The summer I . . . met my bigamist granddad

Growing up half a world away from extended family meant my Canadian relations were remote and shadowy figures, better known from stories than brief and occasional visits. But none were more shadowy than my paternal grandfather Andy, a man whose life seemed built from snippets of Johnny Cash songs.

The facts, I believed, were that he had married my grandmother at the business end of a shotgun, and that he had left some four-and-a-half years later: on the day my father was born, two months premature and in the middle of a world war.

From there, he became a fabulous construct, said to have won the Distinguished Flying Cross, to have married three more women without ever divorcing one, to have abandoned a second family in England and a third in Nova Scotia, and to have gone on to prosper in transport in rural British Columbia.

Most of this exotic tale was pieced together from sporadic correspondence, a newspaper clipping and scraps of information from his sister. Some of it was confirmed by outrageous coincidence, when my father started talking to a stranger in an Ottawa bar, discovered he was chatting to his half-brother, and organised a brief meeting with Andy at an airport departure lounge. ("I'd always heard he was a Charlton Heston type," he said of the meeting later, "so I was surprised to see this wizened old prune.")

So at the wise and cynical age of 17, alone overseas for the first time and with the sense that anything at all was possible, I decided to discover the truth.

I was, at the time, in the throes of a would-be transcontinental bike ride. I'd gained the idea, from a day of tooling around Vancouver Island on a borrowed ten-speed, that a bicycle would be the ideal way to see the world's second largest country. So I'd sunk most of the savings meant to last me six months into a flash touring rig, bought my first pair of bike shorts and selected a snazzy Union Jack cap to keep the sun off my head. A helmet, I decided, would be a frivolous expense.

It was mid-August 1988, the final baking month of a western Canadian summer, and the "plan" was to ride east until the snows arrived. At which point, I thought, I'd sell my gear and continue, perhaps by dogsled.

The first hint I was unprepared for such an endeavour came early on day two, when I had a flat tyre and was surprised to learn I had neither the tools nor the expertise to fix it. The second came shortly after, when I encountered an actual mountain. I also remember being convinced that drinking water made you thirstier, and deciding to subsist on lukewarm grape soda instead.

Nonetheless, with the aid of mechanically adept locals and huge breakfasts, I'd made it as far as the Okanagan Valley, a fertile region home to most of Canada's orchards, an altogether too-friendly band of Charismatic Christians on the lookout for fresh recruits, and my grandfather Andy.

I'd heard that he lived in a largish country town called Vernon, which turned out to have three Coulters in the phone book. Although none had the initial A, I decided to try them all. If the mythical Andy was not among them, I'd keep moving.

The first number went to an answering machine. "Hi," I began, "this is Michael Coulter from Australia. I'm the son of Terry Coulter who's the son of Andy and Mary that Andy met once at Vancouver Airport and I'm in Vernon and I'm looking for Andy to see if he wants to have lunch or meet up, so if this is Andy's number could he ring me at the …"

Mercifully, I was cut off when someone picked up the phone. "Hi Michael," a breathless voice said, "this is your step-grandma Florence."

***

Florence, it turned out, would not hear of meeting for lunch – she insisted I come stay for a week. But she was very clear about two things: my grandfather was not at all well, and he was not to be called Andy. Lionel, I learned, was the name on his birth certificate and air force record. Andy was a detested nickname from a time he remembered with no fondness at all.

I had no idea what to expect as I rode up to their pleasant double-storey house, which youth and the stories of my grandfather's wealth made seem far more palatial than it was. I know I was strongly inclined to dislike both Andy/Lionel and Florence, and that I was eager, in a self-righteous way, to do some laying down of the law, to severely chastise the old goat for abandoning my father all those years ago.

If it occurred to me that such an event might make staying there for the ensuing week somewhat awkward, I don't recall it.

In any case, notions of myself as some sort of avenging ghost of families past lasted about 30 seconds under the combined charm offensive of Florence, who clearly knew the fastest way to a teenager's heart was through copious application of junk food, and the gimlet-eyed humour of my grandfather.

Despite being in the middle-to-advanced stages of emphysema, he still had a razor mind, an acid wit and a level of cynicism that no world-weary 17-year-old could resist.

What also became apparent was that what I was looking for was not justice but legacy, clues to the DNA that shaped me. The scanty travel diary I kept is devoid of useful biographical information, but full of ruminations on the similarities, real and imagined, between Lionel, my father and I.

I ended up being there nearly two weeks, and probably would have stayed longer had Lionel, in his forthright way, not said: "You need to move on. Florence can't keep feeding you."

While we spent most of it attending dog shows, watching the Seoul Olympics and taking in war movies, I still managed to glean a few facts, or at least stories.

He denied strenuously that he had ever been married to more than one woman simultaneously, and maintained that my grandmother and Florence were the sum, and consecutive, total of his wives.

He said he'd left home at 14 to escape poverty, a huge family and a brutal father. He confirmed that his marriage to my grandmother was indeed expedited by "Old man Duffin's shotgun", and also that he'd been much more interested in my great aunt all along.

Despite his fondness for war films, he was reluctant to talk about his own experiences as a bomber pilot in World War Two. (He did, though, wish he was still young and healthy enough to enjoy a "good fight".)

He had been a truck driver and eventually built up a small trucking business. He had won his house in a lottery, but there were no riches. He also told me, which is where credibility broke down, that he felt no guilt leaving my grandmother because she was the heir to the Sheffield Steel fortune.

So after a fortnight, I left, somewhat heavier, slightly wiser and alarmed to see leaves already turning gold as the northern summer sped into autumn. (I also left in possession of a gold chain, which they'd bought me as a parting gift and which later caused a good deal of trouble with a customs official who seemed to think he'd nabbed the antipodean Pablo Escobar.)

I'd gone to Vernon in search of answers, and while I had a few, they weren't necessarily the ones I'd been looking for. I thought then, and still do, that most of what Lionel had told me was an entertaining mixture of truth and lie, designed to help a dying man feel better about a life that was not always admirable. In spite of that, I not only had an odd sense of kinship with the shifty, cranky old bugger, I actually quite liked him.

It taught me a little about history, something about family, and more about fallibility. People, it seemed, could be more than one thing at a time, and stories could have more than one side – which is trite, but still a revelation when you're 17. If childhood is primary colours and adolescence black and white, that was the start of understanding that adulthood would be, by and large, shades of grey.

Post script.

These events took place nearly 30 years ago, and the older I get, the more I suspect I tailor my past to suit my needs – much the same way my grandfather did. So I rang my father to cross check a few of the family legends, and to ask if he remembered me telling him anything about meeting Andy.

He said that he was surprised I'd gone to see him, but I hadn't told him much about the encounter (which is weird enough in itself).

What he did say, though, was that my long-held belief that Andy had walked out the day my father was born was totally wrong. Andy had been training in England for some months by then, and my grandmother went into premature labour while riding a binder in a wheat field. So much for that.

I also asked if Andy's wartime heroics had ever been confirmed, suspecting that too might have been embellished. While we were talking, I plugged "Lionel Coulter" into Google, and found the following:

COULTER, F/L Lionel Elwood (J27630) – Distinguished Flying Cross This officer has participated in very many sorties and has proved himself to be a cool, confident and skilful pilot and captain. He has invariably pressed home his attacks and his determination has won much praise. One night in February 1945 he piloted an aircraft detailed to attack Mannheim. On the outward flight an engine failed. In spite of this, Flight Lieutenant Coulter continued to the target. Whilst over the sea, a fault in the electrical circuit caused a small fire in the bomb aimer's compartment. The fire was quickly extinguished, however, and the target was then successfully attacked. During the return flight, Flight Lieutenant Coulter skilfully evaded a fighter which attempted to close in. This officer displayed outstanding devotion to duty throughout a trying sortie.

Further searching led to an obituary for Florence, which largely disproved the four wives theory. In terms of facts, I learned more about Andy in a 10-minute burst 25 years after his death than I did in two weeks sharing his house.