My lineageChapter VI / VIII1944–1974

Gordon and Ülker, the meeting

What crosses from one world to another : the voice

An English painter who had been a pirate-radio DJ, a twenty-six-year-old Turkish woman who had worked for Turkish Airlines: they met in Portugal in 1971 and were married three weeks later.

Gordon

Gordon Vicary Hodson Swann was born on 11 April 1947 in Crowborough, Sussex, and grew up in Kent, where he stayed at school until his A-levels. In the mid-1960s he was a DJ on Radio City, a pirate station broadcasting from the Shivering Sands forts — old military platforms standing in the Thames estuary, outside the BBC’s monopoly.

Touraine and painting

In 1967 he settled in Touraine, near the château where his father Cecil lived, and gave himself to abstract painting.

Portugal, 1971

Portugal already linked the two families: Ülker’s adoptive father was a diplomat there, and Gordon’s sister Yvonne had married a Portuguese man. That is where Gordon and Ülker met. Three weeks later they were married.

Tours, 16 May 1972

Alexander Remzi George Swann was born in Tours on 16 May 1972. He arrived with three worlds behind him — the Swanns’ England, the Hodsons’ America, Ülker’s Turkey — and learned English before French.

The house in the forest

The first two years were spent in a small house in the middle of a private forest, near the grandfather’s château: a clearing, does, stags, rabbits, pigeons. The family kept scenes from that time, told by several voices: a swarm of hornets laying siege to the house, an American grandmother saving the child from choking with exactly the right gesture.