The Kennedys and me Illustration by Caitlin Shearer/The Jacky Winter Group John F. Kennedy's daughter and I share a name and an exact birthday. Both our mothers, elegant and darkly beautiful with similar strong eyebrows, were called Jacqueline. Coincidence? At the age of five, I did not think so. JFK was more present to me than any relative. There were no pictures of grandparents, aunts or uncles in my English home, but there was a black-and-white portrait of Kennedy in profile in the sitting room and a life-size bronze bust of him in my father's study. On Sunday mornings, my father played recordings of his speeches, alternating them with Beethoven symphonies blasted at full volume till the house literally shook from the sound waves. Everything the US president said or did was discussed by my parents at dinner in the sort of admiring and affectionate tones you might use about a favourite family member. The plan to send a man to the moon was the wayward scheme of an eccentric uncle, much as one might talk indulgently about a relative who liked tinkering with vintage cars. On November 22, 1963, just days before my sixth birthday, I came out of school to the courtyard where mothers assembled to pick up their children. My mother was crying. It was the first time I had seen an adult shed tears. It frightened me like nothing ever had. It hadn't occurred to me that adults had anything to cry about. Even more unsettling was that the other mothers around her appeared to be crying, too. With unfamiliar dread, I took my mother's hand and asked, "Is today the end of the world?" "Yes," she replied, without further explanation. I rode home in the car drinking in every last detail of the streets around me, thinking to myself that I must observe everything carefully so that when the world ended, I'd remember it all. When my father came home that evening, he, too, was sobbing, a sight even more frightening than my mother's distress. After dinner we watched TV and I learnt not only what had happened, but saw faces around the world that looked as distorted and tear-stained as my parents. I went to bed expecting no tomorrow. My father drafted a letter to Mrs Kennedy on my behalf expressing my sadness at her loss. That was the first time I ever attempted a signature, as opposed to merely forming capital letters. Later, I received an envelope from the White House edged in black containing a printed card from Mrs Kennedy thanking me for my kind wishes. After that, my father sank into a sombre mood each November 22. He timed his annual business trip to the US so he could make a point of going to Arlington Cemetery to pay his respects on the anniversary. I don't recall him ever visiting his mother's grave, nor do I even know where that is. The grief did not diminish over time. What changed was my interpretation of it. My own internal reasoning told me that we had lost a member of our family. An only child with hours on her own to imagine the wildest scenarios, I deduced I was JFK's real daughter, swapped at birth for the pretender bearing my name. I began to spy on my parents for the slightest slip and betrayal of their devious plot. There was compelling evidence, like the day in 1965 when, in an unprecedented act, my parents took me out of school. We drove to a place called Runnymede, west of London, where we stood for hours in sweltering heat to catch a glimpse of Mrs Kennedy and the Queen on the day Britain gave the US a piece of the land on which the Magna Carta had been signed, in memory of a fallen friend. Surely the only excuse for such an uncharacteristic breach of school attendance must be a secret connection; otherwise, why weren't my classmates there with me? I documented all such details in my Brownie's diary. When Bobby Kennedy was shot in 1968, I saw his lithe body lying in a pool of blood on TV and felt a disconcerting electricity I could not name. Our house plunged into new sorrow, cementing my belief that our connection to these two handsome brothers with their lustrous heads of hair and their toothy charisma could only be explained by blood. As hormones flooded my precociously adolescent body, I wrote overheated letters to a faraway pen pal documenting my theory and evidence with forensic method. She contributed her own speculations, which included the inspired hypothesis that the states of Carolina had been named after me, a lasting memorial to the terrible deception at the heart of the US nation. Little did Americans suspect the president's real daughter was growing up captive in Wimbledon. Eventually, our correspondence was intercepted, as all such incendiary documents of espionage must be. I was unmasked, my cover blown. Surely now my parents would confess? They did no such thing. Instead, I was sent to my room without dinner. My mother locked herself in her bedroom, where I could hear her sobbing like a mewling kitten. I was forbidden to write to my pen pal ever again and my letters were vetted for several years. The extreme overreaction was hard to comprehend. I read it as an outright injustice, which stirred a righteous indignation that made me argumentative, belligerent and probably insufferably obnoxious, acting out wounded grievance and confusion. It wasn't until a decade later that I understood the hurt I'd caused with my all-too-classic adoption fantasy, when my parents told me both of them had lost their own parents very young and been fostered with varying degrees of success to an unsettling and changing mix of relatives and strangers. Fifty years after that fateful day, Jackie's card is propped beside my desk, together with a photo of my parents in their glamorous youth, radiating wholesome hope and vitality. They could almost be Kennedys.