Norman and Nick Stone

I was always closer to my father than my mother. Every single learning experience — swimming, riding a bike, reading, writing — was down to him. He gave me one of his old typewriters when I was five and I taught myself to type from old copies of Private Eye. He used to bring me Tintin books and make up stories from them. Then it was Enid Blyton's Famous Five, and he'd underline the words with a ruler to get me to read. He was my best buddy then and he still is. I just never understood why he kept leaving me.

I think he must have been desperately unhappy. He was a war baby. His father was killed in action and he was raised in Glasgow by his Scottish Presbyterian mother. It was important to him that his children had a father, but it turned out to be very difficult for him to fulfil that role.

When I was four my parents brought me home to England and they had Seb, who was supposed to save the marriage. He's a great-looking kid, but he's epileptic and autistic and he can't speak. I think the marriage broke up there and then. The divorce was very protracted and very ugly. One of my mother's favourite sayings, roughly translated from Haitian, was: "If you can't eat at the table, spoil the food." That was what I was hearing from the age of eight. She constantly used me to get back at my dad.

Dad bottomed out at one point. He got about as low as you can go. He had these rooms in Jesus College and the sideboard was covered with bottles of spirits. His whole appearance changed. He'd always had short hair and worn a suit and tie, and all of a sudden his clothes were ragged and his hair was long. His second wife, Christine, saved his life, really. She picked him up and put him together again.

My mother didn't like the fact that he and I remained close, so she used either emotional blackmail to turn me off him, or physical threats. Throughout the 1970s, I probably saw him only once every couple of years. Then, when I did, my mother would say: "And make sure you ask him for more money." I now know that my dad didn't have any more money, otherwise he would have given it to her. I was fed the myth — that he was a total bastard — and even though I knew in my heart that was wrong, I was wary of him. I feel bad about that now. He's a decent guy, and he didn't deserve it.

I think that of the two of us, Dad was the more honest. He always made it clear that he wanted to see me, but, for me, visits were loaded with problems. I'd go home afterwards and my mother would give me a hard time. It was easier not to see him. Looking back, I was in a lot of pain but I couldn't show it around my mother, so I ended up sealing it in. Dad and I both have this very dark, very bleak sense of humour, and we joke about it all now — it's the only way, because these really were terrible times. We didn't start talking man to man until 2000, when my wife engineered a meeting. But here's the irony: we e-mail four or five times a day now, but because he's in Turkey and I'm in London we hardly see each other.

Dad hated the English university system. He was underpaid and he hated the pomposity of the people. He's had an extraordinary career. He was writing about eastern Europe before anyone else. He was adviser to Margaret Thatcher on education. He is very right wing, but he's a genuinely compassionate Conservative. He's your archetypal self-made man. In Haiti, people still remember "Monsieur Norman" because he learned the local patois and talked to everybody. He loves Turkey, and I think he's really happy there. It would have been easy for him to find work in the States, but that's not him at all. Show him the well-trodden path and he'll always choose one where nobody else has been.

NORMAN: I was 24 when Nick was born — a research fellow, paid, if I remember, £700 per annum, and hardly cut out to be a parent. Unfortunately, the then Mrs Stone was not much better at it. I remember taking Nick off on a Pan Am plane to Haiti on March 20, 1967, the poor little lamb. It was awful but there was no alternative. He was a lovely wee chap but I simply didn't know what else to do.

I stayed with him there for a month before leaving him with his grandparents. He had a lovely old nanny he loved more than anyone, and his great-grandmother was a terrific old bird who used to keep me fascinated by the history of Haiti. There were endless, very touching things about that place; it was full of wonderful people and I was very fond of it. I went back at the end of each term and stayed until the beginning of the next, so I was there with Nick for four months of the year. I tried to reassure him: "We are are your parents and we love you," and he looked at me and said: "Pourquoi m'as-tu laissŽ ici?" ["Why have you left me here?"] Oh, it was an awful time.

Ours was the last of the great shotgun weddings. In fact, it had started to crumble almost before it began. I think Nicole expected to be living in great style, and my spartan rooms in Cambridge must have been a terrible shock to her, poor thing. The problem was, she didn't want to work, and I never had any money. I finally got a proper job as a fellow of Jesus College when Nick was four and, as a house came with it, I was able to bring him home. Things battered on for a bit, and we had another baby, Seb, to save the marriage. But, really, his birth spelt the end.

Then there was the dismal business of access. Go to Hampstead Heath any wet Saturday and you'll see some disconsolate chap with a little blob in an anorak bewilderedly clutching a bun. The problem is that as a divorced father you have none of the power. Nicole simply made it more and more difficult for me to see Nick. She would tell him: "We haven't got any money because your father's living the life of Reilly." And this was after I'd handed over 90% of my income. I'd be all set to see Nick in my college rooms and the porter would call to say: "She's phoned to say it's raining and since you don't give them enough money for shoes, they can't come."

I didn't see Nick or Seb for ages and ages. When I did, she'd get Nick to ask for money. You just don't know what to do in that situation. I just had to hope he knew that I loved him.

I think Nick has survived remarkably well, because it's bloody unhealthy for boys to grow up without fathers, and I should know. Nick and I never had a chance to have a proper father-son relationship because whenever I saw him, which was infrequently, I would treat him very, very gently. It was an absurd situation, and I'm sure Nick was very hurt and bewildered by it all. It's a shame, because he's a marvellous, intelligent chap with this very black sense of humour. We've both missed out on a lot of time together.

He sent me an e-mail back in 2000 to tell me he was to be married, which was lovely to get. By that time, I hadn't seen him for about five years. When we met at a Turkish restaurant in Regent Street it was just like seeing a close friend. There was no distance between us.

We've given up talking about the past. We talk about other things. I'm amazed that he's so well read. The range of his knowledge is extraordinary. The top of my head is often occupied by Turkish and Russian history, so I tell him stories and he seems to like that. He read history at Cambridge, so we have a lot in common. In the middle of those dreadful years, a wise don at Jesus College said to me: "At a certain point you'll get a letter from him and he'll come back to you." I didn't know it would be so long coming, but I was pretty certain it would come.