the little ones stories about their history. How Mendel and Feiga Finkelstein, my great-great-grandparents, fled from Lithuania not long before the Odessa pogrom of 1871. They came to London and changed their name. I show them photos of my grandmother Kitty Fingleston. In one, she lounges in a deck chair, perhaps on a ship or beside a pool. She has short blonde hair and wears an off-the-shoulder top and a wide grin. ‘She looks so modern,’ my eldest granddaughter says.
I tell them about my father, a bon vivant, a man who flew in Lancasters in the war and raced cars for the fun of it. And I tell them how my mother’s bravery gives me courage. How she picked herself up after losing everything and made an exciting life for herself. These are now my stories to tell. They are my inheritance, the jewels I am handing down to future generations.
I am still grafted onto the tree of strangers. My official birth certificate remains a legal fiction. Adoption laws around the world continue to sever the past as if it does not exist. I do not appear in my parents’ documents or on their headstones. I have no right to
