Jon Woolcott contemplates forefathers, family trees and inheritance.

On Christmas Eve, 1990, my brother Tim and I found ourselves in the dark in an ancient cottage close to the A21 in Sussex. A few months earlier our mother had married a man we hardly knew, and we were in his home; the following morning they were coming from London, and we were to have Christmas lunch together. We had been given simple tasks – put the turkey in the oven in the very early morning and later on, boil the vegetables.

But there was a power cut, and from speaking to the man from the electricity company whose van was parked down the lane we gathered we would do no cooking. The cottage was tiny, cluttered and strange to us; we knew where nothing was, but we found candles, and unwrapped each other’s Christmas presents – Tim had given me two very large and solid wine glasses, which I still have. We poked around in the wine rack and anxious not to drink anything too expensive from mum’s new husband’s bottles, found something red with a Safeway label on it. We lit the fire in the small sitting room and sat close to it and each other, drinking that bottle and then another. Ours is a small family, and since mum now lived a long way from us, it felt smaller still. Sometimes I felt cut off. Barracked by a storm and sitting in the dark, that evening enhanced the sense of isolation. I had played a part in constructing this. My then-partner said that the difference between us was that I had left my hometown decidedly and finally when I went to college, whereas she had kept family and childhood friends close. In the cottage later  that evening I was struck with a severe pain in my shoulder and right arm. Mum, having been brought up in the 1940s, had a fear of draughts, the danger of ‘catching one’s death’ was ever present, and I might have inherited that notion. The cottage was cold, wind sliced in through a single-paned window. Tim had recently been in the United States and had brought home prescription painkillers. I took two with some more wine. Half an hour later I was helpless with laughter. I could barely climb the steep wooden stairs and fell into one of the two single beds in the spare room, giggling uncontrollably into the thin blanket.

Wine and drugs have usually made me nostalgic, but the dawn of the nineties made me look forward instead. For Tim and me there was nothing special to be excited about. I had a dead-end job answering phones in a small room full of smoke and jokes past their tell-by date, selling tickets to a West End musical, for almost no money. Tim was to leave University in a recession and not work for two years. But the nineties were already not the eighties: Thatcher was gone, Mandela was free, the Berlin Wall was down. In the five-hundred-year-old storm-wracked cottage, the traffic noise a light swish in the night, we drank and looked forward. 

The nineties turned into something else. Mum’s new marriage became a sticky, difficult thing. She had married someone from her youth who had gone to Germany to study music, and they had lost touch. In a way, it was my fault that they were married. In my second year at college mum and dad came to visit me in London. They bought me dinner at a Garfunkel’s in Golders Green, and I suggested we meet the next day at Westminster Cathedral, an object of my fascination with large and ugly tucked-away buildings. But the fish was off and I spent the night and next morning in a feverish sweat. Dad phoned from a callbox and my girlfriend explained. Mum and dad walked around the dark and cavernous Roman Catholic Cathedral. In an aisle they were stopped by a man in a cassock, who recognised mum. It was her teenage boyfriend, now a professional chorister, music teacher and composer of minor liturgical music. They stopped and talked, swapped numbers, and two years later dad died. Not long afterwards the Man in the Cassock phoned mum. A year later they married; I walked with her down the aisle, made a speech in the music room that lay in the garden of the cottage and toasted them with warm champagne. My glass contained also a wasp and I spent an hour surrounded by my mum’s solicitous friends, advising gargled vinegar and stillness. 

The marriage was unhappy, but it did last. Mum had always liked the idea of Roman Catholicism, its heavy ritual and clear-cut rules, the labyrinthine theology, music, history, incense and robes. To marry him she had to convert from her pragmatic, flexible CofE half-faith, and conversion meant that divorce was out of the question, but she also hated that she might return to our hometown, single in her sixties and then seventies, and it would all have been an embarrassing excursion. Every time I visited Sussex she would find a way to be alone with me, and to complain, with good reason, or some reason. And I would always say: Just Leave. It was too simple for me, and too complicated for her.

Eventually The Man in the Cassock died and was buried somewhere in Sussex, a grand memorial mass in the Catholic Cathedral – and even at the service mum was too thin. Less than a year later her ashes were buried with our father’s, in a small churchyard in our hometown, her funeral service conducted by a Catholic priest in a CofE church. The excursion had lasted nearly 25 years, but she was home.

Neither Tim nor I have children, our parents are dead, our nearly step-father, wicked or not, is dead. Our surname, not quite Theo, not quite Derek, not quite Alexander, also makes us easy to find. Early in 2024 I was contacted by a namesake from America, who for many years had been constructing a family tree of all the known Woolcotts. The website is remarkable and seemingly endless, hidden deep in its pages were some of my direct ancestors, cheesemongers of Drury Lane in the nineteenth century.  From the email we learned we were no longer a small half family, we were part of a great multitude of Woolcotts. One of us had been a signatory to the American Declaration of Independence. This was more like it. Our tiny, creaking, storm-struck world opened up.

My namesake dug around in his files for more information. I imagined dusty papers in a filing cabinet in the basement of a ranch house. It was probably on a hard drive, but he found us. Once the whole Declaration of Independence thing was out in the open, I had begun to consider my forefathers – and they were all fathers – the research was interested primarily in men with my surname. Patriarchy makes this much easier, even as it removes the richness that would come from knowing the other half of history. Surely the Woolcotts would have been global travellers, adventurers, revolutionaries, or colonisers, someone to be proud of or ashamed of.  It turned out that our ancestors were directly traceable to the early sixteenth century, the earliest being a Richard Woolcott, and for 450 years the Woolcotts never ventured beyond West Somerset. There was some trouble there, sometime in 1570, no more than a fight, but a Woolcott was involved. Other than that, we were unremarkable, fixed people. But what intrigued the American Woolcotts was that we might be a minor missing link, a possible connection between two sets of Woolcotts: from Devon and Somerset. Would we participate in their DNA study? Sending some of my saliva to a group of strangers didn’t appeal. My brother is the adventurer, though, and swabbed the inside of his cheek obligingly. 

Suddenly our emails were plunged into the strange language of genetics, a world that’s weird, fascinating, complicated, plugging us directly into deep time. I’ve also sometimes worried that it has overtones of race theory and eugenics, although it’s mostly shorn of that in these days of Ancestry.com, which tells us more about our connections to others than it does grant privilege to a few individuals.

After a few weeks the results were in and were not what we had thought. We were not Woolcotts at all. We came from a completely different ‘haplogroup’. Our genetic grouping was Nordic – our DNA has most in common with many living in eastern Sweden and western Finland today. There was a map, which showed our family journey from the dawn of humans: from Africa, through the Levant, and then north. How we got mixed up with the Woolcotts and when, is not known, though adoption was suggested as a likely reason 

Suddenly we were cast out from our new-found family, the Woolcott diaspora, and could be of no help in connecting long dead west country men to one another. We were orphans again. I didn’t mind. That one man hit another man outside an inn near Porlock nearly half a millennia ago is much less interesting to me than how the tides of history lap up against us. When I think of my great, great grandfather (and his overlooked wife, my great, great grandmother, Charlotte Hockings), moving to London to open the cheesemongers sometime around 1850, it matters more to me that he did so at exactly the point in history when the urban population of England first exceeded those who lived in the countryside, and that he would have made that journey by train, a migration almost impossible to comprehend by his parents’ generation.

Every year, as Christmas approaches, I think about that evening in Sussex. This year’s abortive DNA excursion had reignited the sense of isolation which was so intense in my memory of the battered cottage, but also has reduced that evening to its essence. It was no longer about the promise of the future or the uncertainty of the past, has become again what is always simply was: two brothers drinking wine and watching the firelight, waiting for their mother to come home.

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Jon Woolcott works for the independent publisher Little Toller Books. He is the author of ‘Real Dorset’, the editor of ‘Going to Ground’, and is writing a new book about the English landscape, its history and mysteries.