“I’m Wedded To The Truth” – David Tereshchuk On His Heart-Rending Memoir
David Tereshchuk’s astonishing career in journalism took him around the world, memorably covering stories in Northern Ireland, Uganda, and Bangladesh as well as interviewing multiple world leaders. Yet despite an acclaimed work life, Tereshchuk was haunted by one question for which he had no answer: the identity of his father. As a young child, Tereshchuk grew up in Scotland with his mother, older brothers, and “sister,” Hilda. Eventually he learned that Hilda was, in fact, his mother, and he moved away to Manchester, England with her when she married. Despite his and Hilda’s closeness, the one topic that both avoided for most of her life was his origin. After Hilda’s death, Tereschuk embarked on a journey to uncover his father’s identity, an investigation that took him back to the village where he was born and ultimately relied on the assistance of the police, the Catholic Church, Red Cross, and the British military. His memoir, A Question of Paternity: My Life As An Unaffiliated Reporter, is a compassionate examination of the people who raised him, an unflinching look at the darker passages of his own life, and a riveting behind-the-scenes glimpse in to Tereschuk’s career as a journalist.
Your mother, Hilda, plays such a prominent role in the book and her presence is felt throughout. Can you start by telling us about your mother and what kind of person she was?
My memory is that she was young. I think somehow or other, I internalized that thought. I suppose everyone else around her treated her as very young. She was only fifteen years older than me. As a child, that’s a curious situation to be in. We were of different generations, but we were very close in age, oddly enough. My memories of my mother are very difficult to reach. I describe trying to recall my childhood with her as looking through a hazy scrim. Some people have crystal clear memories of their childhood, and I don’t. But there are some little aspects of clarity that spring out of my memory bank. One of them is this moment which used to happen many mornings: my mother going out to work. This was a deal done with my grandmother. She was allowed back into the home—even though this was a shameful event, getting pregnant at the age of fifteen—on certain terms and conditions. One was that she stopped her high school education. High school education wasn’t common amongst members of her generation. All her siblings previously had left school early, but she was a high school girl. She might have gone on to college, if things had gone a different way. But as it was, she got pregnant, and my grandmother insisted that she go after work, and then become the family’s only breadwinner.
She went out to work a wage to help feed the extra mouth that had to be fed in the household, which, of course, was me. There were two little brothers. I call them brothers because that was the fiction that was going on. I was supposed to be my mother’s littlest brother. I don’t know how they thought they could get away with this fiction that I was supposed to be the last of the already very substantial brood of children, children that my grandmother had. She gave birth to ten children, nine of them survived.
I don’t know how they thought they could get away with this fiction, but there it was. I grew up in this atmosphere of uncertainty. I called my grandmother Mam, which is the Scottish equivalent to mom. I called my mother by her first name, as if she was my sister. That was the fiction. That’s what I’ve maintained by calling her Hilda, and I did so for the rest of her life, even though at some point I must have come to realize that she was my mother. I’m not sure when it would have been, maybe at the age of seven or eight. I’m totally speculating, because we never discussed it. It was never a matter for open talk. Never, ever. And I suspect that I was carefully and firmly warned away from the topic.
As I say, I don’t remember any words being spoken about it, but it was very clear to me that I wasn’t to talk about this issue, and I never did. I never did start to ask the question, at least in my conscious memory. I have no recollection of asking about it until very much later in my life, as the book relates. I got around to the point well into my adulthood, where I decided to try and get to the bottom of the mystery and started asking my mother the questions.
I’m curious about how you approached writing the book, because it’s not only a retelling of your investigation into your paternity, but it also gives the reader access to all parts of your life. You write very openly about your struggle with alcoholism, and you also paint a vivid portrait of the early days of your career and how exciting it was to work in television journalism in the seventies. How did you land on the structure of the book in terms of including all these different elements of your life?
I think there’s a fundamental irony at work that ties the various strands of the book together. It was my job—and I hope I’ve captured it in the pages of the book—to go around the world and ask people questions and get answers on the public record, often from people who didn’t want to necessarily be put on the spot, leaders in countries that were repressive and autocratic. Nevertheless, I got the answers and they were on the public record, thanks to television. Meanwhile, away from the public realm, in my personal life, there was one question that I never got an answer to. Eventually I did find my way clear to start asking those questions, starting with my mother, of course. It was at that point that the search began in earnest. But for a long time, it was befogged by the family secrecy, and I have to admit, I was a co-conspirator in that.
I internalized the fact that it was meant to be a secret and I shouldn’t talk about it. The other way in which I guess I dealt with it—or didn’t deal with it, but appeared to myself to deal with it—was to live a life of a drunk. I could avoid things very easily by getting drunk, and it’s regrettable. I wish I’d done it a lot earlier, but my getting sober finally occurred in my forties. Then I was able to have the clarity to pursue the question in the realm of my private life in a way that I’d never been able to before. I think the whole thing is drawn together by that central irony or dichotomy or paradox, whatever you would like to call it.
At one point you write, “I have clearly been drawn back again and again to the peculiarly compulsive narrative of a powerful, armed group of men ruthlessly destroying the lives of ordinary people, initially with complete impunity. And there follows, as it must, the never easy, and sometimes hopelessly protracted, search for justice. It offends me; and I guess, for reasons that undoubtedly go way, way back, I have been taking it personally.” The work you did in your journalism career is really about exposing those injustices and you make the connection to the injustice of not knowing about the origins of your paternity. Was there a specific point where you made that connection between your work and your personal life?
Every journalist who is engaged in an investigation takes notes as he goes along. And that, of course, was what I was doing when I when I tried getting answers to the question about my paternity. Of course, part of the journalistic process is also to reflect upon those notes. Now and again I certainly did that. It became clear to me that there was maybe a very direct connection between the fact that I was kept in the dark as a child about something very important, and I spent my adult life desperately trying to find the truth about things that people—quite often people in power, especially—wanted to keep hidden as well. It wasn’t difficult to spot the connection. And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there was a causal connection.
Another thing that I found so moving about the book is a lot of your on-the-ground investigation was taking place during COVID and lockdown. Your work is really constricted by people not being able to meet in person because of the quarantine, their age, and the health risks involved. Can you talk about what it was like for you doing this investigation with this extra obstacle of the Coronavirus thrown in your way?
It was frustrating. There’s no two ways about that. The fact that we couldn’t cross other people’s thresholds during the lockdown meant that I couldn’t pursue the kind of questioning that is actually quite difficult to pursue: trying to talk to people about matters that were kept secret decades previously. You’re not always quite sure what the motivation was behind the secrecy. I’m talking about other families besides my own. I went to people who might have known my mother at the time. Of course, there were fewer and fewer of those still alive, and several people who were important links in the chain died during the course of this investigation, I’m afraid. I lost possible pathways to the truth. But those that were still alive and those who were caring for them were of course, in a state of considerable—I don’t quite know what the correct word is for it. I was going to say defensiveness, and that’s unfair, but people were very scared. I wasn’t a threat, I don’t think. But on the other hand, I dropped into their world from America, talking about things that had happened decades previously, at a time when they were not supposed to leave the house or welcome anybody into their house. They were inevitably nervous.
It’s said that the Scots are reticent people. I’m not sure that’s a fair generalization, as a Scot myself. I don’t think I’m reticent now; I think I was as a child. But there are all sorts of other reasons that made me reticent and withdrawn. The general mood of our community was not outgoing, I can fairly say, for all sorts of reasons. I think my appearance demanding to know all—I hope I wasn’t demanding in my manner, but I clearly wanted very urgently to know things. I knew the clock was ticking, of course: elderly people were losing their memory, and maybe some of them would die before I could get to them. I was there with a need. I wasn’t very welcomed there with my need. It seemed irrelevant to people’s very different and very real concerns of the moment.
Without getting into the specifics, is it okay if we talked about the fact that you’re ultimately unsuccessful in your pursuit?
Well, let’s put it this way. I don’t find what is the journalists’ Holy Grail, which is a complete, proven, what the British would call “copper-bottomed” or “ironclad truth.” That is not what I find.
You seem to have a very healthy relationship with the uncertainty of knowing things. I was curious to hear you talk more about living with the uncertainty of ever finding the actual truth?
Well, that’s something I came to eventually. I am a journalist. I’m wedded to the truth, and I want it to be as full and as reliably confirmed as I can possibly get it. I have nonetheless come to see that I may well have to end my days without that kind of totally ironclad truth in my life. Am I comfortable with that? Mostly, I think, is my answer, because I know an awful lot more than I did when I started. I don’t know the whole truth. I don’t know everything that I wanted to know, but the journey itself has been enough to persuade me that there are degrees of truth, that there are times in life and situations in life where you have to accept that that the 100% success of complete and whole truth is something that you may have to accept is not always going to be possible. That’s where I think I’ve reached. I’ve given it my best shot. I’ve worked pretty damn hard at getting to this truth. I’ve got a kind of set of suggestions which amount to what I think civil case law calls the preponderance of evidence. The preponderance of evidence points in a certain direction, and I may have to be just content with that. The interesting thing is that despite my drive as a journalist to get at the complete ironclad truth, I have to settle for something less than that. And I am now, after all these years, comfortable with that.
Now that you’ve finished this book, do you have your sights set on another project?
I’m still doing my review of the media every week. I do it online and on air. Public broadcasting in Connecticut puts it out, but it’s made available online in podcast form. It keeps me busy week by week. There’s certainly a lot to talk about. I’m also writing something that’s reviewing my whole life, drawing some stories out of the progress, especially the early part of my career. I realized there’s an awful lot of stories about individual people that I have encountered in my various travels that had an enormous impact upon me, but have never actually gotten into the stories that I told on radio, television, magazines, or newspapers. I’m thinking now that I could maybe put a small collection together of such stories, and probably do justice to these people who really had a great effect on me, but who never actually emerged in my public journalism.
That’s exciting to hear, because one of the things that I really loved about those early sections, the stories you tell about people like Clare Hollingworth, who was a journalist I had never heard about before.
In fact, a reader has just written to me about her. He knew about her in another context entirely. In the 1970s in Beijing, just when China was opening up to the to the rest of the world, the British embassy in Beijing put on a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. And Clare Hollingworth was representing The Daily Telegraph newspaper. She was very game about this and entered the cast. She willingly took the part of Miss Prism. I was delighted to hear that. That was one aspect of player Clare Hollingworth I did not know. (laughs)
That’s amazing. The person who broke the news of World War II was also an accomplished stage actress.
Absolutely.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
