Happy, ever after

Once upon a time, I had a stepfather I didn’t much want and because of it, and well-versed in Ladybook Tales, I cast myself as the innocent victim and he the storybook baddie. As a child he seemed a veritable ogre with his loud voice, forceful manner and sharky teeth, and it’s hard to be much other than a victim of circumstance when you are five and taking a bit part in someone else’s drama. In any case, he had three grown up children of his own. Two handsome boys, all Gillette-jaw and sparkling eyes and a girl, who, well, looked a bit like her father.

As we grew up, these adults would pop in and out of my life – Sunday lunches, Easter, holidays, and I grew fond of them as you would any adult you meet as a child. They grew up themselves, from young adults to married with children, and with their busy, jet-set, lives, they were in many respects, the best role models I ever had.

Over time, they were lost to me – distance, family feuds, illness and finally, yet another divorce brought about what felt like closure. Later, at a time when it felt like a lot of the ties to my childhood had been severed, I finally found the nerve to make contact again on Facebook, and they were kind enough to welcome me back.

It’s always magical when you clap eyes on someone you, through the tunnel of time, last saw as a child, who is now the same age as when I first met his father. Last night I saw for the first time, the son of my step-father’s eldest son – the brother who was always nice to my sister and I, despite what had happened to our birth families – and the only one of the three step-siblings’ many children I really got to know.

Both exactly the same as how I remembered, and completely different from how I expected, he reminded me, at times, so much of his father, whilst also being exactly the same little boy I once knew – this golden- haired toddler who sat on my lap as a when I was still a child myself; who no doubt inspired me to have children of my own; about whose name I remember discussing (perhaps even influencing?) with his mother when he was still just a bump.

It’s magical too, that the woman I always looked up to as a child, for her good humour, grace and kindness, and sometime protection against my marauding stepfather is playing a sort of fairy godmother role to me now. The boy’s mother, my step brother’s wife, who took my side when I was defenseless (for all I enjoyed goading the ogre as a teen by trip trapping around the house as loudly as I possibly could) is now helping me in a way no one else could, and for that I am eternally grateful.

We had a lovely evening, of wine and food in a pleasant Italian somewhere down the charismatic ice cream-coloured cinematic streets of Notting Hill, which seems as much a far cry from my current life in “gritty” Tower Hamlets as I can possibly imagine. But ties forged in youth run deep, and we chatted like old friends, about the past, the present, and then, half cut, waxing lyrical about current events, and my favourite topics, given half an audience: of religion and politics, conspiracy theories and the multiverse, before I wended my way home across London and back to the present, with some homework, a friend and a new found sense of hope that this post-script to that story might have a happy ending, after all.