Way back, I wrote a story on a mixed-race couple whose identical twins had different skin colours. One was dark, the other white. Readers were astonished. Other such parents got in touch. They all said that to them both babies were bonny and a gift. And what mattered was love, not skin or eye colours or other physical characteristics.
This weekend I found another incredible twins story which has been turned into a series titled The Gift by BBC Radio 4. The first part was broadcast yesterday. Lavinia and Michelle Osbourne, now 49, took AncestryDNA tests. The results were astounding. They had different fathers. It is the first such case documented in Britain. They were failed by many adults and had tough childhoods. But together they were as one, inseparable, solid. Now, they sometimes feel distance has grown between them, new tensions too.
They could not have anticipated that. Nobody can. Long before these tracing methods were available, adoptees tried to find their birth parents and imagined a joyous, emotional, reunion. My older sister, severely mentally ill, died of Covid in 2022. Around eight years earlier, she’d shown us a letter she’d had from a daughter none of us knew about. The child, N, had been taken into care days after her birth and later adopted. N had been looking for her mum for decades, but lost files and obfuscation meant that when she met her mum, she was unreachable. I can’t imagine how terribly disappointing that must have been for N, part of my family now.
I have long thought about nature and nurture. If genetics is the key determinant of character, health and prospects, why did I not go the way of my sister or my brother, who died an alcoholic? Was I born different or was I raised differently? Such questions have long absorbed other men and women too. Science can now provide us with some incontrovertible facts about our genes.
Revelations about celebs like Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore and Eric Clapton discovering hidden truths about their birth parents, along with popular TV shows like Who Do You Think You Are and Long Lost Families, are instigating a surge of curiosity. DNA testing is big business now. The genealogy hunters don’t think about the perils, the hurt, the unplanned consequences of their voyage into the unknown. The modern trend raises fundamental questions about what it means to be a human. Are we the products of our genetic heritage or lived experiences? How do these interact? Which takes precedence?
The same questions need to be asked of the new band of ethno-nationalists rising in this country, across the West and elsewhere. British ethnos want to “decontaminate” this land, banish mixed-race families and immigrants who are not of Celtic or Anglo-Saxon stock. To make Great Britain ethnically pure again. There are problems with this feverish dream. These isles were never pure.
As Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times in 2010: “Wave after wave of people came to these shores, frequently to escape and usually to settle, intermarry and add their genes to a pool of remarkable richness: Romans, Normans, Lascars, Gypsies, Chinese, Africans, Saxons and West Indians. Jewish traders, French weavers, Norse settlers, Irish navvies, Indian shopkeepers…Immigration is older than the idea of Britain itself”. In 1500AD there were 3,000 “foreigners” in London, 6 per cent of the population. In 1764, The Gentleman’s Magazine estimated that 20,000 black people lived in the capital. They melded into the multifarious population.
Daniel Defoe’s 1701 poem, The Trueborn Englishmen, begins with these lines: “Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman” and ends with a reminder “…there’s scarce one family left alive, that does not from some foreigner derive”.
In other words, a person or a nation is not a genetic, but social construct.
The Osbourne twins are adapting to the DNA revelations, but are still very much themselves, still able and resolved to shape their own lives. My niece has moved on and found peace and success. And Great Britain, though fraught and divided, is still mixing and merging furiously and replenishing the heterogeneity that inspired Defoe. Hallelujah.
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