1976? Aquiring a Little Sister ......................................................

This little tale has all the trappings of a movie script. In fact, it did form the basis of my started but largely unwritten novel.

I was in St. Catherine's House in London during one of my long-weekend flying visits from Halifax, doing family tree research. I chanced to get into coversation with a chap from the Salvation Army.

"What," I asked, "were the chances of locating my father?"

This was the father I'd never met, knew very, very little about, who'd been damned by my mother, was he alive or dead?

The man asked for, and got, the few details I had. A promise from him that he'd see what he could find out and that was it. I sort of forgot about it.

Some time later, weeks maybe, I was back in Nova Scotia and letter arrived . The Salvation Army had located my father's second wife. Sad to say my father was dead but this second wife had said she write to me.

Write she did, with some explanation of my father's later years and the stunning news that I had a sister.

My father had remarried near the end of the war to a Eileen Josephine Moore (I nicknamed her EJ Mum)

They'd had a daughter in 1944 and named her Antonette Frances. To an only and oft lonely child the discovery of a sister is a rather delightful surprise, especially when she's been undiscovered for about 32 years.

She was living, EJ Mum told me, in Toronto, less than two hours by air. I wrote back to my new step-mother, I wrote to me new sister. I flew to Toronto and met Toni. A petite woman, definitely pretty, rather like Anne Murray (if you know the Canadian singer). We share my father's cleft chin.

So I got to know my father a little through meeting her, even if it was by proxy. I later met EJ Mum and learned some more.

Toni? Still in Toronto. We are close but distant, the seperate years somehow forming an emotional gap between us. Occasional phone calls and cards keep us in touch. I missed meeting my father completely and missed having a sister for all those years.

Writing this tells me I need to phone her and maybe talk a while. She is my sister!