One Saturday morning in 1998, I was on the receiving end of one of those rare shocks in life which actually make your knees buckle, forcing you to sit down before you fall down.
I’d opened a letter from a post-adoption agency. It told me my biological mother had discovered my identity and whereabouts after years of searching. Apparently, the clincher was seeing my face in a photograph in a newspaper; I was a ringer for my birth father.
The letter said she would like to meet me, but would respect my wishes and never contact me again if I refused.
I’d known since the age of ten that I’d been adopted as a three-week-old baby. My birth parents were young and unmarried, and a baby certainly didn’t fit in with my mother’s free-wheeling lifestyle (even though she married and had two more sons a few years later). But I had never tried to find my biological parents.
Brian Viner (pictured right with his half-sister Samantha) was a 36 year old father of two with a third child on the way when he discovered he had five younger half-siblings
It was a happy childhood, even though my father died suddenly, aged 60, when I was 14.
But, having been raised as an only child, if I’d yearned for anything while I was growing up, then (apart from battery-operated Subbuteo floodlights) it was a brother.
I was 36 years old that morning in 1998, and a father of two, with a third on the way. The yearning for a brother had long since faded now I had children of my own. But I still sometimes thought it would be nice.
Well, soon I would discover I had five younger half-siblings: three brothers and two sisters. They had all known of my existence.
I knew hardly anything of the circumstances of my birth, except my biological parents named me Robin, which three weeks later was changed, almost anagrammatically, to Brian.
In time, I would forge strong, loving relationships with my siblings.
Physically and temperamentally, I would find uncanny similarities, but also a few striking differences. I would become a walking seminar on the age-old debate as to which is more dominant in the shaping of a human being, nature or nurture — and if it’s biological or adoptive parents that shape a person’s life.
The issue was brought to light this week by the experience of businessman Richard Mason, 55, who discovered the three sons he had raised for more than 20 years were not his when doctors told him he had been infertile since birth.
He believed the same man had fathered all three boys during an intermittent four-year affair with his then wife Kate, 54.
The eldest refused to provide a DNA sample, saying: ‘As far as I’m concerned he’s my dad, and that’s that.’
Richard in turn said: ‘I’m not their father, I know that, but I’m still their dad.’ It’s perhaps proof blood isn’t always thicker than water.
Brian (pictured as a baby with his adoptive mother) revealed he previously withheld from searching for his biological family as it felt disloyal
The debate was also recently at the heart of a British-made cinema documentary called Three Identical Strangers. It tells the astounding story of Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, identical triplets separated at birth, who didn’t meet or even know of each other’s existence until years later. They were American, and born within three months of me in 1961.
In 1980, 19-year-old Bobby went to college, and was bemused when fellow students kept greeting him as if they knew him. It turned out Eddy had studied there the year before, but had dropped out.
One night, a friend of Eddy’s drove Bobby to Eddy’s house, 100 miles away. The two men gazed at each other in wonderment.
The press picked up the story, which was read by David Kellman’s adoptive mother. She stared in disbelief at the photograph of Eddy and Bobby. They were replicas of David. Soon, the triplets were a media sensation in the U.S.
They went on chat shows, where audiences marvelled at how alike they were not just physically, but in other ways; they all smoked the same brand of cigarette; they were all attracted to similar women.
Until that point, the documentary chronicling their story is upbeat. But then it takes a desperately dark turn. It transpires that the agency that placed each of the boys was involved in a clandestine psychological experiment to test the nature/nurture argument.
When they discovered all this, the brothers began to think of themselves as little more than laboratory rats. One of them sank into a depression, with tragic consequences.
Brian says it seemed like betrayal to look for his genetic parents without telling his mother (pictured: siblings (from left, back row): Polly, Brian, Marcus, Samantha and (front) Brian’s nieces Megan and Sascha)
My own story is much happier. That Saturday morning 20 years ago, after absorbing the shock of a family I’d never known about, I ran to our local park where my pregnant wife, Jane, had taken our two young children. I showed her the letter.
While expecting our first-born five years earlier, she had gently tried to persuade me to find out about my genetic background, so we’d be able to supply more than half the answers to all those questions to first-time parents about their medical history.
But I couldn’t do it. Aside from the can of worms it might have opened, it would have felt terribly disloyal.
I’d been a tricky customer for a year or two in my mid-teens, and Mum and I had some blazing rows. But never once did I detonate my nuclear option: ‘You’re not even my real mother!’
I don’t recall it even occurring to me. And I wasn’t willing to remind her of it in adulthood, either.
In all but DNA, she was my real mother. Even to look for my genetic parents behind her back would have seemed like a betrayal.
But now I had this letter, I realised I had to follow it up.
I duly met my birth mother, Pip, 20 years ago this week, for dinner. She told me she’d gone on to marry and have two sons after giving me up for adoption. And she was still in touch with my birth father, even though their relationship had petered out not long after I was born.
He, too, had married and had a son and two daughters. I started making arrangements to meet my five siblings for the first time.
In a world without text-messaging and WhatsApp groups, we communicated by letter and the occasional phone call.
A couple of months later, Jane and I and our children Eleanor and Joseph arrived at a house in a village near Cambridge. We’d been invited for Sunday lunch.
Brian was astonished to discover he had seen his sister Polly (pictured together) in the mid-Eighties before they knew they were related
The woman who opened the door was Polly, my half-sister on my birth father’s side. We were conspicuously, recognisably, unmistakeably brother and sister. We fell, a little awkwardly, into each other’s arms.
Astonishingly, I’d seen her before. In the mid-Eighties a couple of famous England cricketers, during an Ashes tour of Australia, had, at the end of a boozy corporate lunch beside a beach in Sydney, picked up two pretty waitresses and thrown them into the sea. It was just a bit of high-spirited fun, but was deemed an unseemly way for international sportsmen to behave. The cricketers were rapped over the knuckles. The two waitresses made the UK front pages. Though I didn’t know it at the time, they were my sisters, Polly and Samantha.
They had a younger brother, Marcus, whom I met for the first time a few months after that memorable lunch at Polly’s house. He ran a freeze-dried herb business with his wife, but was also a brilliant artisan carpenter.
I’d flunked woodwork at school, so it seemed there was no brotherly connection there, and I couldn’t see much physical resemblance. He is a sight more athletically built than I had ever been; I remember wincing a little a year or two later when he took his shirt off at a family party.
In fact, all my siblings are trimmer than me. That must be where nurture enters the equation; as an only child I sat at the dinner table with my parents, eating adult-sized portions, and fostering a mighty appetite and love of food (and wine) that I have never quite conquered. By contrast, my siblings were all competing with others for their share.
Brian says in the early years he and his siblings looked hard for their similarities (Pictured: Brian's birth father, Polly, Marcus and Polly's daughter Megan)
Samantha settled in Australia. We didn’t spend an extended amount of time together until 2002, when we met in Melbourne. As with Polly, we both felt an immediate bond. We talked for hours as we seized on physical quirks we had in common, like an unusually wide gap between our big toes and the other four. It wasn’t exactly going to get geneticists talking, but it made us happy.
As in the case of the triplets in Three Identical Strangers, however, I think in those early years we all looked too hard for similarities, succumbing to the romance of finding each other in adulthood.
Yet a kind of politeness prevailed between us, which still exists. I’ve never had a row with any of them. If we’d grown up together, shouting at one another to get out of the bathroom and ribbing and teasing each other, perhaps our relationship would feel more visceral.
Nevertheless, I love my siblings and treasure the relationships I have with them and their children. Through my two brothers on Pip, my birth mother’s, side, Alexander and Yoram, I have three nieces whom I adore. Two of them are identical twins, growing up in New York City and about to enter their teens. Perhaps because they were born after I first met their father, Alexander, and thus have known me all their lives, they are particularly special to me.
Alexander, the youngest of the boys Pip gave birth to, is an artist. Yoram is a distinguished author of books about Russian history.
Brian (pictured with his wife Jane) believes his adoptive mother was more concerned about his emotions than her own when he told her about forging a relationship with his siblings
They embraced me, physically and figuratively, from the moment we met. In fact, Yoram applied the same academic rigour to my arrival in his life that he brings to his research into Stalinist Russia, by visiting my home town of Southport to see where I had grown up, and even re-tracing my daily route to grammar school.
I’m not sure I look very much like either of them, but I feel as though we have forged a precious fraternal bond.
I also feel an empathy with, and understanding of, their professional lives — there are similarities with my work as a writer and film critic. On the other side, Samantha, Polly and Marcus all work in various ways with their hands. So there seems little doubt that nature rather than nurture has made me creative.
My (adoptive) parents were bright, engaged people, but had I been their genetic child, I’m certain I wouldn’t have become a writer. My father was a businessman who bought ends of lines from lingerie manufacturers and sold them on to small shops and market traders, and also a sometime (failed) bookmaker. My Mum worked with him, packing lingerie in a rat-infested warehouse in Liverpool.
Growing up as an only child forged my personality perhaps more than anything else. I am serenely content in my own company, yet my friendships have always been fiercely important to me. I cherish and nourish them, more than I do the relationships with my siblings.
Last year, my mother died, at the grand age of 92. We’d talked little about my biological family, and she never expressed much interest in my siblings.
Telling her I had met them wasn’t an easy conversation, but at the end of it she asked a single question, which typically showed more concern for my emotions than for her own. ‘Are you OK with it?’
I was. More than OK.
It felt, and still feels, like an unexpected blessing.
https://textbacklinkexchanges.com/category/the-sun-world/
https://textbacklinkexchanges.com/the-joy-of-finding-youve-got-a-secret-sibling/
News Pictures The joy of finding you've got a secret sibling
You don’t have to pack away your bikini just because you’re the wrong side of 20. These body-beautiful stars reveal their secrets to staying in shape and prove you can smoulder in a two-piece, whatever your age. Read on and be bikini inspired!
TEENS
Hayden Panettiere
Size: 8
Age: 18
Height: 5ft 1in
Weight: 8st
To achieve her kick-ass figure, Hayden – who plays cheerleader Claire Bennet in Heroes – follows the ‘quartering’ rule. She eats only a quarter of the food on her plate, then waits 20 minutes before deciding whether she needs to eat again.
Hayden says: “I don’t have a model’s body, but I’m not one of those crazy girls who thinks that they’re fat. I’m OK with what I have.”
Nicollette says: “I don’t like diets – I see it, I eat it! I believe in eating healthily with lots of protein, vegetables and carbs to give you energy.”
kim cattrall
Size: 10-12
Age: 52
Height: 5ft 8in
Weight: 9st 4lb
SATC star Kim swears by gym sessions with Russian kettle bells (traditional cast-iron weights) and the South Beach Diet to give her the body she wants. To avoid overeating, Kim has a radical diet trick – squirting lemon juice on her leftovers – so she won’t carry on picking.
Kim says: “I am no super-thin Hollywood actress. I am built for men who like women to look like women.”
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/01/09/21/8328854-6574697-Brian_Viner_pictured_right_with_his_half_sister_Samantha_dis-a-14_1547069563401.jpg
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