The agony of knowing the father you adore loves his new partner's children more than you: Erica felt 'airbrushed out' of Peter's life when she discovered she'd been cut out of his will

By Erica James

Published: 20:59 EST, 18 February 2013 | Updated: 04:40 EST, 19 February 2013

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Last November, I discovered that my father had written a will which stated that my sister and I would inherit nothing from him, other than a chest of photographs and cine films.

In many ways, this felt worse than nothing. 

Initially, I laughed (perhaps a little madly) at the sheer unexpectedness of it. Then I cried. 

It came as a surprise to me that, after everything I knew about my father, there was still a raw spot that could be so painfully prodded, to such great effect.

My father, Peter, was not a vindictive man. Far from it.

Author Erica James believes her father loves his second family more than he does his first

Anyone meeting him for the first time would say he was easy-going, charming and humorous. But although my father had been the one who wanted children — my mother, Marie, had merely acquiesced to keep him happy — he was rarely at home. 

His work during the Sixties and early Seventies as a crop-spraying pilot meant he spent long months working away in Kent and Norfolk, as well as in the Sudan spraying the cotton fields. 

He was never happier than when he was up in the air flying an aeroplane, or on the water sailing a small yacht along the south coast where we lived. Those were his two great passions in life; nothing else came close.

I always felt excited when I knew he was coming home, as things tended to feel better and more relaxed when he was around. The tension of my mother’s frustration at being stuck at home alone with two young children lifted. 

He was good at reading bedtime stories to us — more often than not making them up as he went along. He was patient too.

He taught me how to knit when I was about seven (I have no idea how or when he’d learnt) and to play chess when I was a little bit older; I remember the day I first managed to beat him, I was as pleased as punch. He also played a great game of hiding from my sister and me, and then making us scream with terror when he magically reappeared from behind a door.

Erica James with her father on her wedding day in Oxford in 1979. She said she was practically a stranger to him after he found a new partner

Being the youngest of a large Catholic family — he was one of seven brothers and sisters — I suspect he’d been treated as the baby of that family, cossetted and spoiled by his mother. As a consequence, I don’t think he ever really grew up. Perhaps that attitude was unconsciously reinforced when he married my mother, a woman 15 years older than him.  

As fun as he was for the time he was at home, he didn’t seem able to take on the full responsibility of fatherhood, or to look after a wife who was badly in need of emotional support, to cope with what would perhaps now be diagnosed as depression.

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He could easily get his priorities skewed. A classic example of this came one Christmas when I was about 14 or 15. After writing some last-minute cards on Christmas Eve to friends and neighbours, he happily dashed off on his bike to deliver them personally. 

But come Christmas Day, there was no sign of anything for my sister and me — no cards, no presents. Only later in the day when we hinted at this omission did he think to give us each a card containing a gift token. It wasn’t a malicious oversight — it had just slipped his mind. 

You’d think this would have been upsetting, but the reality was, it was just another thing I had long since learned to shrug off.

I left home at the age of 18 and married a year later. Naturally, my relationship with my parents grew more distant. I was living in the north of England and visits home to the south coast were increasingly infrequent and strained.

Erica James pictured in 1980. She said she was pleased her father Peter had found happiness with a new family following the death of her mother, but that he offered little support to her when her own marriage fell apart

They became more so when in 1992, with two young sons, my then husband and I moved to Belgium with his work. That year, sadly, my mother died after suffering a stroke.

Inevitably, my father’s life changed dramatically. His marriage to my mother had not been a happy one and — like a lot of people in his position — when offered the chance of a fresh start, he grabbed it with both hands. 

Almost immediately after my mother’s death, he threw himself into a new relationship with gusto.

Within months, the woman he was seeing — someone known to our family since childhood — had moved in with him on the south coast and he was happily absorbed into her large family. 

Everyone deserves a second chance in life, and so I was pleased for my father. Speaking regularly to him on the telephone, I could hear a new bright and cheery tone to his voice, and with each conversation we had I sensed a man heavily investing in this new relationship.  

It quickly became clear he was not just a father figure to his partner’s two daughters, but also a surrogate grandfather to their young children. 

He spoke often and at length about them, but the funny thing was, not once did he suggest I meet this family. It was as if a line had been drawn. My sister and I were from an era that had died with our mother.

While my father was immersed in the joy of finding love again, I had returned from my home in Belgium and was living back in Cheshire, my own marriage having fallen apart after 16 years.

But if I had expected to receive comfort and succour from my father, I was not to receive it. In a breathtaking display of insensitivity, my father callously failed to offer me any support, totally disregarding the heartache I was enduring.

By contrast, my best friend’s father showed me far more kindness, even offering to drive the 200 miles to help me with odd jobs in the house that I would soon have to sell. 

The gap which had been steadily widening between my father and me turned into a chasm. More than a decade had passed and I still hadn’t been invited to meet his new family. 

I spoke occasionally on the phone to his partner, but it was never more than an exchange of pleasantries. I only ever saw the two of them, or just my father.

It was in 2008, after he’d been diagnosed with a form of Motor Neurone Disease, that I met his partner’s youngest daughter when she called in during one of my visits. He was very ill by this stage and I have to say his partner did a wonderful job of caring for him. But it was the weirdest sensation, feeling like the outsider in what had once been my family home. 

Erica James aged 5 at primary school in 1965. She said her father was a easy-going, charming and humorous man

As I talked to my father, I couldn’t help but notice that there was only one photograph of me on display, in contrast to the crowd of framed smiling faces I didn’t recognize. Five months later, I finally met the entire family when my father, aged 78, died. It was the oddest funeral I’ve ever attended.

There were people there who had clearly known my father in a way I hadn’t; their grief was all too evident. 

Never had I felt more of a stranger. During the eulogy, I struggled to recognise the man being spoken about. Who was this man who was so passionate about education? He had shown no interest in mine. Nothing resonated with me.

There was no mention of my sister or me, though plenty was said of his other family.

A reference was made to him taking his grandchildren to McDonald’s when they were little. My sons looked at me enquiringly, ‘Us?’ I had to shake my head. ‘No, that wasn’t you.’ Not only had I been airbrushed out of his life, but so had his blood-related grandsons.

Out of respect for my father’s partner, I had stood back to let her organise the funeral according to her wishes. My only role was to pay for it. No one else seemed inclined to do so, and my father hadn’t made provision for the cost. 

The wake was held at a local football club, the last place on earth I could ever imagine my father visiting — or at least the man I knew. I had never once seen him watch a football match, or even talk about soccer.

I had a sudden, and not unsympathetic, thought of my mother spinning in her grave at such a place — how she would have hated to be there.

The best part of the proceedings was the fly-past arranged by the flying school where my father had been an instructor for many years.  

Later, talking to the solicitor handling my father’s affairs, we had understood that my father requested that his partner would be able to continue to live in the small two-bedroom flat where we had grown up, and then on her death the proceeds would be shared between her two daughters, my sister and me. I accepted this in good faith. 

Then last year, four years after my father’s death, his partner died and the truth of his will emerged. My sister and I were invited to a meeting by his family, which she attended on behalf of both of us.

There she was told by the family and trustees that she and I were not entitled to anything other than a trunk of old photograph albums and cine films which we were to come and collect at our convenience.

She called to tell me and I was dumbstruck. Could our father really have done this to us? In a state of utter disbelief, I dug out the copy of my father’s will I had always kept but never looked at closely. 

I had always trusted his word that my sister and I would be looked after.

But sure enough, when I looked at the small print, it was there in black and white: this really had been his intention all along.

But why? And why hadn’t we realised this before now? How could we have misunderstood the situation so badly? All I can say is that I was foolish not to have properly read the will. Yet even if we had realised earlier, what could we have done? If this was how he wanted to do things, what right did we have to dispute his wishes?

I should have expected nothing less of him, I suppose.

Erica James' father Peter, pictured in 1980. He died aged 78 after he was diagnosed with a form of Motor Neurone disease in 2008

Naively, despite our fractured history, I’d expected that when it came to it, he would behave as any decent, loving father would. 

But in reality, this was a father who had chosen to airbrush his own children out of his life in favour of another family. 

I desperately tried to work out what had prompted him to treat us this way.

Perhaps we just disappointed him? Perhaps we just didn’t live up to what his idea of family constituted? Or did we remind him of a failed attempt at family life, making it easier to discreetly push us to one side as if we didn’t exist?

Did he give any thought to how painful the day would be when I had to go back to where I grew up and collect that pathetic trunk? Did he realise that his partner’s daughters would be too cowardly to meet me face-to-face, that they would send someone in their place who, shamefully, wouldn’t allow me to have a few moments alone in my old home, as an act of putting the past to rest?  

As with so much in his life, my father probably just didn’t think about it. He basically saw what he wanted to see and turned away from anything emotionally challenging.

In the last few months, I’ve realised that, while I wanted to believe that he still cared about my sister and me, his will makes a mockery of that.

The sadness and disappointment I feel has nothing to do with money. It’s about realising how little my father really thought of his own children; about coming to terms with one last act of hurtful rejection.  

The Hidden Cottage (Orion £14.99) by Erica James is out now.

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