I don't quite know why I'm republising this right now - but do I have to have a reason?
The Original Alec
by alecweston @ 2006-05-12 - 00:20:58
I was named after my mother's most glamorous cousin, who was at boarding school with my dad. Beautiful, charismatic. Alec brought my parents together, which was a disastrous idea.
"But if I hadn't met Your Father," my mother says, clinging on to her wedding ring 55 years after the divorce, 10 years after he died, "You would never have been born." It's a heavy responsibilty.
Anyway, I think that, at school, my dad had a crush on Alec. In fact I know he had a crush. When he left school, he kept a diary. In it there are pages of lyrical peaons of adulation for several boys, deperate speculation about whether he would see them again. Alec was his favourite.
What I don't know is whether the love was recripocated, or consumated.
My father met my mother at a party at Alec's house. My mum adored Alec, too. They were both 21, both virgins heterosexually speaking as far as my dad was concerned. (Although, come to think of it, he may have visted a female prostiute and never told me. He told me a lot of stuff like that, see below)
After they met the diary (which also includes a powerful account of his trip to Republican Spain in the Civil War - I'll blog about that some other time) - after my dad met my mum, his diary goes blank for several years.
They got married in 1939. My father failed the medical for the army and didn't fight in the war. I was conceived in May 1942. The result, I truly believe, of their first fuck. Actually, that's what my father told me. Now, he was a strange man, not always capable of telling all the truth (his truths were so complicated) but not having sex with your wife is not something any man would brag about to his son. Surely?
The day I was born, at two o'clock in the morning, he started writing his blog (ha, ha, Freudian slip) writing his journal again. He is ecstacically happy, obsessed with the idea of me. His passion is almost frightening.
My parents agreed that Alec should be asked to be my godfather, and I should be named after him. A telegram is dispatched, via British Armed Forces, and he replies, delighted. The last telegram or letter he ever sent.
Alec died in action a few weeks later.
And my parent's marriage? I will never know if it ever lived at all.
