The seventh journey

Now I am less than two days from the end of this journey, the seventh substantial foreign trip I have made from my home in the Algarve. On Monday, Altura, with its still streets, barking dogs and scowling faces, will enfold me. But on this Saturday afternoon I sit at Lavender Hill Library, in dark and stormy London, the city where I was born and where I hope to die.

If  I went to live in Italy, which was my old pipe-dream, I would probably be as much of a stranger as I am in Portugal. I would certainly have more fun there. People would smile at me. I would eat more delicious sweets and drink more delicious drinks. But I would still be lonely.

And I am certainly not lonely in London, where the grand tenements belonging to Arab sheiks, Chinese warlords, Russian oligarchs and African dictators stand proudly behind the Thames Barrier, the hopeful and confident young drag their suitcases behind them in the streets, and the grinning government issues the sternest of flood warnings to the English, mourning their loaded fridge-freezers in the new wetlands of Somerset and Kent.

How could I be lonely here? I too am behind the Thames Barrier. I am warm. I am dry. My stuff is safe. The dark-skinned people in the restaurants, ticket offices and internet cafes serve me with kindness. And I am popular with the Poles, Indians and Italians who run the hotels.

I came in on December 4th, 2013 via the overnight ferry from Hook of Holland to Harwich. I thought I might be arrested on landing, so I had a slap-up three-course meal on the boat, costing almost forty pounds, one of the most expensive and one of the best meals of my life. Then I was up for a walk on deck, a leaf through the free copies of the Spectator, and an excellent night's sleep. At half-past-six in the morning I approached the mean and sleepy-looking male customs official at Harwich.

"How long have you been out of England?"

"Oh, a little while."

"And how long is a little while in your world?"

"Oh, just a month or two."

"Go on, sir."

And so to the slow train which will take me to the hotel I have chosen in Gidea Park in dreamy East London, and I listen to the announcements that my luggage will be destroyed if I leave it for a second, that if I see that doesn't look right I must report it, that this delay is unavoidable and we will move as soon as possible. I stare with a foreigner´s wonder at the posters urging me to text this to such and such in order to give to this or denounce that.

Alienating indeed, but finally the train moves, and in the ghostly winter dawn, in the comfortably underpopulated train, I contemplate with sudden joy the wooded countryside that still exists between Harwich and Manningtree, and wonder how I could ever have left my England.

Almost the first thing I do when I am ensconced in a comfortable basement room in Gidea Park is to phone an old woman who lives in north London. She was an old friend of my mother, I have known her all my life, she is now almost ninety, and for some years has been in poor health. But she is one of the few surviving witnesses to the time in 1954 and 1955 when my mother was involved with two men: one she met at the Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand, my official father, the despicable Arthur; and the other one, the one she met on the tube train, when she got her finger stuck in the door, the German who spent his later life under Polish identity, the handsomer of the two, Michael., who went by the surname of Hupfleit. He was my Dad.

I approach my call with anxiety, because this lady is so old and ill, lost her only son when he was still young, and I have bothered her so many times. I get through to her on this first morning, but her voice is enormously weak. She does not sound pleased to hear I am in London. She says she is too unwell to see me immediately. And she is "going somewhere now."

But to talk to her, and to try and get more details of what really happened with my father and Arthur Ernest Hills, is the most important reason I have come to England. So I put the phone down bravely, saying I will phone her in a few days. But, when I try again, another woman (?) says that my old friend is not in and puts the phone down. I wait a week or two, try the phone again without success, and then enter into email communication with the old lady's daughter. She says her mother has been in and out of hospital and is too weak to see me, but she will ask her again.

I try the daughter a few more times until email communication from her finally fades out. Two days ago I travelled as far as Wood Green, where we used to visit this family (they lived there when I was a child), and phoned the house of the old woman, further north in the most distant suburbs now, from the old area. The phone rang and rang and there was no answer. Perhaps she is still in hospital. Perhaps she is dead. And now there is only one more full day. Almost certainly I will not see her now.

And perhaps God willed it. For it was this old woman who finally told me, when I called her from Lisbon in June 2013, that the man who called himself Mieczyslaw Hufleit (she knew him only as Hupfleit) had been my father. Thus she rendered me the greatest service she could possibly have done for me.  I do not really have the right to expect more information from this sorrowful, exhausted and vulnerable person. 

Anyway, during the five weeks that I have spent in London, I busyied myself with many other people, enquiries and appointments. I consulted various medical specialists who diagnosed vast numbers of problems with my ageing carcass, none of which they had the time to treat, so that I must return to England endless times, if I can be bothered to travel so far, to solve problems that are far from urgent, and to which they will give so little thought.

But my visit to London was more than just that. The people I knew varied quite a lot in how much time they would give me, but those who were almost strangers were often kind, and I made a whizz as a fashionable fugitive at the homes of my old aristocracy friends in Earl's Court, Holland Park and Fulham.

I stayed for some days at various hotels in King's Cross, where I ate at a lovely restaurant called La Regina and found a bookshop that was previously unknown to me, Housmans, very left-wing upstairs, but with a dusty secondhand basement that reminded me of the old days. And for Christmas and New Year I went to the Queens Hotel in Crystal Palace, where Zola had stayed before me. Here I spent much time walking through the sodden parks and poking around the vaguely Victorian shops. And I also enjoyed a magnificent Christmas service with the Salvation Army.

But I was most often, like a homing pigeon, at a small guesthouse just opposite the council estate where I used to live, in the Wandsworth Road. In the wet and stormy nights before Christmas, I loved to sit in the dark local McDonald's next to the guesthouse and contemplate with mingled sadness and an odd sense of freedom the small corner of London that was once mine and is no longer. I was reading a preposterous but strangely comforting novel, Dancing with Eva by Alan Judd, which I had picked up in a doctor's waiting room in Rush Green on the first day. This featured a pair of ancient Nazis who meet for a splendid dinner by the fire in a manor house in Sussex that one of them now owns. Before the man dies - the woman, who owns the house, has hurried this along - they reminisce cosily about the old days in the Bunker, with Adolf and Eva, Heinrich and Joseph.

And concerning my enquiries about my mother and what seem to be her three marriages, one of them certainly to the German passing as a Pole who called himself just Hupfleit, and with God knows what connections to the said Bunker, I made quite a lot of progress during those six weeks. More of that anon.

First I want to talk about an aspect of my time in London that was disturbing, although not as much so to me, perhaps, as it would have been to another, because I do not really believe in friendship.

I once had four friends in London. They were (and are) Bill Hicks, Mark Casserley, Richard Pyatt and Stephen Cviic. I met them in the later 1980s and early 1990s, during the long years I lived in London and tried to be a writer, and they supported me in different ways in the frustrating but hopeful life I had then. They are fine specimens of Englishmen (although Stephen is half-Croatian), and they have in three cases held elite positions (Bill never has), and all four have beautiful manners and carefully-gradated voices, and they often show measured kindness.

During the terrible time that I went mad (as it seemed) I believed that some or all of these friends were spies for various powers and that one of them, or possibly two, had tried to kill me. (These things I still believe, as I revise this piece on 27th January 2018.) They were all shocked, later, when I tried to commit suicide and attempted to rally round. But especially when I was committed to prison for two and a half years, my friendships with all four continued to deteriorate. For almost a year I was in a terrible prison in Nottinghamshire called Lowdham Grange. It was three hours away on the motorway or by train. But none of them visited me there. I wrote all four of them long, affectionate personal letters from that prison. None of them replied.

As the crisis of my time at Lowdham Grange came, I had grim telephone conversations with all four, before my telephone was disconnected by the prison authorities.The worst one was with Bill on Christmas Eve, when he made his first threat to break up our relationship, threats that have been many times repeated in the troubled years that have followed. I gave all four up in my heart, with a proviso about Bill. At about that time, I described them to a fellow prisoner, and he said they were certainly not true friends and when I came out of jail I should have nothing more to do with them. I corrected him by saying I could still use them, and he agreed that this was so. I was to dtry and do it with three of them for some time. Now, one of these friends I would never engage with again, one I would talk to only if I met him, one I would take back if he came to me, one I hope to hold on to.

Eventually I was sent back in Belmarsh. One morning, on Association about ten days before my release, I successfully jumped the phone queue and phoned Richard Pyatt. A dispute broke out over the line almost immediately we went through our opening greetings. I threatened him in the style of a hardened con, he said, "this is the end", and I have never been able, or wished, to contact him since.

Bill came to meet me at the gates of Belmarsh, with a glamorous young woman, Alecky Blythe, who was interested in concocting a drama about me, a play perhaps, or even a film. This occasion was great fun, and I acted up like mad. But then they left me, first Bill, then Alecky. I saw Stephen a little later that day, and Mark on the following one. But the first evening of my freedom I spent alone.

Four months later, I left England, telling the remaining three friends that I was going for a brief holiday in Scotland, and giving picturesque details to them and my probation officer.

For many years before this time, Mark Casserley had done an enormous amount of practical, legal and literary work for me, but without ever showing me any affection. Particularly during the worst period of my depression, I had become heavily dependent on him. During the period in early2002, when I was preparing to leave England for Portugal in order to deal with my sick mother's affairs, I had given him a power of attorney over my entire estate, as well as leaving it all to him, with the exception of two thousand pounds, which was to go to Bill.

But on an evening in late 2005 when Mark  helped me buy a new television and then would not stay to watch it with me, I began to hate him. During the time I spent in prison, when he adopted a judgmental attitude towards me, the hatred became more. I revoked the will in his favour shortly before going to prison and the power of attorney soon after I was released, just before giving a more limited power to Bill.to sell any property I might own in England but not to buy anything on my behalf. I made no new disposal of my property and still have no will.

In the months when I was first abroad, Bill was successful, with great energy and determination, in selling my flat and putting all my stuff (an enormous amount of it) into a storage unit. He was helped in this task by both Mark and Stephen. They thus did a lot more for me, and I expressed my gratitude, but I also made it plain to all of them that one of the essential reasons I had left England was to reduce my relationship with them because they had not come to visit me in Lowdham Grange.

During the years in Portugal and elsewhere, I often phoned the three friends, and Mark and Stephen were usually pleasant on the line, while Bill, who was doing by far the most work, was increasingly rude and impatient. I treated the three of them slightly differently in respect of what I was willing to say. to them. I mentioned a lot of what I was discovering about my background to Bill, discussed mainly questions of our mutual personal welfare with Stephen, and kept the conversation to general matters with Mark.

All three brushed away any suggestions that they might come to visit me in Portugal, and also (particularly Mark) strongly discouraged me from visiting England. It seemed, indeed, that I might be arrested if I returned there. Any future friendship would be on the phone, it seemed to the trio.

Now I come to my relations with them during the month and a bit that I have been in London. I had not told any of the three, or anyone else, that I planned to come. I planned to leave contacting Bill for a few days after my arrival, and Mark and Stephen for a few weeks, so that I could get the bulk of my enquiries into my background completed before they knew I was in the country.

But when I began trying to contact Bill by almost every method - home telephone, mobile, email - there was no reply from any of them. After a little while I began to try to contact Mark, by home and work land lines (I did not have his mobile number or email). Again no reply on many occasions. Two days before Christmas I phoned Stephen Cviic on his home telephone, my only contact for him. He answered the call, spoke to me very briefly and then more or less put the phone down on me. I have not contacted him again and do not intend to. If he comes to me, he will receive a response. How friendly it will be, I cannot say.

I had a strange feeling abour my many attempts to contact Bill. For instance, I tried him on three successive nights on his home number from a phone-box very near my old flat, so that if I had managed to reach him and he had invited me round I would have followed the same short bus-route that I had used to go to him, so happily, over many years. I wanted him to answer, but there was also a strange relief in not hearing his voice and just going into the McDonald's across the road for a sticky treat and from there into the nearby hotel to sleep. For the old happiness had already been spoilt by the many aggressive phone-calls from :Portugal I have mentioned, and from now on I was to be happy to see Bill and happy not to see him, as the occasion arose. The love I felt for him has gone for ever. But I have never lost my feeling that he could once again be useful to me.

On New Year's Eve I phoned Bill on a line I had not used before, which was the home number of his partner in a country region outside London. I knew he was staying with her and their children over the Christmas and New Year period, and I believe he may have forgotten that many years before he had given me this contact number It was he who answered rather than she, he was extremely surprised to hear I was in England (or, at least, so it seemed), and quite upset I had phoned, because his partner strongly discouraged contact on that line. But he was not unfriendly, and accepted my suggestion that I should visit him the following Monday evening at his flat in London, a revival of our old custom of more than twenty years.

Since I was returning to his flat after so long, I took him an fine bottle of wine, we had a good time together, and finally  we listened to the three records that we had so often shared - Walter Gieseking playing Debussy, Edith Piaf singing "Monsieur le Noble," and two sides of Marlene Dietrich giving us varied numbers in English and German (and a bit of French), the three records in the order I have given. Once again I sang along joyfully with Marlene to the last song on Side Two, "Ich bin vom Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt," the song known in English as "Falling in Love Again."

But my love for everyone, and including him, was gone. My singing was now a show. I did not mention anything about my father to Bill. Everything about that evening was the same, only different. Old friendships die hard, and I intend to do everything to maintain this one, in the face of almost any discouragement. But you never know. Bill remains my rock, with the proviso that even the sturdiest of rocks can be washed away by the ever-encroaching seas, lakes and streams of modern Britain.

Three or four days ago I finally managed to reach Mark Casserley on his home telephone. He was suaver and silkier than Stephen had been, and said he already knew I was in England, because Stephen had told him. But when I proposed a meeting, he said that he did not have time to meet me during the few remaining days of my stay. I then brought our conversation to a speedy end, and will never have anything to do with him again.

There are, as far as I know, no extant photographs of myself with any of the four friends, and I believe none were even taken. These friendships thus exist only through memory, and whatever I reveal of them could only be confirmed or rebutted by what they themselves say, or have said, or through the memories of those who observed these relationships, or, in the case of Bill, observe our relationship now. If they were asked, I do not expect the four friends would give a good account of me, and not necessarily a true one either. But in a way they did me a service when they did not visit me in Lowdham Grange, did not answer my letters from there, and reacted so unpleasantly when I phoned them in my desperation. Since that time I have never considered their interests or welfare. I have lied to them, and used them systematically. I do not care whether they live or die. If even one of them had treated me humanely when I was in Lowdham Grange, I do not believe I could have acted in the way I did and gained all the advantages that have accrued from my lack of affection for them.

Now to the results of my researches into my mother, my father and Arthur Ernest Hills. I have visited the Westminster Archives and the National Archive; been in contact with the General Register Office in Stockport; attempted to contact the Co-op and Crawley Town Hall; spoken to as many private people as might be able to tell me anything; enjoyed a most helpful and friendly session with the staff of Lauderdale House, Highgate; looked for the register of my mother's marriage to my father in vain at two north London Catholic churches; and, after an immense exchange of emails, telephone calls and visits, consulted what I was told was the summary marriage register for March, April and May 1955 compiled, to the best of my knowledge, by the priest at the church of St Joseph's, Highgate Hill.

Here are the results of these researches, presented in as detailed a form as is possible in the context of an occasional blog.

There is a record of a civil marriage between my mother, known as Maria José dos Reis, and a man called (or known as) Arthur Ernest Hills, in the Hendon Register Office, on 11th September, 1954. About ten or twelve days later (the original document showing this is so fragile that I cannot get it out of the bag now to check the exact date), my mother seems to have applied for British naturalisation, and appears from the document to have been granted it.

On my visit to the National Archives, however, this document turned out to be a forgery, or at least never to have been put into effect. They had no record of my mother as a British citizen, although she certainly passed as one for about thirty years. The number on the fragile document in my possession, 30638, turned out to be the naturalisation number of a woman called Ursula Helene Hedwig Bleistein, born in Berlin in 1919, and at the time of her naturalisation in 1954 working as a typist and living at 24, Charlwood Street, London SW1.

With the help of a person I have been put in touch with and who has promised to help me with my researches, I checked for further details of this woman, and there is every indication that she was a real woman who died in 1991. She was not a mere alias of my mother. And I am left with the mystery of why it was necessary for my mother to enter into this elaborate fraud to gain naturalisation, when she had apparently married a genuine Englishman only about twelve days before.

There is a record of a second wedding to Arthur Ernest Hills on November 13th, 1955, about three months after my birth, at the church of St Joseph's, Highgate Hill, where I was also baptized. This second Hills union was once referred to by my elderly informant who lives in the centre of Lisbon as having been necessary because the church, seeing that I had been baptised there as Charles Albert Reis Hills on October 2nd 1955, insisted that there be a Catholic ceremony with the man recognised as my father.

About ten or twelve days after the date of the second wedding, a marriage for a Maria José dos Reis is recorded in the civil records in Kensington with a man called Geoffrey Searle. Many middle names were given for the woman, which I did not initially recognise, but the surname given before Reis was Martins, and this was the surname of the man my aunt Eva married in Portugal in 1958.

The whole name turned out, once again, to be that of a real person. She was one of the daughters of Manuel Martins dos Reis, the brutal first commandant in the late 1930s of Tarrafal, a sort of Portuguese Dachau in the Cape Verde Islands, where the political opponents of the regime of Dr Salazar went sent. What connection exists between my mother and this woman I do not know (in this case, it is is even possible, but not likely, that they are the same person). But, certainly, there are enough links between this document and what is known of my mother for me to feel fairly confident that this wedding is in some way connected to the second marriage to Hills.

No photographs exist of the second Hills union, to my knowledge, and probably none of the civil union, ostensibly with Hills, in September 1954. Instead, there is a vast collection of photographs in my possession of another wedding, to another man, part of the huge archive of personal memorabilia which recently reached me in Portugal, after having been kept in England for four years under the long-suffering and efficient supervision of Bill Hicks. It was partly because I was now armed with photographic evidence of this other union, as well as one photograph certainly showing Arthur Ernest Hills, that I undertook what might be the perilous trip to England.

The most interesting of all the photos is the wedding group photo, which shows my mother newly married to my father in the presence of twelve other people (and with myself, a fifteenth, in my mother's womb). And perhaps you will say, how can you be certain the man in the photo is not Arthur Ernest Hills and that this is a third wedding, the second in date order, to someone else?

The two men, from their photographs, strike almost everyone as very similar looking but definitely different. Yet appearances can be deceptive. Well, if you want factual proof, this photograph cannot have been taken in September 1954 or November 1955. For this there are a number of reasons. The one that really clinches it is that the photo includes two of my aunts, Eva and Augusta. Eva arrived in England in about January 1955 (I have in my possession her permission to enter the country for working purposes, dated December 1954) and Augusta left before my birth, in the summer of 1955, as I was many times informed during my childhood and since by all my relations. This photograph must therefore have been taken between January and August 1955.

During the period of my earliest childhood, we lived in a single room in a large London Victorian house, 19, Hornsey Rise, N19, belonging to a Neapolitan Italian family called the Maccariellos, which had been closely connected with Mussolini and whose senior figure, Elpidio, had gone down with other Italian Fascists and some Nazis on the boat called the Arandora Star in 1940.

Gennaro Maccariello, Elpidio's son, was my godfather, and he lived in the house, as well as his sister, Concetta McLorg, and her Scottish husband William McLorg, their young daughter Catherine Tamara, later the dancer and choreographer Tamara McLorg, and Elpidio's elderly widow, Mrs Elisabetta Maccariello. 19, Hornsey Rise, with the houses alongside it, was compulsorily purchased and demolished by Islington Council in 1972 and Elthorne Park now stands on the site.

I was once told by the old woman in the centre of Lisbon whom I have mentioned many times in this blog, that my parents' wedding was at a Catholic church somewhere near the house of the Maccariellos. So, a few days after my arrival in England, in an early Saturday afternoon, I boarded a 91 bus on the Caledonian Road and travelled northward towards Hornsey Rise.

Sitting on the front seat on the top of the bus, I asked the woman opposite me, who turned out to be herself a Catholic, what Catholic churches were in the area. She was interested in my story, and mentioned St Mellitus, Tollington Park and St Peter in Chains, Stroud Green. She also said that there was one called St Gabriel's, but this had been built in the 1960s, so we agreed that this could not have been the one.

Over a week or two, by successive visits, I eliminated both St Mellitus and St Peter from my enquiries. But the priest at St Peter finally mentioned that there was also St Joseph's, Highgate Hill, and I suddenly remembered that had in fact been the one. So I hurried over to the mother house of the Congregation of the Passion in England, a huge Italianate or Byzantine edifice, whose great green dome on the hill, sheltering the smaller one, can be seen for miles, where the huge church, its reception area, and the monastery shut off from both, are so cunningly interwoven into the crenellations and battlements guarding them all from the exterior - and the outbuildings are  quite distant from the main bastion across the Passionists' extensive ground - as to give the whole complex the suggestion of a slightly more modest Palace of the Popes at Avignon. The welcome I received there, perhaps unsurprisingly, was initially not so warm as at the two more demotic churches.

This church is only a little further up Highgate Hill from the Whittington Hospital, where I was born on 21st August 1955, and next door, just across Dartmouth Park Hill, is Waterlow Park. I possessed several photos of my mother heavily pregnant enjoying an excursion in a park with my father, the woman who lives in the centre of Lisbon, my aunt Eva, and a man whom Eva says was a Greek with whom she was romantically involved. On one of several visits I paid to the area of Highgate Hill, I was able to identify the exact spots in Waterlow Park where these photographs had been taken.

Next I visited Lauderdale House, which is just within the park, on Highgate Hill, a little up from St Joseph's. I enjoyed the café and the art gallery, and in the course of doing so approached several kindly and efficient staff members with my photographs, and they were interested in them. With the help of a cultivated middle-aged lady in the gallery, the museum director, who was consulted in his office upstairs, and a pretty young black girl, who went with me through the grounds, we were able to identify the exact spot where the wedding group photo was taken, just inside the grounds of the house, and evidently just after the ceremony in the adjacent church.

Now all three old women who are my principal sources for the events of the relevant period agree that my mother was pregnant with me at the time of her wedding, or at least they have agreed on this when they have not been contradicting their own stories. I phoned the one in the centre of Lisbon during the course of the research. She said she thought my mother had been at least three and no more than four months pregnant at the time of the wedding.

My mother is not showing in the photo, but is holding a large bouquet of flowers against her stomach. She once told me that I had arrived early, at about eight months. This places the likely inception of her pregnancy at just before Christmas 1954, the earliest possible date for the photo would be in mid-March 1955, and my mother will have been just four months pregnant in late April and five months pregnant towards the end of May 1955.

Above the wedding group in the photo is a luxuriantly blooming tree. The weather in 1955 was cold and wet up until mid-March, but then April was exceptionally warm, while May became rather stormy, the last major storm being on May 18th. The day of the ceremony was a warm one, because the party are dressed in light clothing, and my aunt Augusta has her arms bare. I asked a young man in a tube train travelling towards Archway how long it takes for a tree to bloom after a cold winter. He immediately answered that it would take about a month. The tree would then have burst into flower in the middle of April 1955, and gone on ever more luxuriantly blossoming into May.

When I was finally able to examine the register at St Joseph's, with the help of people who shall remain nameless, we began looking in early March and went on into May. We were looking for a wedding within the possible time limits of late March to late May, a groom with a German name, and a bride who might conceivably be my mother.

When we reached a marriage which was solemnised at St Joseph's on May 21st 1955, exactly three months before my birth, we found what I believed we were looking for. We had eliminated all the weddings that were impossible, because the partners were so English, or had married before the tree can have been in flower, and therefore the one we found, however improbable it might seem, was the only remaining possibility.

I feel bound to point out, however, that the marriage I believed was the one appeared at the bottom of a right-hand page of the register, and because it united all the features we were looking for, and was already so late within the possible time limits, we did not turn over the page to see what marriages might appear on the following double-spread. I rather wish now we had turned that page.

The document is written, wherever possible, in Latin, and I give the English renderings where appropriate. The priest, Philip Hayes, CP (Community of the Passion) recorded a wedding between Donald Williams, formerly Schoenthal, the son of Fritz Schoenthal, and Josepha Moravcova (in Czech orthography there would be an acute accent on the final letter), the daughter of Joseph Moravcova (sic). The name Josepha is my mother´s name, because in Portugal the rendering used of the name Josepha, or Josefa in the Spanish version, is Maria José. This then seems likely to have been the wedding of my parents, even if they were using aliases.

The witnesses to the union were Samuel Scarlett and Frederick William Williams. The latter is possibly an alias of my grandfather, although of course it is not certain, and if he was a relation of Donald Williams, previously Schoenthal, then he had perhaps previously been known as Fritz Schoenthal, and may have been either the father or a brother of the groom. Because the photograph really shows my parents' wedding, and if the wedding document also records it, then this witness would in fact be my grandfather, because Brian Streeter has confirmed to me that one of the 14 people in the group photo, an old man whom I vaguely remember, and who was always said to be the father of Arthur Ernest Hills and also known as Arthur Ernest Hills, was my paternal grandfather.

If this old man was the father of Arthur Ernest Hills Junior, and yet also my grandfather, this would mean that my father and Arthur Hills Junior were brothers. They certainly looked extremely similar, so much so that they can even have been twins. Arthur Ernest Hills Junior was extremely reticent about his first seven years, which would have taken him, probably, to about 1932 or 1933, the time when his ostensibly English and Scottish family mysteriously broke up and he was left simply with a woman  probably his mother, a woman called, or passing as, Mary Martin Brown of Edinburgh.

If what can be deduced from all the above is true, then she was perhaps not that, but a German (possibly Jewish) woman who arrived in England probably some time in the early 1930s with one of two sons who had been born in Germany, leaving behind the other, my father, and the man who was the father of both, presumably a Nazi who passed after the war as Arthur Ernest Hills Senior and also probably Frederick William Williams, and perhaps used other names as well.

There is a signature at the bottom of the certificate, from a different and possibly later hand than that recording all the other details, of a Bonaventura Wilson, who was also CP, and was the priest who later married my mother and Arthur Ernest Hills, on November 13th 1955. He is most likely to have been the priest in charge of the community, and Bonaventura, an early Franciscan saint, will have been his name in religion.

Also given on the document I have are details of addresses for the spouses and witnesses, and I omit these, because on present information it seems that these are mainly false addresses. The spouses are recorded as being of mixed religions and it may be for this reason that the counter-signature of Bonaventura Wilson was necessary. Since the fact that my mother was a Jewess has always been exceptionally well hidden and she would have had no motive to disclose this, I think it is more likely that it was my father who was recorded as a Jew, in the case that their real identities were in question. Of course, if it was real persons whose identities my parents were using, then one of these persons could have been known by the parish to be a Jew, which would have meant that either of my parents would have had to allow this identity in order for the marriage to proceed. It is not necessarily the case that my father was a Jew, although it would make the elements of his family story that |I have mentioned easier to understand if he were. 

Obviously the unconventionality of all these details must lead to doubts about whether these really were my parents and whether this really was their wedding. A particular area of doubt must be the Czech surname of the woman, because my mother was quite obviously of southern European origin, although, as I have said before in this blog, of uncertain origin within that area.

However, this was the only entry in the marriage register I was shown that fitted all the conditions. And my mother was, as far as I know, already legally married at a registry office to Arthur Ernest Hills Junior, and my father, to the best of my knowledge, was an ex-German soldier on the run and after 1964, at least,  passing as a Pole under the name Miecszyslaw Hufleit  (only he usually called himself Hupfleit). So they would thus have needed to use false names, and these names would have had to be foreign ones, because it would have been clear to the priest that they were foreigners of some sort. He would have thought they were from northern and southern (or eastern?) Europe respectively.

The possibility also exists of course, as I have said, that there were other persons who were the genuine holders of the names used by my parents, and that Mum and Dad had either been allowed to use these names on a temporary basis, or had appropriated them. A false name is a movable feast. A person can use more than one, or pass on any one identity at will to a second person, or vanish under one identity before moving on to another. 

There is the possibility that Donald Williams was originally an alias used by Arthur Ernest Hills Junior and that he passed it on at a convenient point to his twin brother while himself slipping into another identity. My father in turn could have passed on the name of Donald Williams to another man when he himself felt like a change of permanent woman. Josefa Moravcova could have been an identity used on a more temporary basis by my mother.

Anyway, strange as it appears, there is a strong likelihood (I would not put it higher than that) that this marriage recorded on 21st May 1955 at St Joseph's, Highgate Hill, between Donald Williams and Josepha Moravcova, was the wedding of my parents.

And now my time on the computer at the crowded library on Lavender Hill is approaching its end. Have I given enough strange and sinister details? Will anyone believe this story? Well, life can be a funny business, and no one can pretend they know everything, or that they have discovered all the details of things long kept secret and possibly dangerous to know.

And I am conscious of a tendency in myself to jump to unwarranted conclusions. This library where I sit is the very one where I once believed that I had just been assassinated by two black women as I alighted at the nearby bus-stop, and I am still alive.

But I calmly awaited my end on that occasion, and even felt a sort of strange joy, and I feel the same emotion now, when I think about my dear father and mother and their false wedding and their fake bouquet and their flowering tree.

In a Quiet Time

On the evening of 5th August 2013, I arrived back at Lisbon Airport from a pleasant tour of five European countries and was facing an all-night journey by four buses to the Algarve. As the melancholy of Portugal enfolded me, I struggled with my absurdly heavy luggage to the first bus. This was a Lisbon city one. I waited long, and finally it came. But, as I boarded it, my left knee seized up. I was in severe pain and could hardly move my leg.

The sombre people in the bus showed the usual Portuguese lack of any interest in anything, and when I arrived at the huge Oriente Station other Portuguese merely commented that my trousers were falling down. There were several hours to wait at the grim multi-transport complex at Oriente, but it was just as well, because I had to recuperate.

I finally crawled rather than walked on to the coach going to the Algarve. Sitting in the narrow seat without being able to stretch my leg caused pain, but at least I could just let myself be moved on. The three hours on the coach went quickly. But when we reached the first bus station in the Algarve, the bus turned out to be continuing westwards to Lagos rather than east towards my own home near the Spanish frontier.

Another passenger had to help me down towards the floor. People were being hurried towards the bus that was proceeding east to the regional capital of Faro, and one of the bus drivers jeered at me because I could not pick up my heavy luggage. But he had to carry it nonetheless. I could not have done it myself.

As we travelled through the aromatic night of the Algarve, the white buildings and golf courses of Vilamoura, and the high rises of Quarteira, seemed like ghost cities, and I determined to get a taxi when we arrived at Faro. The enormous wait for the fourth bus towards my home, the difficulty of stowing the luggage and dealing with the driver, the journey, and the long walk from the stop to my house, seemed too much to bear.

Once again, I was helped out of the bus at Faro and my bags were placed around me at the seat near the stop. Now I was alone. There was almost no traffic, no people, but, opposite, an all-night cafe I had used before was open. I was hungry and contemplated trying to reach it. I got to the kerb and gingerly put my foot forward, but a great shot of pain made me turn back and sink back on to the seat.

Now a taxi came ambling into view. I hailed it, the youngish, blond driver quickly assessed my situation, and was soon helping me and my luggage into his cab with solicitude. I felt great joy. As we drove off, we began talking in our non-native Portuguese, and I learnt that this was Yuriy, from Ukraine. Soon we came to the suburbs of Faro, our talk turned to family and personal matters, and he told me that he lived in the city with his wife and young children. I experienced the usual disappointment of the homosexual. But then we came to the more countrified road, I fell silent, and it seemed a beautiful, peaceful journey, with few stars.

Finally, I directed him through the housing estates of Altura, and we drove up to my dilapidated villa, whose entrance was almost blocked by dark and forbidding shrubbery. The meter showed a little less than sixty Euros, but I had withdrawn that sum from the machine in the bus station at Oriente, and decided to reward my kind helper with a round figure.

He got out to help me into the house. I was nervous about its appearance, and cack-handedly dropped my keys into the vegetation in an attempt to open the post-box. I would never have found them on my own, but a few seconds was sufficient for Yuriy to retrieve the bunch. Then, at my direction, he opened my postbox, which tended to be so difficult, and I had my post.

We cut a path to the front door, and the key was so stiff in the lock that I could never have opened the door on my own. But after a minute or two of struggle, Yuriy had his usual success. The electric light did not switch on, and I assumed that, as on many previous occasions when I had returned from journeys, the electricity had been cut off for shortage of funds in my Portuguese account.

But I was in my house now and knew the way to my bed in the darkness and had no immediate need to look at the post. I thanked Yuriy and told him to go, dropped my bags, and with a sob of mixed pain and joy staggered towards the bed and threw myself on the mattress.

About a week later, Yuriy appeared again to find out how I was, and I was delighted to see him, and got him to help me with fetching shopping and cutting down shrubbery. But basically I was now alone in my house. And this did not entirely displease me. For I had done so many journeys. Most recently there had been the four grand tours, and the two succeeding trips, which were more voyages of self-discovery. These paralleled the six extensive surveys of the five continents I had made in the years before my imprisonment. And in the long years I used to visit my mother's villa when she was alive, there had been the five trips to Morocco and the sad one to New York.

Few people knew the world and the varieties of humanity as I did. And few were more sick of them. So, seeing I was now more or less crippled, I entered what I call my "quiet time", when I hunkered down in my house, did nothing I did not feel like doing, and restricted my contact with people in the settlement of Altura to the minimum that seemed psychologically sensible.

The best days of the whole period were the first three, when I saw no one at all, and did not go out of the house. The first day I just lay in bed, getting up to drink water and eat what little food was in the house - crackers with honey, dry cornflakes, and, with a supreme effort, the peaches that were just then in full bloom in my back garden (I called them peaches - they may be an analogous fruit). I managed trips to the toilet by arranging a row of strategic chairs to grip on to lest I fall.

On the second day I began the unpacking and arrangement on my shelves of the books I had bought in Paris, Heidelberg, Thessaloniki, Athens, Rome and so on. By evening I had reached the stone table in the sunny garden with the remains of my amarguinha, the bitter-sweet almond liqueur that is such a typical taste of Portugal. There I leafed through the first chapter of The Sentimental Education by Flaubert, which I had bought in Aristotelous Square in Thessaloniki. In the Greek city I had just sat among the huge buildings curving down to the fabled Mediterranean with the book in my bag, but here in more homely Portugal I actually began it, with the sun setting directly between the lemon and the rose.

The next day I became very hungry, but by evening there was still one more peach that lay within my grasp, and I managed to reach it, and then, with a most determined application of what electrical know-how I possess, I managed to switch on the lights. So it was a further half-hour to stay up, sitting on my comfortable sofa, with Sarah Walker and Roger Vignoles performing cabaret songs on the turntable of my mother's ancient stereo system.

The following morning I was ready for my first excursion into Altura. I walked like a man a hundred years old, but just down the road from me is the clinic of the charming Udo Pohlschneider, and in his relaxing consulting room overlooking the quiet square, with Buddhist music, and conversation in a mixture of English and German, he took away the worst of my pain. He had not been able to see me immediately, but at a nearby cafe I had feasted on cheese sandwich, milky coffee and orange juice and leafed through H.G. Wells' Short History of the World.

It is now four years since I was able to enter into my mother's house, the third of my homes that I did not choose. The flat in south London and the one on the southern outskirts of the far south bank of the Lisbon area came to me easily, they were in rough but pastoral city districts that appealed to me, and I loved them both, and was sad to get rid of them when the time came.

But my house in Altura was an enormous struggle to acquire. The streets surrounding it are hot, harsh and still. Although this home is a refuge, and although it is very large and even beautiful in its run-down way, I cannot help hating it. Pray God I do not live here for ever. In fact, I could not do so. I would have no money and die before my time. No one here would lift a finger to help me if I was without money.

The psychology of the Portuguese is a complex business. But these people have never been, like the Italians, the spoiled darlings of the Northern Europeans, gleefully living up to every clearly-understood cliche about themselves. Because they have not been loved, they cannot love, even though it is in their instinct to do so. They are not an unfriendly people, but they are not friendly either. Their attitude is a sort of blank, hidden, if necessary, under sympathetic words. And a deep sadness lies over this country of neglect and shame. The sun shines, but not in people's hearts.

At the cafes I frequent I am served in near silence. The person dealing with me turns away immediately I approach and does not return my initial greeting. Five minutes are allowed to pass before taking my order. I see a sign in one café that says, "In this establishment, people enter, order, pay and leave." But it also takes five minutes for them to allow me to pay at that café. If I settle the bill there with sufficient humility, my final salutation will be returned before the person quickly looks elsewhere.

Well, Charles, is it you that wants love? Is that delicious cheese sandwich not enough? Can you help them in their profitable drugs business?

The said business is  conducted partly on the beach just to the east of the illegally 12-storied hotel, owned by Miguel Madureira Celorico. This is the beach of Cabeço, situated on land bought by the Angolan dictator for a golf course and luxury villas that were never completed and which is therefore now turned over to nocturnal landings when all the lights go out here in the last hour of darkness. Or it is conducted from the beach just to the west. Or, just beyond the Praia Verde to the east, there is the Ricocu ("Rich Arse") beach, totally deserted and the private property of a rich and distinguished but mafioso family.

Oh, well, Charlie, aren't your research skills, aided by your excellent knowledge of Portuguese, brilliant? I'm proud of you for finding all that out!

And, if you don't like the drug-importing Portuguese, perhaps you prefer the Germans and Dutch dealers who are waiting to receive the goods when it grows light by the caravan park or near the mysterious gently-rumbling huts by the hotel with barred windows and surrounded by barbed wire? Or perhaps you like the Bulgarians who work in the orange fields by day and deal and fight in the evening, handsome and friendly with their dagger faces? But you surely can't prefer the Spaniards, even more adept with the drugs than the Portuguese, who bang the food down on the table and flounce off with a metaphorical click of castanets, which your own sombre and preoccupied people would never do?

And, anyway, does it really matter that Altura, where a surprising number of people seem suddenly to lapse from Portuguese into Italian, is more an international criminal organisation than it is a place? Does it matter that the inhabitants loathe me, a gay yet strangely triumphant stranger in their midst, endlessly coming up with pert replies to their unpleasant questions, or marching past with trousers falling down and carrying huge bags of shopping? Should I even worry if this is the chief Portuguese base of the Neapolitan Camorra?

For there is another side to the coin of my almost total failure to  click with these morose human beings. It lies in the attitude of contempt and barely concealed hostility which I am able to unleash at any time and which contributes to the atmosphere of luxuriant solitude I am able to maintain at my house. I will give just one example of this.

I mentioned in a previous post that a neighbour called Josefa (not a Portuguese, a Galician) offered some years ago to do my washing for the same price I would pay if I took it to the launderette. That price was Eight Euros Fifty. For a while Josefa did the washing at this price, then it became ten and, finally, by degrees, it became twenty Euros, however large or small the bag, or bags, of washing I gave her.

When my mother was alive, and suffering from Alzheimer, Josefa gave her a lot of free help, and her Portuguese husband António acquiesced in this, while not approving of it. Later the couple were friendly and welcoming during the long years I was struggling to get the house, and since I have had it they have also been quite kind, being willing, for instance, to pay bills on my behalf when I am abroad, on supply of the money. They have usually, but not always, been scrupulous in repaying any change that was due to me. I have innumerable times visited their excellent, overpriced and totally empty restaurant in the nearby beach resort of Monte Gordo. Recently I was able to negotiate a standard price of seventeen Euros for a simple meal: vegetable pancake with potatoes, a glass of wine, a bottle of water, and a small coffee, served with habitual hostility and occasional affability by António.

I once liked them, or at least her, but not now. During the "quiet time", I started to kick up rough about the price of the washing. Josefa was hurt, self-righteous and adamant. She began appearing more and more often and earlier and earlier in the morning, first to collect the dirty clothes, and then to deliver them in many instalments, plonking them down on a chest by the door where I had created a decorative display of treasures from my travels. Then she would slam the door from the outside before I could close it myself. I was handing her the note of twenty in grimmer and grimmer silence.

I have been writing this post in slow stages, and the date as I continue today is 1st October 2013, almost two months after I arrived home. A week or two ago I visited the restaurant and sat outside in silence and windy discomfort. Now I was being served like a stranger, in the same way as at the cafes. Towards leaving time, Josefa attempted a more friendly conversation and mentioned the washing. I told her abruptly that I did not need her services in that department any more.

After a quick walk around the square. I picked a quarrel with her husband over a trivial issue. Then I waited for the lift that they always gave me back to Altura after the meal. He delayed longer and longer with the trivial business of the restaurant. Finally I walked out without saying anything to them. Then I sat on the beach almost crying with relief that I had got these people out of my hair.

A week later, I took my washing to the local laundry, and found with delight that they had dropped their prices, and could now do a very reasonable bag for twelve Euros. Today I went again, and the price has dropped to ten. It does my heart good to save on the washing. But I feel slightly sad and guilty about the poorer relations with my friends.

And when one reaches the haunts of the English - the Tavira Treasure charity shop, say - the talk is entirely of possessions and material things and there is no comfort there either. "Always keep a house in England," one radiant old lady says. "It doesn't matter if you have one in Portugal, or France, or both, always keep a house in England. You never know when you might need it."

One soon turns away from such people in despair, but not before one has extracted a pair of serviceable trousers from them for one Euro. Then it can be fun to cross the river to the more flyblown Portuguese fair, and sink heavily onto a park-bench, plastic bags gathered around one, to finger one's new LP of The Merry Widow, eat a banana, and finally rise up towards the local bus.

So is the life of seamless apprehension and contemplation in the Algarve a tolerable road towards death? Well, as the poet Heine puts it:

Immerhin! Mich wird umgeben
Gottes Himmel, dort wie hier....

When I think about death now, I consider my current favourite writer, Patricia Highsmith. Of course, she has her faults. Her delight in the charnel house of humanity may be rather too evident, and she certainly cannot tell right from wrong. But what a mistress of every department of the art of writing! What a grand explorer of what it means to be human!

I didn't go on with The Sentimental Education after that evening in the garden, although I thought the first chapter very fine, and turned instead to Ripley Under Ground, by Miss Highsmith. The title is to be taken literally. Ripley almost ends up being buried in a grave that he originally dug for someone else, whom he killed in a cellar, but he gets out of that grave, and pursues the man who had tried to bury him across Europe, to save him from suicide, but that man commits suicide anyway, and Ripley hacks at his body in order to burn and bury it, before carefully preserving the remaining ashes, in order to pretend that these are the remains of someone else, whom he, Ripley, impersonated, and who also committed suicide.

Am I any better than Ripley? Is anyone else? I have been in the dock at the Old Bailey and was condemned there for trying to get someone thrust into a car at my occupied house in the Algarve, driven over the border to Spain, killed there, and the body disposed of in the thick vegetation, to confuse the police. Was that nice?

And, on a more trivial scale, there are two people in Altura who are taking money off me almost every day under the guise of friendship. I said in a previous post that I liked the amusing younger druggy more than the rapacious old alcoholic woman. But a few nights ago I met Joaquim the Breba in the dark main road of Altura, and expected that he would greet me with his usual shouts of joy, but instead he came over to me, and stared at me so long and hard and so silently and with such venom that I thought he would hit me. Then he suddenly dropped the hostility and was his usual smiling, wheedling self.

And the old woman, Dona Isabel, her constant begging for more and more money is almost intolerable. She sits outside the Snack-Bar Piri-Piri, and is one of a poisonous gang associated with the place. There is the flirtatious middle-aged owner who calls herself Arlete, her ageing and silent paramour Senhor António, and the handsome and violent younger Bulgarian Alex, who has a hold on Arlete. These are usually all in the rather insalubrious interior. But when I pass the place on the bus and see Dona Isabel sitting so silently and still and alone outside it, I am filled with a stab of pity.

And what about her young friend, or possibly her illegitimate daughter, the beautiful and refined and aristocratic woman who shares the Christian name of my favourite writer, who mixes delicate appeal with a smoker's coarseness, who is full of friendliness and civilisation and charm, but who regularly goes to Spain to smuggle drugs, with Dona Isabel to help her? Patrícia is widely suspected of having committed one terrible crime, and I believe she may have committed another.

And what of my mother, who slept in later years with the man thirty years her junior, Flávio José Custódio Rosa, the man whom I tried to murder, a person widely reputed to be her son and who would thus be my half-brother? Well, she did have Alzheimer's. She didn't know what she was doing.

And perhaps the worst of all, my father, that German soldier in Italy from the Second World War, will it ever be known what he had done, what horrors he took part in? And yet, on 4th November 2011, between nine and ten weeks before his death at around the age of ninety, I managed to track him down to the small town in Northern Portugal where he was living with his wife of many years.

And they received me kindly. I sat with the couple in their quiet room and we had pleasant conversation and they gave me a good meal. My father proudly showed me his basement workshop and both liked the present of a china elephant that I had brought them. The years of philandering and hiding and impersonation and a false marriage on my father's part, the years of lying and killing, were gone. He was a silent but friendly old man. He cried a little in the evening of that day, when I was sitting with him in his sitting-room and his wife was in the kitchen.

And a little over two months later, he came into the sitting-room from the toilet. Then he just sighed softly and was gone.

A credo, drawn from my experience of life

I have not added a new post for more than five months, and this was partly because I have been living intensely. It was also because I did not know how to put what I wanted to say.

When I last wrote, I was in Paris, as part of a long and strange quadrilateral journey which took me all around Europe and to the Levant. My goal was Israel, but I wanted to keep this secret from everyone for as long as possible, so I chose the most circuitous of routes, starting from my home in the Algarve on the evening of 2nd October 2012, progressing gradually through northern Portugal and northern Spain, and then going into southern France. Eventually I reached Paris. From there I went to an inconspicuous resort on the Belgian coast called De Panne. Then I spent a week in later November 2012 going rapidly south-eastwards through Europe towards Athens, mainly by night trains, and with stops in Cologne, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia. In Athens, late in November 2012, I bought my ticket to Tel Aviv.

From 30th November 2012 until 4th January 2013, I spent five weeks in Israel and Palestine, and this journey was by air, from Athens and back, because that was the only way to travel, and because I was forced to purchase a return ticket at Athens Airport.

On my return from the Holy Land, I spent a little more time in Athens, then went by boat between Greece and Italy, spent some days in Rome, took another boat to Spain, stopped in Madrid, and finally reached my home in Portugal on 21st January 2013. I have since visited Lisbon and two Portuguese regions to the north of it.

The period after returning to Portugal has been troubled, and conflict has broken out with many of the people I know in the Algarve and elsewhere: the Portuguese who surround me; the British expatriates who are a little farther away; and the members of my own family, yet further, in Portugal and England.
The essential incompatibility between people cannot be disguised for ever. And a tie broken is a freedom gained. Furthermore there has been a positive development during the difficult journey and  return, which seems to be connected with this trouble and dissension. Details of it now follow, but first a few more personal details.

While I was in prison, between 2006 and 2009, I lost an enormous amount of weight, but during the four happy months in London after my release, and then the period of my four sybaritic grand tours, and the somnolent and mainly harmonious intervals between them in the Algarve, I put back all the weight I had lost and added some more. When I was in Sicily in the summer of 2012, and had access for the first time in many months to a weighing machine, at Palermo railway station, I saw with horror that I had reached 17 stone.

Since then I have been fighting back. During that long journey through the twelve countries (or thirteen, if Palestine be counted) I climbed every hill I could find and took on every adventure that was within my physical capability. And after returning to the Algarve I have often chosen water rather than wine with my lunch. I have succeeded in reducing my shirt size from XXL to XL.

The most important part of this process of self-discipline was the five weeks I spent in Israel and Palestine. There I had a particularly stressful time. I was alone, and I suppose such an eccentric and solitary traveller as myself would have been bound to attract suspicion, and particularly from those who hold power in the land. It was a wonderful and all-encompassing journey, which I would not have missed for the world, but I also could not help (to my regret) developing quite a marked dislike for Israel. This was because of the outrageous way in which I was treated there by a group of people who went unchecked and also by the general hostility towards others that seems to be characteristic of the Israeli people. But I also understand that Israelis, ever since the inception of their state, have lived in a condition of existential angst, and that therefore behaviour which in the case of any other western nation would be entirely unacceptable is at least understandable in their case.

I went to Israel and Palestine with three purposes. The first was just to see as much as I could, as a tourist. The second was to visit as many of the sites connected with the life of Jesus as possible, as a Christian. These two aims I fully accomplished. The third was to find out more about my own identity as a Jew. There my success was limited.

During my Israeli journey, which began with 12 days in Jerusalem, after which I went to Tel Aviv, I attracted the attention of a private security team (or at least their leader told me it was that). It consisted of three men, who were all, according to their own account, Jews and Zionists, and who were presumably acting with the authorisation, or at least the toleration, of the state of Israel.

I encountered the first of the three, who was the leader, on the evening of the day I had tried to register with Beit Hatfutsot, the organisation which hosts the Jewish genealogy centre, in Tel Aviv. He was a large South African businessman in middle-aged physical decline, who had homes in Israel, near Cape Town and in Florida, who in his youth had been a mercenary in the former Portuguese colonies, and who, according to his own account, could, at the drop of a finger, kill anyone without hope of detection.

We were in a slightly dingy hostel in Tel Aviv, and we were all guests. On the first evening, a Friday, the South African was hostile to me briefly. Then, repeatedly, on the Saturday evening, he threatened to kill me, came very close to me in a threatening manner, called me an anti-Semite and a paedophile, and followed me to the toilet and tried (or seemed to try) to break the door down. His two cronies looked on, and occasionally added their own threats.

The second man was a very quiet, bearded middle-aged American, with pointed wit and a mystical interpretation of the more threatening parts of the Torah. The third was a huge and gross young Brazilian who, the other two later informed me, was a hitman. There were quite a number of other people around in the hostel who just did nothing, acting as if to subject foreigners to this sort of third degree was the personal right of every Israeli. Not even in the worst countries of Africa do I think the staff of a hotel would have allowed a guest to be subjected to such treatment. But in such countries you might have been killed. I do not believe there was any danger of that in this case.

I reacted to the intimidation by showing as little fear as I could, and the following evening I met the trio in the street. Now they were very friendly, and invited me to come with them to celebrate the last night of Chanukah (the Festival of Lights). I was moved by this very Jewish occasion, and after that, under some pressure, I offered to stand them three rounds of drinks at a crowded nearby bar (the American, who was drinking Guinness very fast, eventually took four). That evening they were very amiable and told me that they knew that I was a Jew. Towards the end of the evening we became mysteriously separated. They later said that it was I who had left them in the lurch, but I believe  it was they who vanished.

In the following days, the South African, in particular, was alternately friendly and threatening, openly intercepted my email, and said that he had been commissioned, in his capacity of head of the private security firm, to find out everything about me, and that, with this purpose, during the third degree evening, he had put me under hypnosis. He confirmed, however, that the grilling was extensive enough for him to say that I was not an anti-Semite and that this had been confirmed by what he had since discovered.

I found all this difficult to deal with, and hoped to escape them by going to the hostel in Tiberias. But when I arrived there, the South African and the American were waiting for me. In Tiberias they became increasingly more friendly still, and the South African wanted to take me with them to the synagogue, but the rabbi  vetoed it, because I was a Christian. And, once, when I was sitting more or less alone with my chief persecutor in the sitting room of the hostel, I asked him why he was taking so much trouble over me. And he answered, with surprising gentleness, "We have to be sure, so that you can know."

But I was effectively being held as a sort of open prisoner, and they told me that they would be with me at least until the end of my stay in Israel and possibly beyond. I said I would be going back to Greece, that Greeks did not like Jews, that I knew enough Greek to explain to the Greek police in that language what was happening (entirely false), and said I would have no hesitation in denouncing the team to the Greek authorities.

Meanwhile I could not stand the situation I was facing in Israel, and eventually, one morning a few days after Christmas, just before the beginning of Shabbat, taking with me as much of my luggage as I could carry without attracting suspicion, and when they were themselves going on a pre-Shabbat excursion, I left the hostel and my persecutors, ostensibly going by taxi for the day to Banias, the ancient Panias, or Caeserea Philippi, where Peter recognised Jesus as the Christ. It was a beautiful place, with its streams, grottoes and ancient temple, and I stayed there a while, but when the taxi returned me to Tiberias I immediately got another one to a town farther westward and southward in Galilee called Afula. There, with some difficulty, and after attracting the attention of some young Israeli soldiers, who seemed anxious to be friendly with the whole world, I procured a third driver to take me to a point some distance away from the frontier with the Palestinian Authority.

After crossing the very quiet frontier, I was borne off by a party of friendly Arabs to Nablus and spent a good day and two nights based there, seeing the Christian sights of Samaria, and reflecting on the strange historical continuity of the fact  that this area, in the time of Christ, just as now, was inhabited by a people hostile to the Jews but related to them. On the second night in Nablus, lying in bed within my room at the hotel, I heard the voice of my chief Israeli tormentor in the room outside, talking to the Arab proprietor, but the latter evidently did not prove co-operative, because I was not dragged away, although the recorded announcements of the muezzin were wildly out of sync all that night, presumably the humour of the ex-mercenary.

The next morning the Arabs quickly hustled me into a taxi towards Ramallah, and I passed New Year's Eve there, and, wandering around, just as we went into New Year's Day, was inveigled by a cafe-owner into carrying the Palestinian flag through the streets. I did this to please him, but dropped the thing with great relief when I reached my hotel room and abandoned it there.

And, the next day, it was back to Jerusalem on a maximum-security bus, and then over the desert to mysterious Eilat, where a man calling himself a hotel-owner met me at the bus station and took me to a strange encampment where there were no other guests and which I think was a security outpost. Then back to Jerusalem and the Kaplan Hotel, where on the last night, about two o'clock in the morning, I suddenly heard, within my room, shouts and screams and the sound of gunfire, followed by maniacal laughter, But the next morning all the Israelis said nothing at all had happened in or near the hotel in the night, so I suppose this was my jokey friend's last hurrah. Then back to Tel Aviv and the airport, where after a frisking from a severely handsome Israeli soldier who had me stripped naked, my trip to the most unforgettable and most unforgiving of all countries was over, and I sat in the plane with God knows what mixture of anger and longing.

To attract all that attention was obviously strange, and I do not believe it can have been connected to anything I have done in my own life, which has only consisted in practising as an unsuccessful literary man, followed by being an even more unsuccessful would-be murderer. This surveillance and persecution must therefore, I believe, have been connected with the mysteries about my ancestry which I have mentioned in previous posts, the possible Jewish origins of my mother, and the possible German (and Nazi) ones of my father.

And, as far as all this goes, I have recently made two discoveries, or possible discoveries, one of them very startling. Among my purposes in going to Lisbon was to visit my one surviving aunt, Eva, and my main purpose in going to see her was to get a photograph of my Neapolitan godfather, Gennaro Maccariello, whom I never met after my babyhood and whose face I therefore did not know.

Tia Eva had been extremely reluctant even to try to find this photograph, but after I had visited her once and taken her a large present, she rang me up at the house of the woman who lives in the centre of Lisbon, whom she has known for sixty years but from whom she has become estranged, said that she had found the photograph, and invited me to dinner. We had a very amiable time together on that evening. I did not ask her all the usual questions that she does not like and she eventually gave me many photographs relating to my early life, including some of my mother's wedding, and retained only one or two for her own possession.

I did not look at the photographs she had given me very closely before leaving her, and the next day, which was last Sunday, I rested from everything to do with my own family and spent the day around the Anglican church in Lisbon, with its eccentric but conformist congregation. On the Monday, I was due to visit the area of rural Portugal which was my mother's native region, in order to lay flowers on her grave.

On that morning, before leaving, I glanced quickly at the photographs and suddenly, with immense surprise, saw that the man who was posing with my mother in one very clear photograph of her wedding did not appear to be the Englishman who had brought me up and whom I had always believed to be her wedded husband and my father.

The man in the photo looked like the person I had known, but I suddenly felt sure he was someone different. The man she was marrying, I suddenly realised, was possibly posing under the Englishman´s name, Arthur Ernest Hills. And, come to that, I remembered, I wasn't even sure that Arthur Ernest Hills had originally been an Englishman, although he must have arrived in the country before the age of eight because he had no foreign accent. I had already conceived suspicions he might have been a German or a Pole, because three old women, including Eva, had told me his father, my grandfather, had been either of those.

I had known various photographs of my mother's wedding, and of my parents and family background, since I was a child, and had assumed, as children will, that they all showed same man. And the two men, if two men they really were (because I was still confused at this point), looked similar in that both were fair, both roughly the same age, both rather wolfish-looking, and both balding rapidly to about the same extent. Really, they could be twins. But the other man seemed to have slightly more hair of a different shape, to be bigger, taller and fitter than Arthur Ernest Hills, more of a catch, really, than Arthur.

In one of the photographs remaining in my aunt's possession, there was  a wedding group that included the father of Arthur Ernest Hills (or at least someone I always believed to be that) and the second wife he had married bigamously (if such she was), so the deception, if deception it was, seemed to have been practised with the full knowledge of Arthur, and, I thought, possibly for money.

There was certainly an official record of a marriage between my mother and a man calling himself Arthur Ernest Hills in the registry office in Hendon, north-west London, on 11th September 1954, and the wedding itself would be difficult to fake. Later I was to discover that there had also been a church ceremony with Arthur Ernest Hills, at the church of St Joseph, Highgate Hill, on 13th November, 1955. But I had also been told by Aunt Eva that my mother had a church wedding, somewhere near the house of the Maccariellos at 19 Hornsey Rise, N19, that this was definitely to my father, and that she had no other wedding.

There were also stories that my mother had met my father on a tube train, when she got her finger stuck in the train door, and not at the Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand, where she and Arthur Ernest Hills always told me they had met. I had many times questioned my aunt about this discrepancy, but she is as taciturn as they come. If she gives information, it is because she wants to.

The whole set of stories and discrepancies, and now the photographic evidence, were disturbing indeed. But I longed to discover that Arthur Ernest Hills had not been my father.

When I arrived in my mother's "terra", I showed the photograph of the wedded pair (in Hendon? near Hornsey Rise?) to an elderly and deeply Catholic cousin by marriage, who had known Arthur Ernest Hills quite well, and to whom I had taken a large statue of the Virgin as a present. He studied the photograph a moment. "Is this Arthur?" he said doubtfully.

"Well, it's strange," I said. "It looks like someone else."

He took the photograph from me and looked at it quickly. "It's another man," he said.

At that point I was sure Arthur Ernest Hills had not been my father, deep joy filled my heart, and that evening, after my return to Lisbon, I phoned my friend Bill Hicks in London to tell him about the strange discovery.

(Just as an aside, and in relation to the mystery that surrounds my mother, I want to relate here that, later in the day spent in the terra, I spoke in private to the wife of the man who had looked at the photograph, and she told me, in response to my prompting, that my mother had been given to the family Reis, by whom she was brought up, as an outcast baby.

These sorts of unconventional family arrangement were very common in Portugal up until the end of the dictatorship and many people in the country are entirely uncertain who their grandparents were and sometimes even their parents. So the woman who told me this, and my aunt, and my cousin Maria in England, who saved me from suicide, are possibly, it seems, not my relations by blood.

But my knowledge of all this is so very incomplete, and based so entirely on hearsay, that I can make no definite statements about it at present. I am particularly close to Maria, who knew instinctively on the evening in 2006 when I had taken a hundred paracetamols that it was essential she ring me. She thus saved me from death, I believe she must be a very close relation. And, as I have mentioned in a previous point, there are stories of a mysterious woman known only as "Ana of the Stockings" who lived in my grandfather's household, and who could be my grandmother and also hers.)

The day following my visit to the "terra", which was my last full day in Lisbon - I was going off to visit an elderly friend (and rival) of my mother's who lives in the north of Portugal - I set off for the Museum of Ancient Art, but on the way dropped in at the Lisboa Story Centre. There I met a personable middle-aged Canadian woman painter who also wished to see the ancient art.

So we visited the museum together, enjoyed a pleasant tour, and afterwards I treated her to drinks at a nearby café, and told her about the mysteries surrounding my parents and showed her some of the photographs in my possession. She was convinced that all the photographs I showed her were of the same man, and said she had the special knowledge of physiognomy of an experienced painter to tell her this. Because I thought some of the photos might just show Arthur Ernest Hills, I became a little upset. She said she was a member of my team, and I said rather sharply that she was a member of the crew but not the captain. We parted on rather bad terms, as often happens in my initially pleasant encounters wit strangers.

Since then I have been studying all the photographs carefully, now with doubts in my mind, but never quite losing the conviction that some of the ones taken at the wedding, and possibly every single one in the group, show a different man to the seeming Englishman I had known.

So did my mother, the daughter of the possibly Jewish "Ana of the Stockings", marry a mysterious German closely resembling and posing as Arthur Ernest Hills, live with him for some time at the house in London of Gennaro Maccariello and his mother, and did then Arthur Ernest Hills resume his true identity on our move down to Crawley in Sussex, when I was nine or ten months old, or even at some point after that?

It all seems too fantastic to be true, but, just in case it is, and I am an explosive mixture of Jew and Nazi-descendant, I want to set down my personal credo for all who might be interested.

First a little more background. The childhood in Crawley, and the subsequent years, were unhappy. My mother and the man possibly not my father lived at war until Arthur Ernest Hills left our house soon after my sixteenth birthday. I did not really know any of my grandparents, what other relations existed in Britain were entirely distant, and my other relatives, numerous but not very understanding, were in faraway Portugal or, even further, in colonial Africa. I  had no friends among other children until I was sixteen, except one whom I disliked, and did not get on with my school teachers, who disliked my intelligence, knowledge and oddness. Going to Oxford did not improve matters. I was unpopular with fellow undergraduates at Hertford College and did not find a don to encourage me. Two postgraduate years repeated the pattern. Later I never received any financial help from my mother or the man who brought me up - let alone my real father , was only able to get low-grade professional jobs, never shared a house or flat with a group of friends, never had a sexual or loving relationship, never travelled abroad with anyone except my mother, and never found any writers, agents or editors who could help my literary career. This last failure was the most damaging of all, because my writing is life.

My loyalty was always only to my mother, to whom I was very attached until I grew to hate her, and my only other influence was the man who brought me up. That man, Arthur Ernest Hills, even if his initial background was German, became an English nationalist and fanatical racist, and my mother, even if her real background was at least partly Italian or Jewish, identified strongly with what may have been her adopted country, Portugal, and brought me up to think of myself as a Portuguese patriot. This contradiction of background engendered in my character a sad dualism, where I attempted to be part of both England and Portugal, but fitted in with neither, experiencing rejection in the one, seeing my personal life ruined in the other, and always longing to escape from them both and what seemed to me the unbearable modern world.

So, because I was never invited by others to partake of the banquet of life, I have been occupied in snatching the crumbs from under its table. Other people have disapproved of this scavenging, and the result has been that I have come to hate them and they have just ignored me. I have wandered alone through the world, trying to make the best of whatever contacts I have had, almost all of which ended unhappily. Yet the upside of this radical isolation has been that I have developed emotional and intellectual self-sufficiency to an unusual degree. I am entirely indifferent to the convictions, interests and preferences of others, although I sometimes pretend to care, in order to please them, or to get something out of them (I sometimes try to help people, if I perceive them to be fellow victims). But I have no favourites among my fellow human beings. There are those I hate, those to whom I am grateful, but there are not any I love.

All this has led to my developing a harsh philosophy. I am - although not with absolute consistency - a person of the far right. It sometimes seems not to be so, because I have often been forced to mask my real allegiances in the left-liberal society,  England, in which I have lived. I have indeed come to delight in deceiving others as to my real character and beliefs. It helps to keep the free food and drink flowing. 

I have refused to subscribe to the ideals of democracy, human rights and anti-discrimination which are the common currency of my educated and less-educated contemporaries. I have been tempted to racialism (although not racism in the sense of discriminating against anyone - I treat people as I find them), and in bold moods, I have often opposed and derided moves towards progress and greater human happiness. I have more or less openly stated that I think that in certain circumstances an autocratic government might be necessary and desirable. In my most brutal moods I have come close to believing that there may be nothing intrinsically wrong with mass-murder, slavery or torture, although these are beliefs, because of their sheer outrageousness, that I have not often voiced.

As I have grown older, however, almost imperceptibly, and with a sense of joy during the time I was in prison because for the first time in my life I felt part of a community, I have come to believe, although with frequent lapses into older ideas, in a more humane, liberal and optimistic outlook.

Democracy may, indeed, as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle considered, be flawed, because a considerable mass of voters, particularly in recent times, can never be induced to accept the necessary actions that their leaders might reasonably demand. But we are not living in the age of the Enlightened Despots, and modern tyranny seems likely always to be dreadful. The idea of human rights may be an intellectual construction, and lead to innumerable stresses in daily and political life, but there has to be some way to guard against frightful abuses. And, although the idea of race - or, as we might now call it, "regional genetic variations within humanity" - may have had some rough validity in the past, and to a limited extent in the present, and although local, regional and national loyalties are all important, the global mixing that has taken place in recent decades (which cannot be reversed), the ecological, economic and other problems that affect mankind as a whole, and the demands of common decency, mean that, whatever our doubts, we must emphasise Human Race Limited as one enterprise and one family.

I still believe these things from time to time. But often I believe them to be nonsense.

What about the issues that specifically affect Jews and the State of Israel? Here I believe we must give different answers to the question of Iran and that of the Palestinians. The present Iranian regime both develops nuclear weaponry and threatens death and destruction to Israel. The consequences of any Israeli pre-emptive attack on Iran are terrible to contemplate in human terms, but it is nevertheless possible to envisage circumstances in which Israel might find itself left with no reasonable alternative but to launch an attack on Iran proportionate to the level of threat posed. It is also possible that force of circumstance might justify a disproportionate response. This would have to be judged on the exact nature of what threats Israel might face from Iran in the short to medium term.

The issue of the Palestinians is different. They are not the aggressors but the victims in the current situation. It is they who have either been driven from their land or forced to live as second-class citizens there. Their wrongs cry out for proper redress, all hopes of lasting peace seem to rest on such redress, but the difficult question is to see how it can be achieved.

For many decades, all conventional opinion has favoured the two-state solution. But the whole territory of Israel and Palestine is only about the size of Wales and almost half of it is desert. I personally find it difficult to see how a two-state solution can ever be implemented. The only other solution is a unitary state and, if the respective numbers of the two communities remain the same, this would obviously entail the end of Zionism and a situation where Jews would not be in a clear majority within the new political entity.

We Jews have an entirely understandable need to be separate and self-sustaining and to control our own destinies. It is essentially this need that is holding up a solution. So is there a way to maintain a strong Jewish identity in and for Israel and at the same time welcome adherents of Islam and Christianity and of other beliefs, interested members of humanity, as one might call them? That would require very careful thought and planning, and I myself, in a humble way, have given some thought to this matter, which I will outline if anyone ever shows any further interest in my ideas on the subject.

All three monotheistic religions have Abraham as their father, and Jerusalem is equally a holy city to all three, so surely there is a deep common heritage on which to build. The almost equally difficult problems of South Africa and Northern Ireland have eventually yielded to some sort of imperfect solution. The dangers, the hatred, and the apparent insolubility of the problem are all obvious, but I hope,, at least sometimes, that time and demography and human reason will eventually do their work. 

But I am a loyal enough Jew to have a desire for the continuance of the State of Israel in its present form, and, because the numbers on both sides are at present roughly equal - an equality that guarantees constant tension and conflict into the foreseeable future - that would surely involve the subjugation, further expulsion and perhaps even mass-killing of those members of the Palestinian population who are unreconciled to Israeli society. This is perhaps an attractive idea, if Israel has the strength and determination, and the necessary indifference to world opinion, to impose it. But in moods of rationalistic caution, and also in those of sudden love and generosity, I find it hard to believe that this can be right. What vengeance might ensue? Might not a non-state actor, maddened by the devastation of the Palestinian people, eventually get hold of a nuclear bomb large and smart enough to destroy Israel, and be a species of suicide-bomber so that they would not fear retaliation nor the destruction of any remaining Palestinians who would be viewed as collaborators anyway for having failed to fight and die?

But, perhaps, so be it with all the destruction. Human beings - whether an individual or a nation - feel compelled to do to others what has been done to them. It is essential for their psychological health that they do so. The Jews were subjected to a genocide, principally by the Germans, and the rest of the world looked on. The hatred for the rest of the human race already felt by the Jews intensified. It was not possible for them to exact revenge on the Germans, which would have been the ideal solution. So our rage has been progressively transferred to the Palestinians who, in their sense of loss and displacement, are an enemy almost as determined and savage as the Germans once were. If the Israelis finally succeed in exterminating the Palestinians, the Jewish people will rejoice to the end of their days, whatever punishment they may eventually suffer for this crime.

And, since all possible solutions face insuperable difficulties, I have to conclude that there is no solution and that we shall just have to wait and see what happens. It may be entirely beyond human will to influence. As the Greek tragedians knew, human passions are sometimes so overwhelming that progress towards a destructive outcome inevitably follows, however benevolent or malign the motives.

Going back to general questions. If I am not really so keen on liberty, equality, fraternity and all that, and have no exclusive attachment to any group to which I may happen, by affiliation or ancestry, to belong - Jews, Christians, Gypsies, gays, conservatives, Germans, Portuguese, Italians, English, British, Europeans, whites, Nazis, writers, masochists, human beings - what are my real commitments?

Of course, in one sense, the question is easily answered. My commitment is to myself and my own desires, and to getting through my own life as comfortably and easily as I can. But that goes without saying. It is my primary motive in everything I do. But is there anything more than that? Do I have any beliefs that transcend my own ego?

I have already mentioned my Jewish loyalties, and these certainly exist, and are my only loyalty to any group to which I might seem to belong. But even they only exist to a certain extent. For life has often seemed to me, and still seems, like nothing so much as a medieval melee, a war of all against all, with no mercy and no quarter, where everyone uses the first weapon that comes to hand, where you are more likely to be destroyed by your own side than by the other (if indeed it is clear to you what side you are on), and where those who were once rebels and underdogs, and therefore full of justice and hope, always end up lording it with reciprocal ferocity over the tyrants who once oppressed them. High above this grim battlefield, love and good feeling seem sometimes to shine like an unpredictable ray of light.

And this redeeming love and light has come over long years to be identified for me with Jesus Christ and the Christian religion. The Church may be an imperfect institution, individual Christians are sometimes intensely annoying, the Christian Church has a terrible record in its treatment of the Jews, abstract dogmas can seem dry and doubtful things, and it is impossible, I find, always to retain one's conviction that Jesus is God. But never mind. The essence of my personal faith lies in trying, no doubt very uncertainly, to follow in the footsteps of that radiant figure.

What Jesus tells me to do is in essence simple: love God and my fellow human beings, seek God's kingdom, keep his law, do not judge others, give to those who ask, forgive those who do me wrong, and don't worry too much about the future. Is it so very difficult to follow? Well, yes, it's almost impossible to follow. But has there ever been a better set of precepts? Or one more deserving of my total loyalty?

And I have two other allegiances. I was named after Prince Charles. Could I ever cease to love the Royal Family in whose honour I was named? Never!

And I believe in the transforming and healing power of art. How could I not do so? I have dedicated my life to trying to be an artist, a writer, and even now I am continuing to follow my goal by writing this blog. It may often appear to be a total waste of time. But I'm going on with it!

Is that all positive enough? Well probably it isn't. I've hedged my bets so much I may have done the reader's head in. From all this stuff I don't think anyone could work out what I think about anything. 

Don't qualify your statements at every turn, you bloody hypocrite. Be crystal clear. Boil your beliefs down to a single sentence.

OK, here goes.

For me it's basically love of all, tempered by fear of all, hoping for joy for all.

Sous les toits de Paris

My latest round of travel has brought me to Paris and, as it is a cold, wet afternoon and All Souls Day, I  decided not to visit the Impressionists at the Musée d'Orsay but to see the Memorial of the Shoah.

During my years wandering around Europe, the visits to Jewish museums have often been memorable, but this one is among the most darkly impressive of all. It is mainly housed in a stark modern building which is over the site of a former barracks which became a deportation centre during the Second World War. At a deep underground level, there is a permanent exhibition where everything is explained with thoroughness. But above it is a huge dark hall which is down some steps, almost empty, and you see there sparse candles illuminating Hebrew words. There seems to be a tacit agreement that this area should not be entered. I myself decided to remain at the top of the steps and pray there.

Whether or not I am a Jew I do not know according to any material evidence. My mother, from whom my Jewishness, if it exists, must derive, only ever referred to the possibility in the most ambiguous terms. My ostensible ancestry, recorded in official papers, does not support the idea. I was not brought up according to any Jewish custom. I am not circumcised. I am a Christian and a homosexual, and a somewhat frivolous, irresponsible person whose most strongly held value, perhaps surprising and unsuitable in someone who holds to Christianity, is indifference.

I am very far indeed from being devoted to anything or anyone, except possibly Christ himself. Part of me wants to stand back from Jewish identity, which could only be proved with the utmost difficulty and might bring me harm. But another part wants to know the truth, and cleave to my own people, if such they are, as I believe.

There was a date when my doubts about the origin of both my parents began to crystallise. It was a few days before the Christmas of 2002, my mother had been dead for about three months, and I was visiting an old friend of hers, whom I had not seen since childhood, in her dark flat in a beautiful square in the centre of Lisbon. And I well remember sitting in this old woman's best back room, usually not used,  and feeling both close to her and strangely distant, and her suddenly saying, without any preparation, "Oh, you did know that your father's father was Polish s, didn't you?"

"No, I knew nothing at all about that. I always thought he was from Kent. But you say he was from Poland, do you?"

"Yes, I do. Your mother told me that at about the time you were born. She wouldn't have lied to me  I'm sure it's true."

"You are talking about Arthur's father, aren't you? Arthur, the man who brought me up?"

"Yes, who else would I be talking about?"

"But I was always told Arthur's father was from Kent. It doesn't seem possible he was Polish."

"Well, he was. Your mother said this very definitely. And she wouldn't have made a mistake about it."

"You're absolutely certain of this, are you? He was not from Kent? He was Polish?"

"I'm absolutely sure of it."

Oddly enough, the old woman's strange assertion did not utterly surprise me. This was because, in the years preceding her death, I had become aware of a parallel mystery surrounding the origins of my mother.

I had always believed my mother to be Portuguese, and in her honour had made every effort to learn the language. But when, after many years, I began to know Portuguese well, I was puzzled that her own knowledge of it seemed to be defective. However, her spoken Italian, in the dialect of Naples, was perfect, as I had known since childhood, because she so often boasted of the fact.

When I had myself begun to to try to speak Portuguese, at the age of eighteen, I was rather sharply taken up by various Portuguese because my efforts to speak it were coming out in Italian. I must have learnt this from her, when I tried to get her to teach me. She made tapes for me on the night before she told me something of what she had done with her house (i.e. leaving it to someone else), and this effectively ended our relationship. On this tape I am trying to talk Portuguese as well as I can, but at one point I come out with the words "Tutto a posto," "Everything OK", not "Tudo bem", as it should have been if I had been able to keep the conversation up in Portuguese. My mother also begins to talk perfect standard Italian on the tape.

So the possibility that my father had been a a Pole rather than an Englishman seemed like a variation on a theme.  Just as with the possibility that my mother had not been Portuguese, it did not entirely displease me. I did not really want my father to be half-English and half-Scots. I had an ambiguous attitude towards the English  and positively disliked the Scots and did not instinctively feel I belonged to either nation. I much preferred the more exotic origin that had been revealed to me, and have preserved my belief in what the old woman told me in the face of many attempts over the years by sceptical people in England to discredit the idea.

Quite soon after the initial disclosure, it was confirmed by two other old women that my mother had often told the story of my foreign grandfather at around the time of my conception and birth. One of the old women is my mother's sister, and she is an exceptionally taciturn person, who simply confirmed that my mother had told her the story, but would add no further details, if she knew them.

The third old woman is also ostensibly Portuguese, but like my mother does not appear to know the language perfectly. She was married to an Englishman and has lived in north London for many years. She is largely unknown to the other two, not in contact with them, and has never been friendly with them. She also is reticent, but has a more open and sympathetic personality than the other two have. Her attitude to my mother, who was simply a friend not a relation, has always been more detached than theirs and her attitude to me, perhaps unexpectedly, more affectionate.

When I visited her once and questioned her about the story, she said at first that she had no memory of it. This was when we were talking in her sitting-room and her husband, who had suffered a stroke, was sitting nearby in a chair. But, as I was leaving her, and we were on her doorstep, and her husband was out of earshot, she suddenly said that she did remember the story, and that she thought my grandfather might have been either Polish or German. She said she hardly knew the difference between those two countries, but I thought she must be lying there. I immediately believed that the origin of my grandfather must have been German, because I have always felt a strong affinity with Germany, as did my mother, and have never had any special interest in things Polish. However, on a later occasion, when I questioned the third old woman again, she went back on what she had said by insisting that my grandfather was not German and must surely have been a Pole.

None of the three women has ever been able, or perhaps willing, to add anything more to these initial details, although all three are still alive and in good mental health and continue to insist that my mother told them this story, and that she was referring to the father of my ostensible father, the man who brought me up, Arthur Ernest Hills, who appeared to be her husband.

With the help of the noted researcher Anthony Adolph - who is utterly convinced, without knowing them, that the stories of the old women are just "old wives' tales" - I have traced Arthur's official ancestry back to a shepherd of Westwell, Kent, Stephen Hills, born in the mid-nineteenth century. To the shepherd's piano-tuning son Frederick Charles Hills was apparently born Arthur Ernest Hills, electrical wireman in the naval dockyards of Chatham and Dover, who in turn, at least on paper, was the father of my father, born at Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey on 6th January 1926. He is recorded as Arthur Ernest Hills Junior, and he died in Chichester Hospital on 24th July, 2004. Arthur's birth certificate shows that his mother was Mary Brown,  a Scotswoman, born in Edinburgh on 17th September 1899, whose ancestry Mr Adolph has traced back in Scotland to Angus in the mid-eighteenth century.

I have employed a similarly efficient researcher in Portugal, and, once again, my mother's ostensible ancestry is solid and detailed and can be traced back in the rural area between Mafra and Ericeira to the north of Lisbon, through a long line of peasants and rural proprietors, to the early nineteenth century. In contrast to my father, who was a man effectively without family, I have known since childhood many people in Portugal who seem to be my relations and who, if not affectionate, are generally at least clinging. Therefore they seem to have every likelihood of being my real family.

So, fine Kentish shepherd and och-tha-noo ancestry on one side, innumerable saloios in their peasant berets on the other! In a world of prolier than thou, I should surely be richly satisfied. No one wants to be the mysterious grandson of the Romanovs any more, and only cranks claim to be of the family of Christ. But why did my mother speak Italian better than Portuguese? And why do the old women, the three Sybils, tell their story of the unknown Pole or the hastily withdrawn German? To be unsure of the origins of one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, but to be unsure of the origins of two looks remarkably like... what?

But there is no one to provide reminiscences on my father's side, and only vague and self-contradictory if insistent old biddies on my Mum's. So, in recent years, I have entered the curious world of genetic genealogy, courtesy of the famous and ostensibly highly reputable American firm, Family Tree DNA, recommended by Mr Adolph. From my experience of genealogical science, admittedly limited and not regarded by me in any very sympathetic light, it appears to have all the infallibility of early Christian theology, and to possess at least some of the interest. But, like the controversies of Athanasius and Arius and their successors, it appears to tell you mainly how many angels can dance on the end of a pin.

After many courteous, impersonal and dogmatic exchanges with the learned experts of the said organisation, and endless useless upgrades with substantial honorariums attached, I have no close matches on my father's line and belong to no identifiable sub-clade on my mother's. Therefore what I have learnt of the possible  problematic origins of either has been virtually nil.

On her side, nothing suggests ancestry in either Portugal or Italy, the countries she seems to have been connected with, but there are vast numbers of very distant matches, and not a single close one, in many parts of the world. In the listing called Ancestral Origins, for instance, Iran is quite well represented, and there are also many Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews. But there are also many of everyone else, and no real evidence anywhere to say whether she herself was Jewish.

In contrast to the remarkable world spread on Ancestral Origins in the maternal line, of  23,931 people tested on the paternal line in England I match only one at a single genetic remove, but at the insignificant level of 12 markers, and I initially had no name for the person. I was eventually, on my request, and with some difficulty, given an email for him, and I seem to remember receiving a very vague answer which said the man's ancestry was Welsh. There was also a match at a genetic remove of one at 12 markers among under 700 people tested in Greece, and I was also given an email for this person, but it proved unobtainable. I remember this area of the evidence only vaguely and the learned experts did not clarify it much.

I had six matches at two genetic removes on the paternal line, and these included someone called (or calling himself) Andy Hills, so he shared my ostensible surname. But his email was unobtainable, he did not respond to letters, and, because he had only tested to 25 markers and not the recommended 67, it would have been impossible to tell anything useful about what relation we might have, even if I had been able to reach him.

I eventually also managed to elicit emails from two of these other six remote matches. The first, from one of three Americans who shared the surname Rose, knew only that he was of remote English, German and Dutch ancestry in New York State, so no joy there. The fifth match, who, I seem to remember, was a rather threatening person known simply as Benbow, almost all of whose details were private, simply warned me in an unpleasant email not to contact him again.

The sixth of these matches was an American with the Italian surname of DiBartolo, and he did not reply to my contact.

The Population Finder result, which tries to estimate regional ancestry on all lines, but whose results are notably prone to error, estimates that I am 84.80 per cent of Western European (French, Orcadian) ancestry and 15.20 per cent of Middle-Eastern (Jewish) ancestry. According to the learned experts, however, the Jewish proportion could be accounted for by remote ancestry within the medieval Jewish population of the Iberian peninsula.

My sub-clade on the paternal side, which traces the line of fathers is currently called I2a3-L233-Western (this is a fairly new name, and they are about to change it again). It is quite a numerous grouping dating back to the end of the last Ice Age, and I am not closely related to anyone else within it who has tested.

However, I did receive a close match on an extension of the organisation called Y-search, who turned out to be a well-known scientist called Professor Kenneth Nordtvedt, a former advisor to President Reagan, who works closely with Family Tree DNA. But when, in great excitement, having discovered his identity, I contacted him, he immediately confessed that he had faked the match in order to get in touch, he said, with fellow members of this sub-clade. My confidence in Family Tree DNA, already low, was shattered when I discovered that they would resort to providing false matches in order to increase their own information.

The genetic group that includes such a distinguished if dishonest person is strongly present in two areas: one is England; the other is the western end of the North German Plain. The experts, including Professor Nordtvedt, say there is nothing whatever to tell which of the two areas my father may have been from. So, just as with my mother, all the information, expense and expert opinion I have incurred has told me nothing about the origin of my father, except what I already knew (because nobody I knew, including myself, ever showed the faintest interest in Poland), that he was English or German.

So, if I am ever to learn anything more, do I have to go back once again to the rebarbative elderly lady in the beautiful square in the heart of Lisbon, a person mainly so guarded, occasionally so sharply revealing? She wouldn't tell me anything without a good reason. But the last time I visited her, which was only recently, and this very Catholic lady was still in fine shape, I suddenly saw, on her mantelpiece, a menorah.

My fourth and last Grand Tour

Tomorrow I begin the journey to my home in Portugal after the fourth and last of my European grand tours. Despite the rich experiences of the last three months, I am filled with sadness. I very much wish to leave the small town in the north of Italy where I am. Yet I do not really want to return to the place in Portugal.

I have come to this town many times because a young friend of mine lives here. I met him on Christmas Day 2009, on the first grand tour, and he was then nineteen years old. I was passing the bar called Pop Bar, saw him inside at the counter, and went in. They were just about to close for the holiday, and he was helping his mother - who was in the back of the shop - to serve any last customer who might turn up. I had come to the town that Christmas to look for other friends who had lived there. They had moved away, but this thoughtful, intelligent and sweet boy was friendly, although not quite my type physically, and asked if I liked chocolate. So I thought I had found him.

Now it is he who is unobtainable, and I am back to the round of contacts with hoteliers, restaranteurs, and cafe owners, pleasant enough people, but with whom money must always be exchanged. Well, in many ways, as I have said before in this blog, I prefer such contacts. Professional people will never hurt you. For, if they had been people to hurt, you would not have hired their services in the first place or you would swiftly have dispensed with them when the person in question turned nasty.

Yet, just now, as I was writing this piece in the noonday sunshine on a park bench outside the library, in which I had previously been whiling away the time looking at a book called Empire Tales, two female librarians came out and stopped to talk to me. We had such a pleasant chat, and now they have ridden off on their bicycles. That is what I love about the Italians, the way they combine sympathy and a ready approach with the essential human hardness. That is why it is in this one country alone that I could live, and where my own essential solitude could be mitigated, once my travelling years are done.

For how simple in its sophistication is this land, whose long Western shore I have followed for seven hundred miles. And so often it was just a small green verge and a drop of stones between where I sat on the train and the sea, all the way from leaving Menton Garavan in France and coming to Ventimiglia, with so many miles until I passed the Gulf of Joy, and Tyrhennian, Ionian and Mediterranean seas met like the weird sisters, beyond the straits, in Sicily. How beautiful it all was. But there have been beautiful times too in France and Germany and Portugal and Switzerland and Spain. What am I worrying about? Is there any human being more free of every problem than myself? Anyone more endlessly fortunate? More totally blessed by God?

And now I must go home. I will drop my bags in the dark house. There will be silence there. I shall  sleep after the long journey. But in the Algarve, too, there will be a shining sea, and at least some pleasant friends. So I do not repine for a moment. My heart is full of love. But it is not for anyone in particular. My house may be dark. But how bright is the shore on which I travel now.