Fairytales really can come true

Jul 21 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

It’s Liverpool’s own fairytale about how a beautiful little girl from a comprehensive school became a princess in a distant land. David Charters reports

EVERY little girl should be a princess to her daddy. But this lovely little girl’s handsome father lived far away in a country where the sun always shines and the palm trees are high.

She knew then that the world was big and wonderful and mysterious. Even so, she wondered why she never saw him.

People said that he had settled with that big smile and those charming ways of his in a land which had been home to her ancestors. But to the girl it could have been the moon – for all the difference that made.

For Liverpool was her home. She was a Liverpool girl. She knew where she belonged. And yet, the father had left something, hidden inside her, a feeling that she was special.

But she didn’t know just how special until the phone rang many years later. On the other end was the father telling his daughter that he was a king in Nigeria.

To be sure, Ayo Ogolo must have been the only old girl of Shorefields Comprehensive School, in the Dingle, whose father was a king or chief (the status is the same in Nigeria).

Of course, she had done well passing O-Levels in English, art, history, biology and French, which had enabled her to study to be a “tailoress” at the old Mabel Fletcher College, in Wavertree.

If her dad was a king in Africa, that meant she was a princess, despite being brought up in Liverpool and working in Manchester.

This was a fairy story starring living people – confirming her faith that almost anything was possible in this life.

Ayo, 44, came from a long Royal line on her father’s side. She could pinch herself until the blood flowed, but it was not a dream.

And later this year, her father, Lambert Ogolo, will meet Ayo in England and take her to the Rivers State in the mangrove swaps of Nigeria, where he is King of Opobo, an important coastal town.

Once there, he will introduce Ayo to her brothers and sisters from his second marriage. That will involve a lot of kissing and shaking of hands.

For King Lambert has been a busy man since he left Liverpool.

Her new sisters are Ibiene (Valentina), a stockbroker; Ibifuro (Margaret), an environmentalist; and Ayawarifi (Geraldine), a computer expert. Her new brothers are Fuminyeye (Harold), a doctor; Diepiri (Levi), also a doctor; and Omirie (Gilbert), a design engineer.

In 1963, Lambert had married Ayo’s mother, Norma Kuya, at the Brougham Terrace register office, Liverpool. The following year, Linette Ayo Ogolo was born, followed by her brother, Paul, now a 43-year-old surveyor.

Ayo knows very little about her father’s time in England, but the family went to Nigeria. “We went when I was a baby and came back when I was about 18 months,” she says.

But Lambert stayed, leaving a hole in Ayo’s life, as she attended Stanhope Street Nursery School and St Margaret’s, Toxteth, before going on to Shorefields.