Vanishing Uncles

I have been gone some time, and for that I apologise. I have been on a journey — no, a quest — to shed light on the so-called 'lost years' of my great uncle Percival Seymour KBE, MBE, BBC, IBM, AT&T. Between 1969 and, the year of my birth, 1974, my great uncle went missing. It took the family some time to realise he had for he often vanished for days and weeks on end. He would usually turn up in the foreign section of a newspaper, photographed looking drunk at the table of an international summit or in the background as some African dictator or other, having seized power, addressed the excited crowd.

It isn't that great uncle Percy was one of the world's power brokers, or that he took part in bloody coups. It is just that he had an uncanny habit of turning up right at the centre of things just as they were getting exciting. And the odd thing was, no one ever questioned his presence. He had one of those faces: he always looked liked he belonged.

But back in '69, after six months had passed and no sign of him had turned up, the family started to worry. The British Foreign Office denied he was on any secret mission, but then they would, wouldn't they? But one of great uncle Percy's old school chums, who worked for the security services, said he would keep an eye out for him and let us know if he surfaced.

He did surface, but not for five years. Many in the family had given him up for dead. But one day — June 8th, to be exact — he strolled into his private members' club in Pall Mall, London, in the same suit he was last seen in (pulled apart at the seams and terribly creased but still somehow stylish), a tangled, white beard that rested on his chest and hair that resembled, according to one eye witness, a bird's nest. Accounts differ, but it is generally agreed that my great uncle Percy sat in an arm chair, ordered a gin and tonic, which he drank in three gulps, under the gaze of the entire lunchtime membership, before his eyes glazed over and an eerie stillness overcame him.

The fear was he was dead. Major Haversham-Grimshaw, one of the first white men to fully explore the interior of Africa, stepped forward and placed the back of his hand below my great uncle Percy's nose. Feeling my uncle's breath he announced him to be alive and went on to say he had seen the same thing before in the jungles of Uganda. It seems a one time travelling companion of the major, a William Graves, was struck by a dart the major swears was shot at him by a monkey. The slow acting poison didn't strike for another three days at which time Graves became locked in suspended animation while teaching the natives how to play cricket. Conveniently he had been frozen in a perfect forward defensive position for two weeks and this gave his students the perfect opportunity to study him. When he snapped out of the trance Graves was unaware any time had passed at all. The members examined my great uncle Percy for dart wounds but found none.

It cannot be established with any degree of accuracy how long great uncle Percy was like that for. Some say only a few hours, whereas others claim it was as much as a week. What can be certain is that when he did finally come round, no one seemed more surprised than him. His doctor gave him a full examination but could find nothing wrong and recommended he went somewhere quiet for the summer to relax; so he travelled by rail to Derbyshire to visit the Warburton-Stanleys at their estate where, according to his sporadic diary entries, he walked, fished and read. Just what the doctor ordered, as they say.

In the seventh week in Derbyshire something happened to cause his memory to return. Although he never did reveal what it was he suddenly remembered, it had long been hoped that the nature of the cause itself would provide some clues.TheWarburton-Stanleys, if they ever knew, told no one. But I tracked down the grandson of a former maid who worked for the Warburton Stanleys at the time great uncle Percy was staying with them. I visited him in his flat in Manchester and asked if his grandmother had kept a diary. She had! I had to part with some money but eventually the grandson handed me the diary, which had been left to him in her will, and what it revealed just made the mystery more enigmatic.

[To Be Continued.]