ONE NOT ONE.dna
The
result of my DNA test
taken in the hope of finding out something about my father.
destiny and destination
we are all
recyclable
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I dreamed one night that my mother was Neanderthal and my father Denisovan (closely related hominid from eastern Eurasia). Lovely dream. After all, a recent study found that less than 10% of our genome is distinctive to Homo sapiens. Papa,
alas, was
not Paul Robeson! There was a huge list of distant relatives on my mother's side, the closest of them sharing only 4% of my DNA, and the only one registered on the site that I knew (my mother's cousin's son) shared only 2%. He lives in Northern Ireland. My mother's brother's children (born in Coventry) do not feature at all, nor does my other surviving cousin, son of my mother's sister. The only person listed on my father's side shared a considerable 17% of my DNA, and called himself iantococks.
On investigation, I found this surname does not exist. But Tocock without the s is an extensive family, mainly in southern England, mainly in north Hampshire and around Reading in Berkshire. I was born near Reading, in a posh maternity hospital, as you will have read on the previous page.
My percentage of shared DNA falls between these two extremes. On Googling the family name Tocock I found that there is a website devoted to two extensive family trees. This turned out to be a red herring in a cul-de-sac. At the bottom of the selection of DNA matches shown at the top of this page is a Thomas Cocks... Two entries above him is a Luke Fleming, who is a "shared DNA match"...
But,
to get back to the circumstances of my conception. My mother wrote
in her posthumous letter to me: I was bored [in Belfast] and miserable after my wonderful year in Canada. There were no entertainments, there was the black-out - and when I met some RAF officers whom I found glamorous, resting between "ops", I was delighted. I went to dances and parties, and eventually became infatuated with one particular pilot - tall, handsome, fun-loving, extravert (longish, narrow face, like yours), bright eyes, always bubbly and with a Mephistophelian cast of countenance, really. I offered no resistance because I was simply curious. Although I was 32 I didn't know what "it" was all about. I was totally naive..." At the time of my conception, however, she was 33. And there was indeed an RAF Squadron based at Sydenham in Belfast (now the site of the Belfast city airport) and a half-hour's walk from where my mother lived. This was not the squadron which was based at Aldergrove, north of Belfast, and which was sent to the Mediterranean in 1941. It was only on hearing stories of people who shared DNA on commercial banks that I started wondering if I might find something out about this dashing RAF pilot who gave my mother her first and only sexual experience - at a party. Maybe not against a wall, but probably not anywhere salubrious. Following my joining ancestry.co.uk, I received a kind letter out of the Californian blue telling me that 'iantococks' is an Ian Cocks whose mother was Amy Pirie, and shares maternal grandparents with me. An Alexander Herbert Pirie had two children, one of whom was Ian's mother and the other, apparently, was my father, Alexander Norman Pirie. This surname may be an anglicisation of the French surname Poirier (pear-tree). Pears can be made into perry, which is also a British surname. Among the officers listed as active in Belfast in 1940-41 then was Flying Officer A.N. Pirie.
Born in Edmonton, Middlesex on 23 Jan 1915 to
Alexander Herbert Pirie and Hetty Cribb, Huntingdon
is not so far from Newmarket, Bury-St-Edmonds and Mildenhall airfield,
where my mother spent four happy years as a Meteorological Officer
in the WAAF. However, this is not the most interesting piece of information. On investigating Ian Cocks' ancestors via a very dubious gadget or facility called ThruLines®, I found Scandinavian ancestry.
Continuing down the rabbit-hole on ThruLines®, I get a different lineage:
Salpetersjudar in Swedish means Saltpetre-Jew, presumably a Jew who made saltpetre. So I might be just a teeny-weeny bit Jewish, though it seems pretty unlikely that Sweden at that time included Norway and Finland. Saltpetre is used in glass-making. Glass-making came out of Venice, where the original Ghetto was established...but I am taking this ancestry 'with a large pinch of salt'.
This beautiful maternity hospital, in Wokingham, Berkshire, is where I was born. How did my mother come to or choose to go there ? It is a bizarre coincidence that several of the extensive clan of Tococks (no relation to Ian Cocks alias iantococks) have been living and/or marrying in the Reading area (one actually in Wokingham) for several generations. The question remains, however : where was I between being born in the above manor house/hostel and being adopted in 1942 by my mother and transported to her mother and sister in Belfast. She had, as already mentioned, joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and was not de-mobilised until at least September 1945, so most of my first five years of life were spent without her, one of them in a place unknown with people unknown. My mother was born in the same year as Astrid Lindgren, author of the Pippa Longstocking books. Astrid, too, had to go to another but nearby country (from Southern Sweden to Denmark) to have her first child – in the only Danish hospital that did not require the name of the inseminator. Presumably that "missing year" caused some sort of lacuna in my consciousness, for I remember only once asking about my father when I was very young, and just being told that he was a pilot killed in the war. That seemed to satisfy my curiosity until I reached my 80th year, though at the age of 40 I had officially requested the identity of my parents, and was none the wiser about my father (Father Unknown). But – I was genuinely surprised, though definitely not shocked to learn – my mother turned out to be the woman whom I had always referred to as my "Aunt" Mattie (Martha), with no notion that she was my mother, despite the striking physical similarities between us, especially the spathulate thumbs.
To most people this lack of curiosity would seem astonishing. Did some event in my childhood quash my curiosity about families ? If so, was it a trauma I underwent during my first year ? If so, did this trauma permanently mark me not just as a solitary, an outsider, but a person who has remembered very little of his past at any given time, and didn't even give any thought to remembering until he was well past seventy ? I think so. On reflection, I see my past as a series of boxes in a life-long Daze which must have arisen from the blank first year spent somewhere which might or might not have been a cosy home. Each daze-box was defined and to a large extent sealed by encounters and normal childhood events such as going to school, change of school, leaving school, pleasant or traumatic holidays and so on. After that there were Denmark, dogs, megaliths, Jim, Gregorio, Paris, Malcolm and Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, to name but a few already mentioned in this tedious typescript. Each daze-box had a different atmosphere, a different haze of unawareness and partial awareness. I am now in the last of my hazy-mazy daze-boxes, and, with declining faculties, pondering uselessly on why I have lived as I have lived. . .and what happened during that first unaccounted-for year, after which I was plonked down as an oddity in a family where all emotions were suppressed or unfelt. My occasional tantrums must have been very shocking. Most of them were at the dinner-table, because there were so few things that I would put in my mouth apart from toast, porridge, milk puddings, stewed fruit: baby food ? I must always have been thought of as Mattie's wee (spoilt, left-handed) bastard, and the 'unconscious awareness' of this must also have contributed to my hazy sense of separateness. On the other hand I don't think I was the only boy who, in a18-month religious phase, prayed (in his warm bed) to God every night to take him from this world of conformity, anxiety and stress. Although she was easily dominated by men, Mattie was not 'the marrying type'. She valued her independence, and didn't 'want to wash a man's dirty socks and underwear for the rest of her life'. She washed a goodly amount of mine, however. One reason for adopting me might have been a desire for maternal fulfilment that did not involve intimacy with and dreary laundry-service to a man. I wonder if she actually knew my father's surname...or, for that matter, his real first name. Presumably Flying Officer Pirie did not know (and might not have cared) that he had impregnated her. Both my mother and I regretted it. Because of me her life was a chain of trials and perplexities. Did my father even remember her ? Even if his name had been on my birth certificate, how would I have followed it up in the days before Netscape and Google ? Would I have wanted to ? Pointless to speculate how he would have reacted to a letter from me. The problem with genealogical trees, of course, is that they do not record dalliances, illicit unions and illegitimate children. Thus they are idealised. And when consanguinities are considered, half-siblings often are not. There is also a whiff of racism. An even more glaring deficiency is that they are patrilinear, and it is only through mitochondrial DNA that the female line can be traced...back to our disastrous beginnings in Africa.
ANCESTRY by (who, alas for me, but fortubately for him, was not queer)
by Anthony Weir
SUCH
BURDENS ON THE MIND "Marrezi,
turp
Life
made misery. ...as
faliu ligjes sime, 'Wer,
wenn ich schriee, hörte mich...?' Along
the valley of death I've always been walking Our
comfort-manufactured metal hearts dissolve in rust ...të
shpirtit, në një kend, If
99% of the ever-expanding Universe is unknowable
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