There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You (26 page)

Every night during the run I would queue up in front of the big mirror in the wings, where we all checked out quick changes, and give myself the once over before I went on. It used to take the audience at least thirty seconds to realise I was naked and then I could hear the whispering going round the audience. My poor father, on the opening night, asked my mother to tell him when I was about to come on naked and he just hung his head and closed his eyes! One night the stage door man called my room and said I had a visitor. Always a bit of a worry as you can imagine when you are doing a part with nakedness. I went down to the stage door to be greeted by a very elderly gentleman in a beautiful tweed suit and cape and deerstalker hat and a silver-topped cane.

‘I am so sorry to bother you, Miss Bellingham, but I wanted to congratulate you on your performance and also ask you a rather personal question, if I may?’

‘Fire away,’ I replied.

He paused and sort of stuttered out the line, ‘Do you have help from wig creations?’

It took me a moment to understand what he was referring to and it was only when I caught his eye wandering to my nether regions did the penny drop!

‘Oh no,’ I said trying not to laugh, ‘I just ruffle it a bit!’

That’s showbiz, folks, everyone a winner!

So yes I suppose one could say things have moved on since the seventies but, to be honest, the nakedness is much the same as ever, perhaps even more so, I would say.

It was fun to do the programme and remind myself of my legacy. ‘What legacy?’ I hear you cry. What indeed, but I do hope I will be remembered for something a little more interesting than gravy!

21

MY BIRTH FATHER

An extraordinary thing happened yesterday when I sat down to write this chapter, a very important chapter and, because of the way I have been writing this book, it will also be the last one I finish. I went to make a cup of tea in the afternoon and turned on the telly to catch the news. I was reminded that it was 4 August 2014 and one hundred years exactly to the day Britain declared war on Germany, at eleven o’clock that night. I returned to my desk to start writing about my birth father and realised that he was with the National Guard serving overseas from 21 June 1916 until 19 May 1918. How weird that I should start his story on such an auspicious day and that my father, Carl Seymour Hutton, about whom I know nothing really, was part of the Great War. My wonderful adopted father, Captain D.J. Bellingham DFC AFC Bar, played his part in the Second World War too.

As I was having to face up to the fact that I was coming to the end of my life, somewhat sooner than I’d ever imagined, in my prime with a husband I adore and a family I love dearly, I was drawn once again to how my life had begun and where I had come from.

It had taken me over two years to pick up the research on my real father. I don’t know why I had this reluctance to do so, though I think I was quite badly hurt by the way things ended up when I had found – and then lost – my birth mother.

Years ago I went in search of my birth mother Marjorie Hughes; it seemed the right way round to do things. I suppose instinct tells you that the mother is the one to find, but looking back I now realise for me it was absolutely wrong. After Marjorie died in February 2012 I was very upset by the fact that nobody in her family wanted me to attend the funeral, and did not tell me she had died until it was too late for me to get there. I remained a shameful secret forever, even beyond her lifetime. I suppose for a long time I had felt that I didn’t want to set myself up for another fall. I had a very loving adopted family who I adored and maybe I was just letting myself in for heartbreak if I delved any further into my birth family. My sister Jean, God bless her, was as upset for me, I think, and after discussing the problem with her daughter Martha, they decided Martha would do some more research into my family.

There was very little to go on except a ship’s log of passengers going to New Zealand in August 1947. The ship was called the
Rangitiki
and was used to carry American widows to New Zealand to meet the families of the servicemen they married or were engaged to during the war. My mother’s name is there and so is my father’s, she as a passenger, and he as a member of the crew. I remember Marjorie telling me about this handsome man she met onboard on the way back to the States. She had a photo of herself that he supposedly took of her, though she was not allowed to take one of him. Once back in New York she was completely smitten by him and they had an affair. She then returned to Canada to tell her parents she was going to get married. Discovering she was pregnant she rang Carl and broke the news, only to be told that there were plenty of other men on that boat and he questioned how she could be sure the baby was his.

When I heard this sorry tale I was full of righteous indignation and pronounced my father as a rotter, but now I have mixed feelings. I have discovered a thread in my heart that had nowhere to go and finally after sixty-six years I think I know where it ties up!

But I am getting ahead of myself. I didn’t know what to expect when Martha started to look online but after some digging, lo and behold, she found me a second cousin, a girl called Niki Pittman. We have since done a DNA test and are indeed related as second cousins. Niki’s great-grandmother was my father’s older sister Berthe. Niki wrote to me:

I was born and raised in Rupert, Idaho – population just over 5,500. You don’t realise what a unique culture small towns have until you move away. I never felt like I fit in there. I was an energetic competitive girl who lived in a place where women were supposed to take a back seat. I was always curious about my ancestors in Europe.

I think it is fascinating that this is a girl writing about life now in Middle America and not a hundred years ago! Though I can see where she is coming from, and I agree about the culture of a small town in somewhere as vast as the States. In the UK we mostly come from small towns and villages but they are still always reasonably close to a city. We have a handle on what is going on, but for a girl in the middle of nowhere it must have been stultifying. However, Niki used this desire to find out more and set about discovering her roots. There was an old doctor’s bag in the shed full of photos and many of the answers to her questions.

Suddenly a whole new side of the family opened up to Niki, who began to research her family history in some great detail. Her great-grandmother’s family were homesteaders. They travelled over a thousand miles from the only home they had known, to move to Idaho and set about establishing a home and farm. Government made land available and a family would have to file a claim and then work the land for three years. There was little irrigation to deliver water to the land and many mistakes were made not only by the new settlers but by the engineers in charge. It was a very hard life.

Meanwhile Niki discovered the artistic side to the family too, and it is a side to the family of particular interest to me given the career path I have followed. Another of Carl’s sisters, Leona Hutton, was a silent film star. Between 1913 and 1916 she made over fifty films – lucky cow! My father also had a niece called June Clyde who was a fairly successful actress, and came over to Britain for a period and made several Sherlock Holmes films. My sister has managed to get me videos of these films. It is also bizarre that I have a framed set of cigarette cards in my study of film stars of the day, and there is June Clyde among them! I’d always thought it funny as I grew up that no one else in my family had shared my theatrical side, but suddenly I had a theatrical pedigree after all.

So after lots of digging by Niki and my niece, here we had my father’s family. There was my grandmother and grandfather Hutton and six children, of which Carl was the youngest and Berthe was the eldest. There was fourteen years between the two of them and between them there were three more sisters and a brother, Richard Ray. As the years went on it seems that Carl had less and less to do with his family, and they really knew very little about what he got up to in his life. The one person he seems to have remained in touch with is Berthe, which we know from some intermittent postcards. And yet as a baby I think he was adored and spoilt by his sisters and very much the centre of attention.

When Carl returned from overseas he went back to St Joseph’s where he had spent his childhood and worked as a welder in the same firm as his father. According to a family Bible, he married a lady called Helen Kasper on 19 April 1924 in Chicago, Illinois. Niki thinks they had a son called Jackie as there is a photo of a baby, and it was taken in Chicago and sent to Uncle George and Aunt Bertha, with the message ‘love Jackie Hutton aged three and a half months’. Niki says the handwriting is the same as Carl’s. There appears to have been another child born four months after their wedding – but later the birth certificate of a third child states the first child has died but Niki can find no details. By 1930 a census shows that Helen was claiming to be a widow and living as a boarder in rented accommodation with her son Jack. As we now know my father did not die until 1959, one can only assume that Helen had her reasons for not telling the truth.

Niki thinks the son, Jack, ended up in California, where he died in 2003. I could have found him and met my half-brother, how weird is that? Jack married a Phillis Hesson in 1950 and they were married for twenty-odd years before they divorced in 1970. Niki wrote to her to try and find out more about what happened to Carl. Phillis responded to say that she and Jack were married for twenty years. They had a son who died from cancer at the age of forty-one and he was childless. Jack and Phillis divorced in 1970 and his mother Helen told Phillis that Jack had moved to Hawaii and married a Japanese woman with whom he had a daughter. That was the last that Phillis heard. She told Niki that Jack didn’t know his father at all and that Carl’s family didn’t approve of the marriage and persuaded Carl to end it.

So, folks, I may also have a Japanese niece in Los Angeles. Niki has an old address but nothing current, though there is still a house in the area in Jack R. Hutton’s name. Niki wrote to the address but has not received an answer. She has discovered a new address in Hawaii for Yumiko (my niece) but no phone number as yet. This story could run and run, unlike mine, unfortunately.

As Niki has said at the bottom of one of her emails: ‘Carl led an unusual life and I believe he kept almost all of it a secret from his family. I think there is so much left to uncover!’

So the question has to be asked now, what is it about Carl that has set me off?

As Niki has said when she first saw photos of him, there is something in Carl’s face that is captivating. He looks like a sort of James Cagney character, the cheeky chappie who is hard to resist but not likely to give you a happy ending as a woman in his life. He was obviously doted on as a child, and I get the feeling that he inherited the theatrical genes as much as his sister Leona. But was his life a disappointment to him? Niki says she only talked to one person who ever met Carl, and he was a young boy at the time, maybe eleven or twelve. He told her, ‘He was a great storyteller and told me about a gold ring that he wore made from gold he had prospected for in Alaska. I got the feeling my mother and grandmother tried to keep me away from him.’

Certainly he seems to have told different ladies different stories and there is evidence amongst all the paperwork that he had gone by several different names. But why, I wonder? There is no evidence he was a criminal. He spent the last ten years of his life in New York working in security for the government, it says in a newspaper article, but then we all know the newspapers always write the truth! It actually says on his death certificate that his occupation was custodian which is another way of saying caretaker.

So everything seems to have two sides, nothing is quite straight with our Carl. But suddenly he came to life for me because, as I was sorting the photos, I laid his childhood picture next to one of my grandson Sacha and it was like the flash of a camera. The two of them as children look almost like twins. It took my breath away to see a replica of my father Carl three generations later! The interesting thing with family is we only ever see exactly what is put in front of us at the time.

‘Oh, he looks just like his father,’ we coo as the new baby is presented to us, or ‘she is the spitting image of her mother’. But think of the actual gene pool. Two lots of grandparents, and parents, not to mention the secrets!

When my sons were born they looked exactly like their father (thank God!) but then as they have grown they are a mix of both of us. Facial expressions are picked up unwittingly in families. When I discovered Marjorie, my birth mother, I tried hard to see a resemblance but it was difficult, and to be fair she always said I looked like my father. As a child no one ever guessed I was adopted because I looked so like my sisters but I put that down to nurture over nature. My parents were such a strong influence on us, and family was so important to them, we were imbued with that spirit of love and family from day one.

But now I am suddenly faced with a whole other side. My real father lives on in the eyes of his great-grandson. What would he have made of me I wonder? Now I long to talk to him, to show him what I have achieved. Though maybe he wouldn’t want that because I have such a strong feeling he let himself down in life and would not want the reminder of his failure.

It was clear that there was an awful lot of love from his sisters and I couldn’t help but wonder what he must have felt when he left America for Europe. Did he worry about being killed in action or was he looking for a rush in the thrill of the battle? Over the last few days as I have written about my father, there has been so much discussion about what happened to our brave soldiers in the First World War and what the men who fought in the war thought and felt, and the thing that most impresses itself upon me is that so many people have said their loved ones never talked about the war when they got back. I remember my father, Donald Bellingham, only once recounting how he felt when he went on a bombing tour. He was trying to explain to one of my boyfriends I think about death and fear, and he confessed that he had been excited. Yes his mouth went dry with fear as he climbed into the cockpit but it was a positive fear. He was doing something positive, fighting for freedom, and he was determined that he and his plane would beat the bastards!