Wonder.. to amazement anxiety and heartache..to fear and just panic!

TV star on letter that revealed secret child

- MARK JEFFERIES & ASHLEIGH RAINBIRD

SIR David Jason has described a bewildering cascade of emotions when he received "the most astonishing letter" from the daughter he never knew he had.

The TV legend recalls how his hands shook when he found out that he might have a child he didn't know existed for 52 years, feeling "wonder and amazement, through anxiety and heartache, to fear and outright panic".

We revealed last year how the acclaimed actor had met up with Abi Harris and his grandson Charlie after a paternity test confirmed he had a second daughter from a brief relationship with the late actress Jennifer Hill.

In his new book, he gives more extraordinary details and shares his emotion that he was not part of Abi's life sooner, admitting there is "the pang of sadness for those missing years, all that lost time".

Taking the emotional story back to the start in his new memoir This Time Next Year, David says that a letter arrived from Abi.

Starting gently, and referencing the Dylan Thomas play Under Milk Wood, it said: "To begin at the beginning, well actually, at my beginning, I wonder whether it has ever crossed your mind, as it has done with Mum and more recently with me, that you might be my biological father?"

David, best known for playing Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, was reading the letter in his kitchen and says shocked did not begin to cover his feelings on seeing the handwritten words.

Abi went on to say her "paternity is uncertain" and, while she was not looking for financial support, would David agree "to take an anonymous paternity test so that I can finally know the truth and let the matter rest".

David, 84, writes: "You will be unsurprised to learn that my hands were shaking by now.