LITMIR.BIZ

      Jack Neale left behind wives and girlfriends in Canada and England, finally settling in Australia.

      My mother was the youngest of seven children, and as all the older brothers and sisters had left home, she was expected to stay with their widowed mother. She worked for Marks and Spencer in Ipswich, and she was twenty-nine years old and still living at home when she met Jack.

      I don’t think my mother had a boyfriend before Jack, and in her own words she did “adore him.” One of my older cousins who met him when she was a teenager said he was a very charming man. He was accepted by my mother’s family and regularly went out for a drink with one of my uncles. He had parcels sent to Agnes’s home from his mother in Canada, apparently with his own particular brand of coffee and other items that were not available in Britain during the war.

      Eventually he asked my grandmother for permission to marry Agnes. My grandmother approved, but said she didn’t want my mother to go off to Canada after the war. That was all right with Jack because he said he wanted to settle in England anyway. Apparently my grandmother never really trusted him, so that’s the reason why she did not want my mother taken overseas. I don’t think they actually did get engaged, because soon after this Jack was posted to Yorkshire and my mother found out she was pregnant.

      I don’t believe that Jack was ever serious about getting engaged, let alone marrying my mother. It was just a ploy to have sex. Later in my mother’s pregnancy, when it began to show, my grandmother threw Agnes out of the house and she went to London to stay with a friend.

      Although it may seem strange these days, an unmarried mother in 1944 was treated as a social outcast for bringing shame and disgrace on her family. There were no income-support programs as there are today. For an unmarried mother to bring up a child on her own was tough. Many such children were adopted, and it was not unknown for parents of unmarried mothers to commit their daughters to life in a mental institution, even though they were perfectly sane.

      I was born in a London hospital. My mother was a very determined woman and she intended to keep me from the start. My grandmother did relent soon after I was born, so Agnes returned home and went back to her job at Marks and Spencer.

      In April 1944, my mother took Jack to the Borough Magistrate’s Court in Ipswich for maintenance costs. An affiliation order was granted for Jack to pay £0.50 per week until I reached the age of sixteen, not exactly a fortune by today’s standards. Apparently he did make a few payments to my mother, but Jack’s solicitor wrote to inform her that Jack was returning to Canada. With obviously no conscience on his part, the payments ceased.

      One thing that surfaced during the court case was that Jack was already married in Canada with two sons, but was apparently separated from his wife. It was presumed, however, that he was returning to his family in Canada.

      After the war, I think my mother must have destroyed any documents relating to Jack, because when I got to the age when I was curious about my father, there were only a couple of old photographs left.

      I started to look for Jack Neale about 1980, without making any headway. I soon came up against the Canadian Privacy Act — a brick wall that I was unable to get past. This act has denied many thousands of English and Dutch war children the right to information about their fathers, and it is still in force today. Even the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not allow access to this information.