Meant to be

My black West Indian father died in a road traffic accident in Yorkshire when he was 25 years old, he was driving a van (I later found out he was the leader of a steel drum band and permanently kept the band's equipment in the back of the vehicle). I was only 5 weeks old at the time of his death. My white English mother and I went to live with her father after his death. Due to various family issues my mum moved away when I was still a toddler, remarrying and starting a new family. She had never really got to know any of my dad's family very well as they had disapproved of the mixed race relationship, as did her family and they were essentially runaway lovers. I was subsequently raised to adulthood by my maternal grandparent and we had no contact with my mother until many years later. Growing up I never knew any details about my Caribbean heritage, the white half of my family having no knowledge of what part of the Caribbean my father was from or any details about him or his family and to be honest while I was growing up I was never really encouraged to enquire further about my mum or my dad.<br /> </p><br /> <p>When I was 28 while working in London I met the man who is now my husband and while born in London he is of Caribbean heritage. After dating for a couple of months he took me to meet his family for the first time and while chatting to his mum she asked what my surname was. When I told her she then asked if I were related to my father, I told her that the person she had named was indeed my father but that I didn't know much about him as he had died when I was a baby. She then proceeded to tell me that both her and her husband knew my dad and his family very well and that they had all been raised in the same area on the island of Curacao. Apparently, my dad had been the person who had come to the docks to pick her up when she first arrived in England (in the very van that he was later killed we later worked out). She went on to tell me lots of stuff about my family history and gave me the names family members living in England who I had never heard of. She had even been at my dad's funeral. Eventually my future husband's family were the impetus for me being re-united with my dad's side of the family most of whom had lived in London from the mid-sixties.<br /> </p><br /> <p>We all think that it is a massive coincidence that I randomly moved from Yorkshire to work in London, met my husband to be while there only to find out that we had shared origins from the same tiny island, that generations of his and my family had known one another really well (all the way back to when each family were slaves as it turns out). We have been married for 23 years now and jokingly tell our son that his parent's falling in love was pre-destined, perhaps if our parents had never emigrated we would still have met each other and fallen in love, just on a Caribbean beach rather than in a London wine bar.<br /> </p><br /> <p>As an aside, and lesser coincidence, I also found out many years later that the small provincial club in Yorkshire where my mum and dad first met while he was playing there with his steel band was the same club that I frequented regularly in my teens with no knowledge of the fact that my parents had met and crossed the (physical) racial segregation line, drawn on the same dance floor I had been dancing on, to defy convention, dance with one another and ultimately fall in love and have me.