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| My mother and father with one of my sisters and one of my brothers. |
July 31, 2019
You should never wash your dirty linen in public but there are times when “going public” is a cathartic experience; it is a process of relief, the emotional equivalent of lancing a throbbing boil, pulsating on your soul.
The very tip of this family furuncle was the shock discovery that, after more than 40 years of marriage, my wife is a bigamist.
As well as the trauma of this revelation, as you can imagine this has an impact not just on our relationship but our finances, and that dirty linen is now an issue with the government, particularly the Department of Works and Pensions.
I’d like to say the department’s advisers have been very understanding but they have still to be really tested on this torrid tale, and bigamy is a serious issue.
As you can imagine, this is difficult to write but I’m not as angry as my wife. With her newly-acquired pension book now in a precarious position there is some serious displacement going on and I’m getting the blame for this unexpected peccadillo.
So how did we reach this unknown ménage a trois? Well, it’s tale that stretches through war, cultures, countries and time.
It also involves reincarnation. Not a subject that everyone is agreed on but I firmly believe in it, and that is an unshakeable belief as I have experienced it. The notion that you die and are re-born is but one dimension of the concept. It can happen in a flash; you can walk into a room as one person and leave as another. This is a fact. I was reincarnated a day or two after my son was born. This is true, but more of that later…
To fully understand my wife’s bigamy, I need to introduce my closest family. Not many people know this but I have an Argentinian big sister, Maria Catalina (I played a few pranks on her during the Falklands Conflict, saying Thatcher’s government had asked for a copy of her birth certificate and she was soon to be Buenos Aires bound).
My father was Polish and my other sister is Marysia Katarzyna, and she holds an American passport.
And, with my parents settling in Fife, there’s also Mary Catherine, completing the female ranks of my siblings, all of them older than the male line.
That line is, of course, myself Jerzy, and brothers Jurek and George.
So that completes my immediate family heritage. Yes, there are just the two of us in total.
Early days in the Morkis family really only featured Jurek and Marysia. Until the Falklands, Maria, born near the Pampas, never really surfaced at all while Scottish Mary, through most of her life, has been virtually invisible.
George was the oldest boy but, as a child, I never knew him. The first time I really encountered him I suppose was when we both ended up at the dentist on the same day.
I remember it vividly, as you would. Meeting, or nearly meeting, the brother you never knew. It was my first trip on my own to Mr Barlow’s surgery on Commercial Road, Leven. Up until that point my mum and dad, and on one occasion I recall, even my sister, had taken responsibility for my oral welfare.
On this particular afternoon I arrived in plenty of time for my appointment and was never called, though the receptionist did try summoning a ‘George’ a few times. It was only when the waiting room was empty that the discussion with the receptionist took place, along the lines of:
“Hello little boy with bandy legs and sticky-out ears, do you have an appointment?”
“Yes,” I nervously replied. “My mum, told me I had a check-up today.”
“What’s your name, funny little child?” she asked.
“Jurek”.
Checking her big black book, she said: “I don’t see an Eric, what’s your surname?”
“Morkis,” I replied, fair pleased that I could show off knowing what a surname was.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “We don’t have an appointment for a Derek Morkis, but we do have one for a George Morkis. Maybe your mother got you mixed up with your brother’s appointment. Are you sure you’re not in the wrong place? Maybe your dentist is Mr Brazenall on the Prom?”
“No, I’ve been here before,” I mumbled, my head reeling at the news that I had a brother as Morkis was rare name in Fife; one who needed his teeth checked the same day as me, and must be bigger than me as he was already going to the dentist on his own… and not bothering to turn up. What a rebel.
Anyway, cross checking my date of birth, it was concluded there had been some horrendous muddle and my brother’s name had ended up on my card, and I was duly ushered in to Surgery 2. I remember sitting there, staring through slatted blinds at Hutchison’s electrical store, excited and bewildered to have almost met the big brother I never knew I had.
All the way home I wondered why mum and dad had given my brother away. What did he look like? Maybe he played for East Fife? Why did he never visit? Did he like mince too?
Obviously this was a major topic when I ran through the back door and it was bit of a dramatic disappointment when I learned that I didn’t have a big brother who was friends with Denis Law, owned a leather football and had a Milky Bar Kid hat... but I did have a birth certificate and my given name was actually George.
Granted, it’s probably not as traumatic as discovering your mum and dad aren’t really your mum and dad, but for a youngster to discover your name isn’t your name is still fairly unsettling. Nobody called me George, nobody knew me as that. Best just to forget about it.
And so Jurek continued, until that reincarnation in October 1978. My son had just been born and my father was proud as punch of his grandchildren. He was so happy when I told him we had decided to call our child Stefan, after him.
“And do you have a middle name for him?” dad asked.
“Yes, he is to be Stefan Jurek,” I proudly replied, “After his grandfather and his father.”
There was a bit of a silence, then dad hit me with the bombshell, “You know Jurek isn’t a proper name? You can’t call him Jurek.”
“What? What do you mean it isn’t a proper name? It my name! I’m Jurek!”
“Jurek is a form of Jerzy,” he said. “For his birth, you must register Jerzy, not Jurek...”
Now, this was in the days before Google and, while Jurek is a diminutive of Jerzy and the familiar form, it actually is an acceptable proper first name, besides these days you can call your child just about anything. But back in the 1970s with a Polish father standing in front of me, this was not open to debate. Besides other than ‘piwo’ and ‘kielbasa’ my knowledge of Polish was severely restricted.
So I went back to my wife and explained that when registering the birth it would have to be Stefan Jerzy not Stefan Jurek. Up until that minute it was a name we weren’t even aware of and, suddenly, our newborn was being given it. And his father now had it too…
That has, of course, on my part not been an easy transition. People who know me still call me Jurek, or ‘little George’ to give it its cute translation. Ironic, since I stand at 6’2”. But I didn’t mind switching to Jerzy as people seem to have a problem with the Polish silent ‘J’, so, throughout my teen years and well into adult life, folk pronounced Jurek as Durex, yes that well-known condom brand. Now you really are into “Boy named Sue” territory with a handle like Durex. You can imagine I was, errr, ‘ribbed’ quite a lot with that. Jersey, though not the correct 'Yerzy', is definitely preferable to Durex.
Even at university and then at post-grad training, I dreaded the lecturer reading out names.
“Morkis, Jewrex. Jewrex Morkis?”
There would be class sniggers galore, this usually followed by:
“Did your mother name you after the condom that failed?”
Oh, such hilarity. Wasn't everyone French-tickled pink.
“Never heard that one before, sir,” I’d reply through gritted teeth.
Even after all these years it seems every single Thomas, Tommy, Tam, Tammy, Tom; Richard, Rich, Richie, Rick, Dicky, Dick; and Harold, Henry, Harry, has a major problem with the Jerzy/Jurek thing.
I remember working alongside a manager called William Williamson. He was also known as Wullie, by others as Billy or Wull, but most commonly as Bill though he bizarrely preferred 'Reg', and he asked me if I didn’t find being called Jurek and Jerzy confusing.
It is still not that uncommon to get a message via social media along the lines of, “I was at school with a Durex Morkis, are you related?”
But, by and large, I made it into my 60s with the daily struggle of my first name now easing into only a once or twice-weekly subject. And it’s probably best not to venture into the middle name realm of Thomas, Tomaz, Tomasz, and Thomasz.
But what’s this got to do with bigamy you ask, having read this far without getting to the main topic.
Well, not a lot. It just appears the second half of my handle has now decided it has been left out of these decades of nomenclature nonsense, and would now like to catch up.
On that, have you ever noticed in American dramas, particular cop ones, someone will give a name like Jedrek Srzwoskalski, and the desk sergeant will write it down as though it was as simple as ‘Bill Smith’? You never hear, “… and how do you spell that?”
Morkis isn’t the toughest of Polish names by any stretch of the imagination, but spelling it out is almost a habit. But there seems to be a change in the air that should have set my antennae twitching.
I took my old lawnmower in for repair and, obviously, had to provide some details.
“Your name sir?”
“Morkis.”
“Can you spell that?”
(I always assume that’s rhetorical).
“M-O-R-K-I-S”
“Thank you. No what seems to be the problem Mr Morris.”
“It’s MORKIS”.
“Oh, I’m so sorry about that. It’s an unusual name. Now what exactly is the matter with your mower Mr Morris?”
That fact that this realignment of my name had progressed from an over-the-counter exhange to the higher authorities came a few weeks later while acting under power of attorney for my mother.
Having received all the accredited documents, signed by solicitors, witnesses etc, HM Government had no record of me. We did the whole George, Jurek, Jerzy, Durex thing but to no avail. After sorting out addresses, which for some reason, had all got mangled up, the problem was traced to my surname. However we got that sorted out in some very long phone calls.
Then came the bigamy revelation.
It would appear on September 4, 1976, my wife took as her lawfully-wedded husband one George Morris. This is now an indisputable fact, it is also a national statistic and a national record. Our own pre-digital records have her marrying a Jurek Morkis. The latter, whom I once claimed to be, does not officially exist. In fact, I have records claiming he doesn’t exist and evidence of me trying to erase his existence.
The passport office does have a Jerzy Morkis, but not a George or a Jurek.
All of the above have different middle names.
The bank has a Jerzy J.
My previous employers have a Jurek and a Jerzy but not a George.
The only key to unlocking this mess is, of course, my National Insurance number. Unfortunately that is assigned to one George Morris, and I have no evidence he is me. I don’t want to be him, but, officially, I can’t be, because he is, and he is not me. But he is my wife’s lawful husband.
Officially, there is no Jurek, or Jerzy. And there is no Morkis.
My wife is now legally Mrs Morris.
I feel like I have reached a Spartacus moment in the autumn of my life, where I stand up and scream at the top of my lungs: “I AM JUREK! I AM JUREK!”
But one Roman would just turn to the other and say:
“What’s he shouting?”
“Dunno," would come the reply. "Something about condoms.”
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