In 1994, Belinda Probert and her family made a startling discovery. Belinda’s late father, Bill – decorated war hero, retired businessman, enthusiastic Francophile – had grown up in an impoverished Welsh mining town before cutting ties with his mother and siblings and reinventing himself as a middle-class Englishman. In her poignant new book, Bills Secret’s, published by Upswell, Belinda documents her search through the archives to discover who her father really was – and why he left his old life behind. Griffith Review is delighted to publish a short extract from the book alongside a Q&A with its author.

CARODY CULVER: You learnt of your father’s true beginnings after his death in 1994, but it wasn’t until 2022, following a conversation with your two brothers, that you began digging through the archives in search of answers. How often did your father’s story weigh on your mind in those intervening years?

BELINDA PROBERT: Remarkably rarely, if I’m honest. Now I have learnt so much about him I could kick myself for not making a greater effort before. 
But in re-reading all the letters that I wrote to my mother (weekly) I can see that there are moments when I am looking for answers about Bill. I write that she seems ‘extraordinarily uninterested’ in his real story and suggest my curiosity about it is perhaps ‘because I think I may have forged myself almost in opposition to Dad in some curious way’. 
My mother didn’t in any way discourage questions and didn’t hesitate to visit the Rhondda [in Wales, where Bill was from], to see the house where he was born and meet our newly discovered Welsh relatives. But nothing new ever surfaced from my questions. 
About twenty years ago I was in the UK for work and went to the Rhondda to stand outside the terrace house where Bill had grown up, and to see the graves of his parents and his favourite brother, and to visit a coal-mining museum. This totally failed to bring him to life. I drove over the Brecon Beacons to meet his nephew Denzil, but he could shed no light whatsoever on why Roy became Bill and abandoned his family. I left disappointed, unable to see any way of learning more. 

CC: You note in the book that some people have difficulty wrapping their heads around this story because they don’t understand why you, your brothers or your mother didn’t show more curiosity about Bill’s childhood or family. As you point out, it’s not uncommon for children to show little interest in their parents’ early lives! What role do you think your father’s silence about his upbringing played in your (perhaps subconscious) inclination not to ask about it?

BP: We didn’t feel that Bill discouraged us from asking about his childhood. But, of course, his complete and perfect silence about it gave us no purchase either. Nor were there any relatives who might have placed him somewhere – socially or geographically – and given us something to ask about. We knew a bit about his life before we were born, but that bit was dominated by the war – something nobody talked about.
We grew up in stockbroker-belt Kent, but he did nothing to suggest this was where he felt ‘at home’, and he avoided the kind of social connections he might have made with men of similar business and sporting interests.
When I thought about our lack of interest, I realised that I had never asked my mother about her father (who died in 1917, when she had just turned two). But I knew quite a lot about her childhood and his English family – without asking – because his sisters loved us and visited us. And we played Edwardian parlour games that we knew Mum had learned in the family’s rather grand country house. 
By contrast her mother (our only known grandparent) never spoke to us about her Australian childhood, or her twin brothers, and we certainly didn’t ask. We knew she was not interested in family things, being far too busy working for international women’s rights and world peace.
Bill’s silence might not have been enough to keep us away from his childhood, but his genius was to so fully occupy his persona that there were no cracks through which we might have seen something different.

CC: Bill’s Secrets opens with an epigraph from the great writer Hilary Mantel, part of which reads: ‘As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone, and you will see what I mean.’ You discover, during the course of your research, that your two brothers had quite different perceptions of your father when you were growing up. How surprised were you to learn this?

BP: This has been the most poignant and surprising part of the whole project. When we spent a couple of weeks together in 2022, and started to talk about him, we disagreed about his secrecy. My younger brother William suggested that Bill had started out with small lies when he met our mother, not wanting to reveal his working-class Welsh family as he wooed her in postwar Vienna – and as time went on, it became harder to admit to the ‘lies’. He had been ashamed of his origins and was now ashamed of his lies. Colin would have none of this, arguing that Bill had made conscious decisions about the life he wanted to lead by the end of the war – that he understood very clearly the enormous price he would pay in class- and status-obsessed Britain if he acknowledged his origins.
I sent my brothers draft chapters for comment. When it came to their experiences of him as a father their emotional responses were poles apart. I’d had no idea how much Colin idolised Bill, always feeling that he was never quite living up to his expectations. For Colin the facts of Bill’s life (which he has loved reading about) vindicated his feelings of deep love and admiration. This allowed him to face the ways in which Bill (totally without intent) was probably the cause of his own adult insecurities and drinking.
William, however, has found it hard to be reminded of his difficult relationship with Bill and has still not read the whole book (he has promised to read it all now that his own copy has arrived). He is full of regret that he knew so little about Bill’s life, and that he never felt he could talk to him honestly about himself.

CC: As you unearth facts and rumours during your research, you inevitably end up speculating about what Bill might have been thinking or feeling at certain points in his life and what motivations shaped some of his decisions. Is it frustrating to know that you’ll never have definitive answers, or is it, in a strange way, preferable to have this space to contemplate and imagine?

BP: There have been moments when I would have given anything for a better answer to the ‘why he did it’ question. I made myself go down every rabbit hole I found, on the off chance something might be down there. There are six months from June to December 1944 where I am relying on tiny pieces of information to make sense of the rupture with his mother. His mother remains the most frustrating enigma. I spent fruitless hours trying to find any description at all of her.
Then I discovered (completely by accident) a French woman whom Bill fell for during the liberation of the Ariège in August 1944. She lived to be 102, so if I had started this project a few years earlier I might just possibly have found her and an answer to one critical question.
But it is equally true that when I step back from the ancestry chase – to which one can become addicted – I see that the uncertainty really makes no difference to our family story. There has been no horrible discovery of moral failure or betrayal, or of cowardice and shame. He is just such an interesting man. Well, that is my conclusion at least!

The following is excerpted from Bill’s Secrets:

MY FATHER DIED on 8 April 1994 in the heart clinic at Aressy, in the Béarn region of south-west France. He was seventy-eight years old, and his heart had been causing trouble for several years. My brothers and I gathered from our respective homes in San Francisco, Mayenne in north-western France and Melbourne to be with our mother for his funeral in the little church of St Faust de Haut, the village where they had lived for the last eleven years. It was a small affair, mainly because Bill had no relatives apart from us: no brothers, no sisters, no nephews, no nieces and no cousins at any remove. William Royden Probert was buried in the village cemetery, under a simple headstone made from local pink rock.

The Bill we knew was a successful businessman, always travelling overseas for work, speaking several languages fluently, cultured and well-read, a lover of all things French. He spoke the Queen’s English in a way that brooked no questions. We also knew him as Major WR Probert, DSO, who had done something heroic during the liberation of France at the end of the Second World War. He always dressed well, and held himself upright, with his confident broad shoulders never edging forward.

Bill was not an easy father, and his restlessness disrupted family life. It enabled him to fit several lives into one, adding fly-fishing, house design and house building (twice) and sheep farming in Wales to the end of his international business career, followed up with the move to the Béarn.

FOUR MONTHS AFTER Bill’s funeral, Janet’s postman handed her an envelope addressed to Mr WR Probert. Opening it, she found a lengthy handwritten letter from someone called Denzil Griffiths.

Brynhyfryd, Alexandria Rd, Brecon, Powys, Wales

Hello,
This letter will come as a surprise or maybe even an irritation.
The above address is surely the immediate give away, the name Denzil will confirm who I am.
How I have been able to find you is a long story, I’ll just say that by complete chance it was through friends on holiday in the Pau area. This after many years of fruitless searching through military and official channels…
Much has happened since those far off days in Ynyshir.

Denzil then describes his life in Brecon, including being a local councillor for the past twenty-six years and Mayor, and his pride in being selected as the Tory parliamentary candidate for Brecon and Radnor fifteen years earlier. He explains that his wife and children had arranged a special sixtieth birthday holiday for him in Pau, only twelve kilometres north of St Faust, so that he could surprise Bill with a visit. Sadly, Denzil was sending this letter instead, because illness had delayed the trip.

I certainly want to meet with you personally again after all these years and perhaps simply learn of other members of your family.
If there is no reply to this letter don’t be too surprised if I arrive unannounced on your doorstep from my hotel in Pau.

I do not have a copy of the letter Janet sent in reply, but she must have told him that Bill had died recently, and that she had never heard of Ynyshir, nor indeed of Denzil and his family, and that she did not know who he was.

Denzil’s response was a bombshell.

Dear Aunty Janet… I am replying immediately to tell you all I know about Uncle Roy. I trust you won’t mind me referring to him as such. This is the name the whole family addressed him by and I am so used to it now.

Denzil, it appears, was Bill’s nephew, the son of a sister called Lily. Janet was about to discover that Bill was born into a Welsh coal-mining family, most of whom were still alive when she married him – including his mother, living in the Probert family house in Ynyshir. Ynyshir, we learn, is in the Rhondda Fach, South Wales.

Apparently Roy simply disappeared from their life at the end of the Second World War. Denzil had spent decades looking for his war-hero uncle.

Much warm correspondence was exchanged with our newly discovered relative – about Roy’s Welsh-speaking father and Roy’s many siblings; but nothing really seemed to explain why Roy from the Rhondda had at some point become Bill from Kent. There was no family story about an argument or conflict, and Denzil had never heard anyone speak ill of Roy.

A FEW YEARS before Janet died, I made the journey to Ynyshir myself, and stood outside the narrow terrace house where my father had lived, and where his mother – it is hard to think of her as my grandmother – was still living when I was born. His five siblings, considerably older than him, were all dead, leaving nothing to go on apart from Denzil’s memories. It had never been easy to be close to Bill, so it was more baffling than upsetting. The Bill we knew seemed such a strong and imposing personality that there was no reason to question him.

In 2022, almost thirty years after we were first confronted with these revelations, my brothers and I agreed we needed to see each other. Living our whole adult lives on different continents, we have never been good at getting together. However, the isolation imposed on each one of us by the coronavirus pandemic (and our advancing years) made this a priority. We agreed on two weeks in San Francisco, staying in the comfortable apartment on the bay belonging to Colin (the eldest) and his wife. It was the most time we had spent together since we were children and now, in our seventies, talk turned eventually to our mysterious father.

We thought about the anomalies in our childhood that could have alerted us to his far-from-middle-class origins, such as his love of professional boxing and his enthusiasm for betting on the football pools. We argued about whether he was ashamed of his origins. I suddenly wanted to understand his life better, and it was now or never. I loved the prospect of researching his life. Whatever psychological bruises resulted from Bill’s periodic attacks on each of us, we thought they would not worry us now. We could try to work out how he managed to evolve from the son of a colliery blacksmith in the poverty-stricken Rhondda of the 1920s to our debonair father, working in the City, wearing his Moss Bros double-breasted suits and driving a Jaguar.

DISCOVERING HOW ROY made his way out of the Rhondda, and how his wartime experiences allowed him to become Bill, I uncovered new secrets. It became clear that his role with British intelligence had not ended with his last wartime mission in France. And combing through military archives, my brothers and I found a new relative – because someone else was also searching for the mysterious Major Bill Probert, DSO.

It had not occurred to us that a man so obviously good at keeping secrets might be hiding more than his working-class origins. I had never paid much attention to the growing worldwide enthusiasm for ancestry research and programs like Who Do You Think You Are?, but I now understand how one can become addicted to digging around on Ancestry.com. Almost everyone has a surprising ancestor somewhere – a criminal or a hero, a victim or a perpetrator – who will surface to foster your hopes or fears.

But what if the focus of the hunt is your parent, who lived to a decent old age and whom you thought you knew quite well? How will new discoveries about Bill make us feel?

Do I want to find out about my father’s early history because this might make him more loveable? Or because it might make me feel differently about my experience of him? If I uncover more secrets, will they change my own past, or just briefly unsettle it? Does finding the ‘truth’ bring a parent closer, or could it have the opposite effect – because what you took for granted about that person becomes ambiguous; what seemed certain is replaced not by new certainties but by uncertainty.

While my brothers and I agreed that we should start with a fact-finding mission, in the end these facts had to be interpreted – inserted into a new story about our father. And if I am the one telling this new story, then the story will inevitably be coloured by my memories and my beliefs. I have spent most of my working life thinking about how patterns of social inequality are produced and reproduced and sometimes disrupted, and how families are shaped by economic and cultural forces. It is also true that I am a temperamental radical, better suited to the daily egalitarianism of Australia than the deferential traditions I grew up with in England. This may influence what I see and what I miss.

AS MORE FACTS about Bill’s life came into focus, his story seemed to map onto the major social transformations of Britain in the twentieth century. A mixture of luck and ability helped Roy navigate the collapse of the Welsh coal communities in the 1920s and the Depression years that followed; his gift for languages and his fearlessness gave him extraordinary opportunities in the Second World War. He emerged as Bill, filled with ambition to make a good life and camouflaged to take full advantage of the boom years that followed. Perhaps his greatest stroke of luck was to find his wife, Janet. But this did not prevent him from keeping secrets from her, not only about his own family but also his continued work in intelligence. His extraordinary ability to keep secrets meant none of us had any idea that his Welshness went far beyond our Welsh surname. Until that letter arrived from Denzil, eventually setting me off on this project to understand how Roy became Bill, and what Bill did.

Image by Jonathan Borba via Canva.com