The Autobiography of Ron Payne

In contrast with some others I had very little, or nothing, to do with them and that little not good. My paternal grand-parents are a blank somewhere east of the Odra. Let us call them A Gorski and B Anonymska. I once thought they might be Jewish, but it seems not, although they were probably the source of the small amount of Jewish DNA , if it is real, that shows up in one DNA test, along with all the stuff from Poland (mostly) the Baltic states and the Czech Republic. That was no surprise: from as early as I can remember I knew that I was half Polish.

My father was one 'Ronnie' Gorski, a Polish musician. He may have gone the rounds with Stanley Laudan's Polish Dance Orchestra; my mother certainly knew Laudan, who like most of his band, was certainly Jewish. There was a Polish resettlement camp nearby so it could have be there that the magic happened. Pan Gorski disappeared from the records after 1951, when his named popped up in a local paper in the Midlands, and from my life a good deal earlier. All I got from him was a name. Instrumental in that was my paternal grandfather, William Lee. He ran the local grocer's and general store. No doubt, like many of the lower middle classes, he wished to be thought of as respectable, so he must have been disappointed when his only daughter successively produced sons, in April 1947 and April 1948, after two summers of love with different men. My father, though the second of these,apparently offered to do the decent thing, but had a lucky escape when my grand-father sent him away with a flea in his ear because he was Polish .So I was born Ronald Lee, not Ronnie Gorski II. That at least is a relief.

It was common in those days for a child of an unmarried mother to be brought up by the grand-parents, effectively as a sibling. That was my brother's fate. However, I was the spare and also, apparently, looked too Polish for my grand-father's comfort. The immediate solution was to place me within the wider family. My mother's aunt Nancy, and her husband, Tom Bowler, lived in a big house in Watlington. They would adopt me and bring me up with their two younger children, my mother's first cousins,and my something-or-other cousins, who were in their teens .For a while I became their little brother. My earliest memory of all is of grand-aunt Nancy looking in on me as I lay in a cot. Rather it is now the memory of a memory. It used to pop up regularly and unbidden well into my teens, and I would strain to see more detail than it offered. Now it has to be summoned faintly by an effort of will.

I was on my way to being Ronnie Bowler, and no doubt living happily ever after, when 'sasser' (father) Tom died suddenly of a chest infection; Nancy died 6 months later of cancer. The family split up and I was back again with my mother, brother and her parents. I soon learnt the pecking order. I remember having a fight with my brother because he had been given a packet of fruit jellies. I hadn’t, and he would not share, or even give me one . I got a walloping from my grandpa.

I was being lined up for a children's home when a local woman walked into the shop and commented that I looked a nice little boy. My grandfather immediately made her an offer she couldn’t refuse and I was privately adopted when I was three; I remember going to court in High Wycombe and meeting a very tall barrister who had to bend to get through the door - thing John Cleese in his gown and wig.

Because of my age I was fully aware of what had happened and where I had come from - we still used the shop - and I would run into members of my former family from time to time. (Later, I even found myself at the same School as my brother for several years and, by a mutual understanding, we did not speak to or acknowledge each other at all.) My grand-mother, who would probably have kept me, always looked haggard; she was at least browbeaten. Lee could be very angry and even violent; years later I learnt that he had split my mother's head open with a stick. It was really my brother who had drawn the short straw. His mother became increasingly paranoid, delusional and hearing voices, and he followed suit. He is now mentally incapable of looking after himself and is in permanent care. I am the normal one.
My Bowler cousins-cum-siblings, Dorothy and Eric, came to visit me once after I was adopted but were discouraged from coming again, to allow me to settle into my new family. I did not see them again for 40 years. Then, one by one, they died of cancer. There were, I recall, three funerals and a wedding (the bridegroom, another of my generation, has since died of a heart attack). I last spoke to Dorothy on the phone when she was in her hospice and she cried about all the wasted years. I did not realise how close she was to death and I still feel guilty that I did not jump in my car the next day and drive to Oxfordshire.

Wiping the tears from my own eyes I continue . By adoption I acquired resident grandfather, Edgar Payne, but he wasn’t a cuddly old man. (He probably wasn't Edgar Payne either, his children thought that he was the son of the local squire and a maid, who had been palmed off onto a local family for a cash consideration.) He was jealous of his own position and envious of me. He would steal things that were meant to be mine. It was his hobby; he would wander down to the local shop (my ex-grandfather’s shop) and pocket, if he could get away with it, his Black Beauty tobacco. On the way back, if he was taken short, he would relieve himself in the street; he might as well have been a Belgian. I have one memory of his being taken back to Norfolk on a holiday, or rather of his return in the middle of the night. There were pebbles being thrown at the window; no sooner had he arrived than he had decided he didn’t like it and refused to stay, so they had to drive all the way back. When he died I went into school and said ‘Ask me how my grandfather is‘, ‘How’s you grand-father?,‘ He’s dead!’ We were that close. Besides, we lived in a 2 up 2 down cottage (soon to be condemned) and at last I had got a room of my own, complete with bedbugs. Things could only get better.