Dad had a decade long affair with a family member in our own house – I didn’t discover the truth until it was too late
WHILE returning from an exciting trip can give you the holiday blues, the saving grace is returning to the old and familiar of your home.
However, for Diane Harding there was nothing familiar about her home when she returned from a trip to the UK with her mum in 1952.
The now 74-year-old’s life was turned upside down when she and her mum Blanche discovered that her dad Victor had made some ‘home improvements’ while they were away.
Diane, from Cape Town, South Africa and her mum had returned to her mother’s former home in the UK having emigrated the year Diane was born.
The mysterious stranger quickly became a permanent fixture in three-year-old Diane’s life but it wasn’t until years later that she finally realised her true identity.
Speaking in this exclusive interview, Diane says: “My mum was feeling homesick so dad had sent us back for a visit to the UK and I’d met some of my relatives for the first time.
“I’d loved it but I was very much looking forward to going back home and seeing my dad again.”
Mystery woman
But arriving back at their bungalow, Dianne came home not only to her dad but a mysterious woman whom her dad introduced as Connie.
“I remember her sparkling eyes, wide smile and glossy hair,” Diane says.
“I was mesmerised by her glamour but my mum didn’t seem at all impressed and went straight to her room without saying a word to Connie.”
Victor explained that Connie and her partner had been friends with Blanche and himself but having broken up with her ex, Connie was now visiting Cape Town for a holiday.
“Only, weeks went by and, instead of going home, she got a job and settled into the guest bedroom,” Diane says.
“While Mum ran the household, Connie lounged outside in the garden with me, sunbathing and sipping on beer.
“Her bubbly personality was the opposite of Mum’s quieter, gentle character.
“But she seemed to spark something in Mum and I overheard rows between her and Dad.
“My mum would question why she hadn’t left yet and far from a guest she came everywhere with us.”
New playmate
But while Blanche was uncomfortable with Connie’s presence, Diane had no problem with the new houseguest.
“On the beach I sandwiched myself between her and mum, and she’d race me across the sand,” she says.
“She became my favourite playmate.”
As months went by Connie became more and more engrained in the lives of Blanche and Diane.
She explains: “When dad’s work held dinner-dances, both mum and Connie dressed up in elegant gowns to accompany him.
“I even saw a photo of dad sitting between them, all of them smiling into the camera.
“But I sensed mum was deeply unhappy.
“When we went out shopping, just her and me, she became wracked with nerves and I would tell her to sit down while I fetched everything.”
Breaking point
When Diane was just eight-years-old she was dealt a blow when Victor explained that Blanche would be going into hospital for a while.
She’d suffered a nervous breakdown.
“I missed her so much and, when she came back home, I could tell that the underlying unhappiness remained,” Diane says.
When she turned 14, Dianne and her parents relocated to the UK for Victor’s job - and trailing along with them was Connie.
While Diane admits she thought it was ‘odd’ she was quickly distracted when she met Chris and the pair got engaged aged 21.
But Diane’s happy news was followed by heartbreak when a year later, Blanche divorced Victor and left him for good.
“I was shocked but reasoned that now I was grown up she’d felt she could put herself first,” Diane says.
However, the truth finally became tumbling out when Victor called his daughter one day at work.
“He told me that he and Connie were getting married,” she recalls.
“I was speechless. I couldn’t believe they’d become an item but reluctantly, I attended their wedding.
“Then, in time, Mum met and married a man called Howard.
“Seeing her contented at last was wonderful.”
Truth emerges
Years went by and in time Diane lost her parents, first Victor and then Blanche followed shortly after by her second husband Howard.
It was sorting through the Blanche and Howard’s belongings that lead Diane to make a shocking discovery.
“I found Mum and Dad’s divorce papers and, as I read them, I got the shock of my life,” she says.
“Adultery… Ménage a trois… Connie jumped out at me on the page.
“With a burst of clarity, I saw what had gone on during my childhood.
“I couldn’t believe how naïve I had been, of course Connie and dad hadn’t got together after the divorce, she’d been his mistress for 20 years.
“I realised dad had left his bedroom with mum to creep down the corridor to Connie.
“Today it would be called a throuple but for one glaring difference mum had hated it.
“But she had kept this horrible situation to herself for nearly 20 years, protecting me even when I became a mother myself to a son and daughter.
“As for Connie, I’d continued to visit her after my parents had died.
“I was so ashamed of the revelation that, at first, I didn’t even tell Chris and, when he suggested visiting Connie, I put him off.”
However, when Diane learnt that Connie was dying she decided to pay her one final visit.
“She reached out her hand to me but I wouldn’t take it,” she says.
“She died aged 85 and I organised her funeral.
“Years later, my mum’s sister auntie Linda handed me a bundle of letters Mum had sent her and told me it would explain what she went through.
“Every tortured word of her handwriting detailed my mum’s anguish.
“She explained how Dad wouldn’t let her have more children because ‘it wouldn’t be fair on Connie’, and how he’d stopped her from taking me to the UK in case we didn’t come back.
“I felt so distressed imagining the humiliation she must have felt and I’d had no idea.”
Diane eventually came clean to Chris and, with the truth out in the open, decided to write a book about her mum’s life in order to set the record straight.
Setting the record straight
“Anyone who’d thought mum was compliant in this throuple needed to know the truth,” Diane says.
“None of this had been her choice, she was trapped, worried that she’d lose me if she left dad.
“Writing the book brought up feelings of rage, bitterness and anger as well as revenge but once I had finished it I felt totally at peace.
“It was the catharsis I’d needed and I had told the truth for Mum, at last.”
Diane’s book Always in the Dark: One woman’s search for answers from a family shrouded in secrets, published by BLKDOG Publishing, is out now priced £10
