Chapter 19

'Can we have our buckets and spades and the trowel? We want to do gardening.'

Mindful of the presence of spring bulbs under the soil, I pointed them in the direction of the barren area under their playhouse. A friend had presented them with garden tools for their birthday and they were keen to try them out. They put odd twigs and dead leaves into the ground to watch them sprout.

'And can we have some water for our plants, please, Daddy?'

'Take the watering can. You know where the outside tap is.'

How wonderful that they are all working together so well, I thought. I could see three buckets, three spades and three little figures busily preparing the gound. I set to work on lunch. No squabbles. The usual 'Dad-de-eee! Dad-de-eee! X poked me/took my toy/trod on me' was conspicuous by its absence. Maybe they've realised the value of collaborative play. Perhaps my admonitions and urgings that they would have more fun working with rather than against each other are, at last, bearing fruit.

A small figure was lugging the watering can across the lawn. Some minutes later, the same figure performed the same task. And again. All was quiet. The boys were crouched over their work, absorbed in making their plants grow.

'Daddy! Come and see what we've planted.' The ground was waterlogged, the soil banked up. Mud was smeared across their faces. They pointed proudly to a mound from which a small arm emerged. I recognised the chubby fist of their Bob the Builder. Alongside him the the roof of a car was disappearing Psycho-style into the quagmire. A blackened teddy, a ball and a box of crayons had not quite disappeared under the ground.

'We wanted to make our toys grow.'

There is an established procedure for most aspects of life. Often in Britain it is prefaced with ‘have a nice cup of tea.’ Does one tell friends before or after the event that, as a single man, one is having a baby or two or three? How to explain it? Does it need to be explained?

Without any existing set of behavioural norms, I had to draw up my own. Before the birth, I decided to tell those who I thought would have been saddened not to have been taken into my confidence. I had to bear in mind the legal advice not to say anything to anyone and had to apply the strictest precautions. Some months before, I had decided that I should take on an employee to free me up for my new role as parent. I tried it out first on him. He should, I felt, know what changes there would be in my household before he took on the job.

The next step was to formulate a rationale. It should be brief, factual, unlikely to shock, bore or titillate - to explain events and elicit the desired reaction to them. The analysis concentrated my mind and reduced to the essentials why I was doing what I was doing in the way I was doing it.

In the years I had spent toying with the idea, the reasoning had become so convoluted that I had forgotten where it had started. First I had to reduce the element of angst.

The refreshing difference between Growing Generations and Surrogate Family Program was the elimination of any angst-inducing angles. The load of baggage should be lightened. I tried a synopsis:

'When I realised most of my life had been as a carer, I also understood why it had taken the shape it had and why the normal events in life, such as marriage and family, hadn’t happened. As it could carry on like this for a while longer, I thought I should do something about it before I became too old. I could have joined an agency, met people, married and had a family. All this takes time and chance would be a fine thing. Carers don’t get out very often. In any case, to marry for the sake of having children is a bad basis for a relationship. As I was in my early fifties, I would have to marry someone far younger than me. Children might not happen for a long time, if at all. I would just be getting older. Even if there were children, it might be that the relationship would break down. I could see a failed marriage, hurt feelings, bitterness, recrimination, divorce, emotional scarring, loss of custody, house, business. It could all be such a disaster. Far better to think though logically what I wanted—a family—and how to achieve it. So I went to an agency, found a surrogate who for various reasons liked being pregnant and the kudos that surrogacy could bring to an otherwise ordinary life, found an egg donor who combined attractiveness with an excellent health record and a masters degree, located a specialist IVF clinic and created a family.'

What I had lived with for so long sounded so simple, so straightforward, that I imagined the only reaction would be ‘Oh. Right then.’ And, indeed, with almost everyone close to me, this is what happened after the jaw-dropping shock had worn off.

There were some surprising reactions, though. One of my ex-employees asked ‘If you need to give love, aren’t your cats enough?’ A married woman who long ago decided against children ran from the room. So brief was my analysis and so protracted had been media coverage of other family creations from the US that the concepts became confused. ‘So you’ll bring them here when you’ve adopted them, then?’ ‘But will they let you adopt them?’ It took a while before the realisation that they were biologically mine set in.

When the babies were born, I set about choosing Godparents. Each boy was to have his own—two Godfathers and one Godmother. I decided to take advantage of my international connections. Lars had Lars. Ian had Ian. Piers could have had a Piers, but I had not seen the only Piers I knew for years.

One of the first people in on the secret was Esther Rantzen. I talked it through with her as a friend. Her husband, Desmond Wilcox, was more than a little interested. A documentary was mooted. Over lunch he reinterpreted my reasoning. He saw the logic. ‘You’re clever and courageous,’ he told me. ‘I’m sure you have the ability to change the minds of the vast majority of people in this country towards surrogacy.’

‘But you tackle really interesting subjects, like ‘The Boy David’. That one really tugged at the heartstrings.’ 'The Boy David' was a moving record about a Peruvian boy who was eventually adopted by the Scottish surgeon who reconstructed his badly-deformed face.

‘So would this be. Believe me.’ His eyes penetrated my indecision. I attempted to persist, though.

‘It all seems so boringly logical to me that I can’t see how it could be sufficiently interesting material for a documentary.’

Having admired Desmond’s work, and knowing that when he said he would film just what I found acceptable, nothing more, and that I could see him as a sort of honorary Godparent, I could believe him. I knew I had nothing to fear from it. In the end, my conclusion was right, although my deduction may not have been.

We spoke some time later. ‘It’s been done to death, they tell me. They look at the gays and that’s that for surrogacy as a documentary topic. I tell them they’re wrong, that this is a quite different angle, to believe in my intuition, but I just can’t get anyone to produce it.’ In a way it was a relief. I would not have to make a decision that my children could have regretted. As I believed so strongly in the moral rightness of what I was doing and took the view that others in my position would find it liberating, I was saddened that, if such a luminary as Desmond could not find a backer, this story and all that might flow from it would remain hidden. Within six months, Desmond had died and I had met the real ‘Boy David’ at his memorial service.

I assumed that the story would never be told.

My UK solicitor did not share my willingness to reveal my children’s history. He advised caution, feeling that whatever one did could be twisted round and turned into something unrecognisable at the hands of the tabloid press. Publicity was to be avoided—certainly before the children were in the UK. I asked Esther. She had little doubt that it was a ‘story’.

‘Come on my programme. Tell your story. You can be in disguise.’

‘Why? I have nothing to be ashamed of. Even so I don’t feel the need to defend what I have done.’

‘It goes against the grain as a journalist, but I would advise that the best way to deal with any publicity is to say ‘wait for the book’. I’ve read enough of your letters to know you can write. So write a book.’

It had not occurred to me. She was right, of course. Even if it were never published, it would be remarkable record for the children. I liked the idea. If nothing else, it would give me something to occupy my mind while I was waiting to go to the US and collect the children.

With so much information, I took an eclectic approach. Memories were starting to fade. As the reality of the children drew closer, I found I was quite happy to forget the convolutions surrounding their creation. I knew that when they were here, I would have thoughts only for the future. The computer enabled me to be scatterbrained. I put down the memories that were likely to disappear first. The early setbacks had been so depressing that I wanted to forget them. Down they went onto the hard drive in random order. How could Jane Austen have had the intellectual discipline to start at the beginning and proceed until she reached the end all in longhand? My admiration for her knew no bounds.