my father's birthplace

Dear Professor Spiegelhalter, . I would like to offer you a remarkable experience from my life which I tend to view more as an example of what Carl Jung would have regarded as synchronicity rather than something which can be explained away simply on scientific grounds. Please bear with me while I describe the background to all this. I was born in Britain in 1935. My father was a veterinary surgeon but during the war he worked as a radar technician on the South Coast of England. We lost our home in a German bombing raid in 1942. I lived as an evacuee in Somerset until the end of the war, when I went with my family to live in New Zealand (my father was released from radar work late in 1944 and he had taken a veterinary job in New Zealand and travelled there before the rest of us). So until we were brought back together as a family in New Zealand early in 1946 there was nowhere any of us related to as a permanent home. I saw little of my father during the war and in my teenage years in New Zealand a great rift developed between us. He succumbed to alcoholism and after violent scenes between us I turned my back on him. I trained on leaving school as a journalist and in 1958 I left New Zealand and returned to Britain. I studied for a period in London but also worked for years as a journalist in Fleet Street, writing mainly on foreign affairs. My work took me abroad but I made no connection with any other part of Britain during this time apart from London, and I had no correspondence with my father. And like many children of alcoholics I developed a wary and distanced attitude to human relationships. I had girlfriends but committed myself to no deep relationships. All this changed in 1973 after I had lived in London for about fifteen years. I was introduced to a young woman, also a journalist, who had been living in Australia for some years. She had been married to an Australian and they had a child, a small boy, but the marriage broke up and she had returned to Britain with her son. When I met her she was looking for a job and she obtained a post as a BBC reporter on the local radio in Sheffield. We had not been involved in an affair but I saw her in London shortly after she took up this work with the BBC, and she boldly invited me to come up to Sheffield to visit her, which I did. She had rented a small house in a Georgian square close to Sheffield university, and during the next nine months I was to spend the most intense period of my life with her in this house. I fell hopelessly in love and was trying to persuade her to consider marrying me when her former husband suddenly appeared on the scene again. He had arrived from Australia on a day when I was back in London, and he camped out in her garden until she let him into her home. He was there when I returned from London. During the next few weeks the most emotional scenes of my life were played out in that house, as he sought to persuade his former wife to return to Australia with him and their son, and I sought to hold on to her. In the end we all flew apart in different directions, and although she did choose him over me in the end, their reunion did not last long. During my fifteen years back in Britain this house in Sheffield was the only place in Britain I had made any connection with outside of London, and it was in this house that I suffered the greatest emotional upheaval of my adult life. It was an upheaval that caused me immense distress and forced me to reassess my whole attitude to life and relationships. It led me to embark on a long period of psychotherapy, a professional change of direction (I went back to art school, the Royal College of Art and the Central School in London and am now a professional painter) and eventually to a reconciliation with my father, who had some years previously gone through his own great crisis and become a member of AA. I have now been married for 35 years to another young woman I met in London. It was a few years after marrying that I was invited by members of my father’s family to a wedding in the English Midlands, where I met up with three of my aunts – my father’s sisters. I sat with them after the wedding and they reminisced about their early lives. My grandfather had been a professor of physiology and the first professorial post he held was at Sheffield university. Two of my aunts had spent their early years in Sheffield, before my grandfather moved to Liverpool where he was professor of physiology for many years. They talked to me about their early memories of Sheffield, and I told them that I had also got to know the city well. They told me where they had lived and gave me the address. It was the small Georgian square which I had been invited to visit in 1973. Not only the same square but the same house - the house which my grandfather owned, and where my father was born, was the house in which my emotional life was to be torn apart almost seventy years later. And the only house in the whole of Britain to which I’d been drawn by fate during my many years back on this side of the world. I hope I have not been too long-winded. Best wishes with your research. Yours....Robert Macdonald