“They should be out looking for my father”

Shortly before she passed away, my mother mentioned that my father only ever spoke of his own father once. They were driving through St. Helier, Jersey, at Christmas—this was probably in the mid-1950s—and passed a Salvation Army band playing carols. My father became angry and blurted, “They should be out looking for my father.”

That was it. An entire father-son relationship distilled into 8 words of infinite loss, anger, and abandonment.

My father’s anger at the Salvation Army was, of course, a projection. The ‘Salvos’ have long been an unofficial Missing Persons Bureau; they still offer a family tracing service. They went ‘round the pubs on Friday nights, quietly collecting donations—and looking out for people who’d gone to ground but surfaced for a drink.

My grandfather Charles had dropped off the radar a decade or so earlier.

Looking for my grandfather

My grandfather’s first marriage ended prematurely when my grandmother died of tuberculosis in 1926. My father was four years old. Charles remarried in 1930 and moved into his stepfamily’s orbit in Bristol. Somehow relations became—or had become—strained with his father Albert back in Wales.

When I started looking into my family, one of the first documents I received via a cousin who contacted me out of nowhere (a not unusual occurrence in genealogy circles) was my great-grandfather Albert’s will, dated 9 February 1937.

In it, Charles—and, implicitly, my father—were disinherited.

I’d long assumed that Albert drew up this will in response to Charles walking out of his second marriage and disappearing, abandoning my father to his stepfamily (who, with much gratitude to them, looked after him well).

I dated this to 1935-36. Yet the paper trail, I recently found, proves otherwise.

1939 England & Wales Register

On 29 September 1939, in response to the outbreak of war, a register was compiled of everyone in Britain. (I hadn’t found this because it was called a register, not a census.) It shows my grandfather still with the family in Bristol.

Within the next little while he was gone. In 1940—the year of the Battle of Britain—my father, then 18, was an engineer with the Bristol Engine Co., a civilian flight-testing new warplanes such as the Bristol Beaufighter. I suspect Charles waited until my father left home and then, in the fog of war, did likewise.

This raised a question: what triggered the 1937 will that disinherited them both?

The only clue I have is a notice in the Taunton Courier and Wester Advertiser dated 23 January 1937—just 17 days before Albert’s will. Under the subheading ‘More Speeding Cases’ it reads: “For excessive speed with commercial vehicles fines were imposed on the following drivers… Charles Hubert Hallett, Gloucester Road, Bristol £1.”

Did Albert really disinherit Charles (and my father) over a speeding ticket?

Generational trauma

We shall never know. What we do know is that Charles was on a slippery slope of misfortune, both blameless and self-inflicted, most of his life. The tuberculosis. The speeding ticket. Disinheritance. The walk-out. (Even in death it didn’t get much better; his de facto partner tried to claim his estate, much to his second wife’s anguish.)

Charles’ position in his birth family became untenable. He recreated himself in Bristol only for the same thing to happen again.

The same pattern blighted my father’s life—and in turn mine. Abandonment, rejection, loss, emotional and economic instability; migration, reinvention, repeat.

At least I discovered and named what I was dealing with—generational trauma.

As I describe in Living with ghosts – confronting generational trauma, my first instance of inherited trauma occurred when I ordered a copy of my grandmother’s death certificate and found myself experiencing my father’s unprocessed grief.

Looking for myself

We speak of inherited patterns such as abandonment, grief, financial struggle—yet they are all planets in a constellation revolving around the dark sun at the core of our trauma: a collective failure of nurturing that manifests in most families to some degree.

I went looking for this dark sun and found it: the mother wound, humanity’s single point of failure, the break in the chain of transmission of nurturing that ruptures families over generations, leaving millions of people on the same slippery slope as Charles.

The Salvation Army are still out there, looking for missing people, as they’ve done for decades. At the time my father blurted that “They should be out looking for my father,” his father was already dead. The past closes over itself and falls into silence, save for the occasional register or newspaper clip.

Yet there is an archive that remains open. The tremors of the past live on in our DNA, patterns of resilience as much as of self-destruction. The real search lies within.

Image: London, Salvation Army band by Martin Pettitt on Flickr (CC-BY-2.0)