Smash hit

EVEN Niven’s start in life was shrouded in fiction. After maintaining for years that he was born in Scotland, he told me this was “tosh”: he was born in London. In 1982 he moved into darker territory by telling me: “My father was not my father.”

His mother, Henriette Degacher, was married to William Niven, a wealthy landowner who “lost a good deal of his money backing the wrong horses”. David was only five when William was killed fighting the Turks in the first world war. “My mother wasn’t completely unhappy when my father died.” His real father, he said, was her long-term lover Thomas Platt, a diplomat and Conservative politician. “After my father was killed, she had rather a merry crowd of young men about her, and Uncle Tommy was foremost among them. He got knighted and he hyphenated his last two names, so he became Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt. But we called him Uncle Tommy. He’d been around mother for many years.”

In May 1917, two years after her husband was killed, Henriette married Uncle Tommy at St Margaret’s, the House of Commons church in the grounds of Westminster Abbey. For David, “it rankled that he never publicly acknowledged that I was his son. I could never call him father — he was always my stepfather — and I always called him Uncle Tommy,” Niven told me. “It was a farce.

“When it sunk in that he was actually my father, I think I came to resent and dislike him even more because I felt lost and confused, and I dearly needed someone to be a real father to me. My ‘real’ father had been taken from me in the war, and now I had a stepfather who couldn’t even admit that I was his.”

“What makes you think he was your real father?” I asked.

“For a start, I look more like him than I ever did my father.”

“But have you proof?”

“I used to think my mother didn’t like me because she once told me, ‘I wish you’d never been born.’ I had got in her way and she said, ‘You are the only mistake Tommy and I ever made.’ I was eight and didn’t understand what she meant at the time.”

When he was a young man, she was more explicit. “One day she said to me, ‘David, please try to understand the position he is in. He’s an important public figure and it would cause a scandal if it were known that he had illegitimate children.’

“I took that to mean \ that neither of them cared for me enough. I understand perfectly now.”

Much later, during the second world war, when David was in his thirties, Uncle Tommy had at last told him: “I’m as proud of you as any father could be.”

“I saw a look in his eye. It was the look of a proud father. Officially he was my stepfather. But a real father looks at you with a very different eye. And then he said, ‘You know our secret, don’t you?’, and I said, ‘That you’re my father? Yes, I do.’ And he said, ‘I hope you understand why we could never tell anyone, what with my position as a member of parliament.’ I said I understood perfectly, and we parted on good terms.”

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