Pause for thought: Roger Green, June 2006

Throughout most of my 61 years, some part of the world has been at war, or tottering on the brink of war – as is the Middle East today. It has been said that in a war, the first victim is the truth.

The story I am about to tell you appeared in the Boston Globe newspaper under the headline

40 years later and the war rumbles on.

I was caused by the war

My father, who I first met about 15 years ago, was an American soldier stationed here during the war in preparation for the allied invasion of the Normandy beaches in June 1944. While "over here", as the song used to say, he spent a lot of time doing the sort of thing that young men away at war often do.

I was born in February of 1945 and lived a very ordinary kind of life with the two people I have always known as my mum and dad.

Then in 1970 I accidentally discovered a document that rather changed my view of my situation. My mum had rheumatoid arthritis so when I made my occasional visits home she would ask me to help her with those bits of housework that she found difficult. I was hoovering along the top of a wardrobe when the tool attachment on the vacuum cleaner caught on something and it fell to the floor. It was a small cash-box containing the certificate of my adoption in October 1946.

But my instinct was to say nothing and keep this surprise to myself.

In the early 1980s my mum died. She knew she didn't have long so she sent for me. I sat by her bed and she asked me get her box of papers. I brought it to her and she fished inside, eventually bringing out an old yellowed envelope on which was written the name and address of my birth mother. She said, "I always wanted to tell you this but your dad wouldn't let me. He feared you would reject us if you knew".

But from then on what was "secret knowledge" was out and I felt free to proceed as I wished.

So eventually I traced my GI father and found I had two half sisters and a half-brother all living in Boston USA. I flew over to meet them all in June 1987.

Then things got a bit difficult. My visit to Boston was a bit of a media event and Channel Five TV spent a day with the family, including a meeting with my father, who was at that time seriously ill in a psychiatric hospital.

According to Channel Five, the TV programme they made was a big success with lots of enquiries about it, including one from a New York film company who wanted to make a film based on the story. One July evening there was a telephone call from Channel 5. Would I give consent to make the film and would I be interested in taking a screen test to play myself in the story ?

The problem was, my eldest American sister and I couldn't agree about what the true story was. The father she saw was a loyal American boy at war whose first chance of true love was blighted by the circumstances of war. The father I saw was a young soldier with "a girl in every port".

So the film didn't get made and I'm still not a film star.

But I don't regret the decision I made then to stick with the evidence when trying to decide what's true. Because what's true is what is. It's the way things are…In the search for a good life it's better, no matter how inconvenient, to search for the truth and to live accordingly. When the evidence is not clear suspend your judgement unti lit is.

This would be the securest basis on which to build the future, both for petty family squabbles and for the search for peace in the Middle East.