I never really knew my Uncle Bill.

I think I remember him coming to stay at our house in Bishops Stortford when I was very small but probably no more than two or three times.

I was told he joined the merchant navy as a young man, something which probably didn’t go down too well with his family who were very middle class. His great passion apparently was the theatre and when he came back from his travels, he joined a small theatre group in the Midlands. I think he also wrote for the local newspaper and had even written a book with the dramatic title, “Death on the Road”. That’s really all I knew about him. He seemed to me a rather remote, romantic figure but wasn’t really part of my childhood after we moved from Bishops Stortford.

I heard that Uncle Bill eventually decided to train as a primary school teacher. He would have been in his early forties then. He was about to start his first teaching job when it was discovered that he had leukaemia. At that time people rarely recovered from leukaemia and so Bill was never able to practise his newly-acquired profession. I remember my father being very distressed by his death.

I’ve found myself through my life sometimes wondering about Uncle Bill.

I was probably about fifteen or sixteen and was mending a bicycle puncture on the verandah. My father was watching football on the television just inside the verandah doors. I couldn’t get the tyre back on. “Oh, bugger!” I cursed. My father rushed outside and took hold of my arm. “Do you know what that word means?… It’s when a man puts his penis up another man’s backside.” I was profoundly shocked. Not so much at what my father was telling me, but at the violence behind his language and the emotion in his voice. Why had he felt it necessary to tell me in this brutal way? I didn’t recognise my gentle, peace-loving father in this outburst.

Talking to my older sister recently about Uncle Bill she revealed that there’d been a big family row involving Uncle Bill while we were living in Bishops Stortford. The house we lived in came with my father’s job as minister at the local church – a large detached house with seven bedrooms and an enormous garden. She told me that Bill needed to move from his lodgings and had asked if he could rent a room with us. We certainly had the space. But… my mother refused. Why?

Only now have I understood.

Bill was gay. Homosexuality was against the law up until the late fifties – a crime – and this would have been the late forties. I’m sure my father would have wanted to help out his younger brother but my mother was of that generation always very concerned about what the neighbours thought. What would the neighbours think if it were discovered that Bill was gay? What would people in the church think?

No wonder Bill’s death had distressed my father so…