Politician tells of first phone call to father he has never met
By For more than 40 years, during which time he was a Bristol city councillor and is now running for parliament at the next general election, Paul Smith had never uttered a word to his natural father.
But that all changed this week, when the Labour candidate for Bristol West made a phone call to a house on the French-Italian border and spoke to the man who, through a few letters in the last 18 months, has given him a whole new sense of his identity and heritage.
But letters weren’t enough so, on Tuesday, Paul picked up the phone for his momentous call.
Paul Smith: Bristolian... with an Italian twist
“I just phoned him up and we had a very short conversation,” Paul told Bristol24-7. “From the first letter, I knew he had never realised I existed. So he was shocked and we actually talked about the weather. He wasn’t expecting me to call, but I just felt I needed to take the relationship to the next stage.
“I guess my next call will be to say that I am coming to visit but I don’t know if he will even want me to come.
“The letters are let us know what we have been doing in our lives. But I do have 45 years of pocket money to ask him for!”
Paul Smith was the former chief of leisure services at the council, and it is with some irony that through his letters he found his natural father had worked in the leisure and tourism industry all his life.
Something in common for them already, but he is not building up expectations of a meeting – even though the next step must be to travel to Italy to meet.
“He worked in tourism all his life, running hotels and ski trips. So he should know somewhere good for me to stay.
“The relationship can only move on when you meet each other. You have to prepare for a complete disaster.”
The news of his breakthrough phone call was delivered via Paul’s Twitter account – just a few moments after he put the phone down. Within minutes he had been contacted by a stranger going through the same issues and asking for advice.
“I told him – and would say to anyone else is – if you don’t find out you will never know. I would rather find out something devastating than not.
“I might meet him and we’ll hate each other, so the important thing is not to have big expectations. If you wait thinking about whether to do it or not, you may miss out.”
Missing out is something Paul came so close to experiencing with his natural mother, whom he met for the first time in 2005.
Having tried to track his parents down during the 1980s, only to be blocked by the bureaucratic view of adoption agencies at the time that it was the natural and adoptive parents who took priority in these issues, he finally met his mother at Liverpool’s Lime Street station. Nine months later – after a brief but happy relationship evolved – she died of a heart attack.
But not before Paul had found out some fascinating family history which helped him to regain his Italian culture and heritage.
“I always knew I was adopted and what my mum’s name was, because it was on the birth certificate. But my dad’s name had been blanked out,” he said. “So just grew up with that knowledge.
“Up until 2005, the adoption agencies were very secretive. Most of the information I got in the 1980s when I left university were lies – the agencies felt it was part of their objective to protect the parents. The adoptee was the last priority. They felt they were helping by not giving information.
“My parents were Italian and were here learning English in Cheltenham. I was told my mother had gone straight back to Italy but she was actually living in Bristol until I was 14.
“The law changed in 2005 which said then that agencies had to assist adoptees in tracing their parents. I was able to trace my mum on the internet, and found she was living in Southport and she was married in Bristol.
“The agency this time round gave me all of my files and after a managed process of contact through letters, we met in Liverpool and there was this immediate connection and found out all sorts of amazing family history.
“I felt grounded by the history. My surname is Padova and I found out that my mum was also adopted. She was adopted by a Jewish woman in Florence. Padova is a made up name – from the name of the city – and the Jewish population throughout Europe often changed their names to place names so they could not be identified by the fascists during thw 1930s and 40s. So my surname was created to avoid the concentration camps.
“My mum’s family is originally from Sicily, and there are still relatives in Tuscany who I may go to visit.
“The information was like a bucket of water being thrown over me. I had a sister, and found out I had a brother who had committed suicide.
“But nine months later my mum died from a heart attack. It was a brief relationship but quite intense. We met a few times and she came to stay with us in Bristol. She also met my adopted mum at my son Leo’s naming ceremony and we have photos of them hugging. Three weeks later she was dead.”
Not that Paul reveals any bitterness towards the hand that fate had dealt him. “You can’t change the past, so I was just so pleased that I had managed to build a relationship in that short time and fill gaps in my knowledge of where I came from.”
Through his connections to his parents, Paul now knows his family have distant links to the Mafia in Naples. He also knows that his creation came on the night of the graduation party of the English-language college his parents had been attending.
On a lighter note, he knows from pictures of his father in younger days that baldness is on the horizon.
Knowing the past, and being able to pass that on to his own children, is vital though. And who knows what more is to come if the visit to Italy to meet his father comes off in the new year?
“Having kids again inspired me to find more about my natural parents – it is their heritage, which I wanted to find out for them as much as me.
“I felt I would rather know and be disappointed, rather than not know.
“It’s different for different people – my adopted brother doesn’t want to know. But knowing my parents were Italian meant I lost a whole culture and different heritage as well. There is a sense of loss, there’s something about you that’s not quite right – because your history is not there. It’s who you are.”
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