My mum had six sisters, Nell, Elsie, Renie, Flossie, Cath and Phyllis, and two brothers, Joe and Jack, and on a Sunday it wasn’t unusual for two or three of these other families to show up, and they would pass the gossip and get up to date with what was happening with us and with them. In the smallness of this house there were always conversations being carried on in front of me as if I didn’t exist, and there were whispers exchanged between the sisters. It was a house full of secrets. But, bit by bit, by carefully listening to these exchanges, I slowly began to put together a picture of what was going on and to understand that the secrets were usually to do with me. One day I heard one of my aunties ask, ‘Have you heard from his mum?’ and the truth dawned on me, that when Adrian jokingly called me ‘a little bastard’, he was telling the truth….
The truth, I eventually discovered, was that Mum and Dad, Rose and Jack Clapp, were in fact my grandparents. Adrian was my uncle, and Patricia [Clapton], Rose’s daughter from an earlier marriage, was my real mother, and had given me the name Clapton…. Pat, aged fifteen, enjoyed a brief affair with Edward Fryer, a Canadian airman stationed nearby. They had met at a dance where he was playing the piano in the band. He turned out to be married, so when she found out she was pregnant, she had to cope on her own. Rose and Jack protected her, and I was born secretly in the upstairs back bedroom of their house on 30 March, 1945. As soon as it was practical, when I was in my second year, Pat left Ripley, and my grandparents brought me up as their own child. I was named Eric, but Rick was what they all called me.
— Eric Clapton, from his book Clapton: The Autobiography (read for free)
