Delusions of Grandeur

My heart stopped a few beats as I opened the letter from social services. After reading a couple of lines it restarted. Relief. Uncertainty. Excitement. The court had granted me access to my adoption papers. This comprised my original birth certificate and a set of notes taken during an interview with my birth mother a few weeks after she had given me away.

Immediately, two discoveries mattered most. First, she was a Baroness. Married to a man with an exotic Prussian sounding name. Registered as father of the child.

Within seconds, my misguided youthful arrogance conspired at the possibilities. Does this mean that I am a Baron? Naturally I would have to change my lifestyle – smoke Sobrani cocktails and possibly walk with silver mounted cane.

The second discovery was my mother’s family. Years growing up in Scotland being told I was English. It turns out that I was properly Scottish.

Dundas of Dundas. Of that Ilk.

Now I could claim my true origins, I would have to prepare accordingly – smarten up my act, make appointments with tailors and kiltmakers.

Dundas Castle is a sprawling stately home outside Edinburgh overlooking the Firth of Forth. I pictured myself driving out there and announcing myself as a lost scion of the family.

Determined to keep my new found grandeur a secret, later that night in the pub after a few pints, I told anyone who would listen.

Slightly hungover, the following day I made my way to the library and requested a copy of the Almanach de Gotha, a prestigious genealogy of European nobility – rather like Burke’s Peerage. Sitting down at the long polished tables with inlaid leather, I airily leafed through the pages. Then there it was, plain as day – the Baron, his wife and their issue of three children. All born before me.

The question swimming around in my muddled head: Why didn’t they keep me?

Of course it turned out that in fact, I was not, nor ever would be a Prussian Baron or indeed any other form of aristocracy. The Dundases were what was known among Lowland families as Belted Earls – and my grandfather had been chief. But he had not covered himself in glory. As an unrepentant fascist – one of Sir Oswald Mosley’s henchmen – he had to slip out of the country before the war began or risk imprisonment. He never returned and later remarried. The clan chief title passed out of Britain to a son through his second marriage.

Before returning the book to the librarian, I committed a shameful act of vandalism. Writing in fountain pen on the page underneath my siblings, I inscribed my name. Philip. And the year of my birth. 1965.