A good family mystery doesn't hurt anyone

If anyone had asked me what I knew about my grandfather while I was growing up, it would have fitted into a couple of brief paragraphs. Yet he was an extraordinary man. Dave Ritchie, as he was fondly known by all his friends, was a fisherman and a doer of crosswords. He had a big atlas on the table next to his chair in the lounge and he rested his sandalled feet on a footstool that was, i believe, a camel's saddle. He had been to Egypt, Greece, Italy, Hong

Kong, Zanzibar and Brazil, to name just a few of his travel destinations.

he was also an engineer of sort. His career, I was told, had something to do with early computers, but that didn't mean much to me as a child. of far more interest was the driveway he laid out of bricks in swirling patterns, the huge Greek-urn-style garden pots he decorated with colourful mosaics for the fireplace, and the intricate miniature coffee pots and irons he fashioned out of copper and brass. He was forever applying himself to new skills, which made him an inspiring role model for us cousins as we grew up.

But perhaps the most exciting thing about Grandad was that he looked just like Henry, Duke of Gloucester. Sharing the same birthday, he was just two years younger than the son of King George V and Queen Mary, and had once even been chased by a bunch of newspapermen who mistook him and my grandmother for royalty at a hunt. On top of this, his father was never spoken about. Neither of his daughters [my mother and my aunt] knew a thing about his early life. In the absence of facts, therefore, it was inevitable that conspiracy theories would abound, and I have to admit to some twinges of trepidation as I began the process of trying to find the birth certificate i so badly needed. I didn't, after all, want to jeopardise my chances of success with the British Home Office by claiming royal lineage!

Happily, my research led me in a different direction, but it still proved to be full of surprises. There is nothing quite like a family mystery to get the imagination ticking. I swear, I've dreamed up a hundred possible scenarios for my grandfather's entry into the world, many of which would make great premises for novels, but I've come to the conclusion that fact is stranger than fiction. As gripping as novels are, they can never quite match the thrill of discovering something about an ancestor whose life story actually made all the difference to who you are today.