Look What You Made Me Do

It’s time I gave Franc a voice. This is the first letter he wrote to me. It arrived in an envelope, with a stamp, brought by the postman. The method of delivery was quaint, old-fashioned and romantic:

11 November

Darling Ellen,

Thank you very much for your love letter. I enjoyed reading it . . .

He said he was looking forward to seeing me that evening and to cooking a meal for me, his ‘special guest’. He wrote some hugely enjoyable but blush-making French stuff and then asked if, ‘by a terrible mistake’, he faxed the letter to me in my office, ‘would that be a problem?’

Yours for ever, my arse – we’d known each other all of ten days. As for faxing a letter to my office, it looked like teasing but was, I know now, a gentle exploratory threat. He was testing me and I reacted exactly as he had hoped – I was horrified. I’d been in this job only two months and was still settling in.

I don’t have the letter Franc is replying to, my first. Perhaps he didn’t leave it behind as he did all the others, but I imagine I was responding to something he had done in the best way I knew, with written words. Knowing me it would have been an honest statement of what I felt, not especially flowery, not over-sentimental, but true. I do, however, know what he did to prompt it – he listened. We’d seen each other half a dozen times and each time he encouraged me to talk about myself. It was such a relief to tell someone about the awful time I was having that I told him where my strengths and weaknesses lay. I was completely open with a man I barely knew. Why did I trust him? Because Jeannie did. It wasn’t as though he was a complete stranger I’d met in the street. He was Dave’s boss and my friend’s friend. Of course it was OK to trust him.

There was one other thing. That weekend he had woken me in the night, pulled me into his arms from my side of the bed and whispered, ‘I need you, Ellen.’ Something flared in my heart and I fell in love. That was the exact moment.

I remember talking to my close friend Nina about it. She had also met someone who might be described as ‘spoken for’. I think this was the only time I voiced concern about the speed with which my feelings for Franc had deepened. After that any reservations I had seemed to melt away.

So what did I tell him about myself in that first couple of weeks? Almost everything.

He knew I’d been married and divorced – that’s not something you can gloss over, especially not when you have three almost grown-up daughters. But I didn’t, for example, tell him I had ended a long-term relationship a couple of years earlier for fear of dying of boredom. I didn’t tell him about my ill-advised dalliance with a married man that summer either . . . or the Russian birthday kiss. My love life was, for the time being, off limits.

I told him that having teenagers in the house is a continually evolving crisis, but that the issues tend more towards minor than major. I confessed, bravely I thought, that I was already a grandmother. He laughed at that.

Number 1 Daughter had fallen pregnant within weeks of finishing her college course. It was quite a shock – I threw up when she told me. But then we talked about it and I said that whatever she decided to do I would support her. Nine months later I held one hand and her boyfriend held the other as she pushed my first grandchild into the world.

As soon as my grandson was born, the midwife took my arm and said, ‘Don’t go anywhere. I have something to show you.’ She came back a few minutes later with a tiny plastic ID bracelet bearing my daughter’s name. She had been my midwife seventeen years earlier, helping to deliver the baby who had grown into the young woman who had just become a mother herself. She had kept the bracelet because it had been an unusual birth of an unusual baby. We had both almost died. I hadn’t been in any position to thank her at the time and so it’s hard for me not to read some deeper meaning into her being exactly where she was at exactly the moment we needed her again. It was, she said, quite wonderful to see that the tiny scrap of very sick baby she had worked so hard to save was now a mother herself, tall, healthy and beautiful. And then we hugged each other and cried. It was the strangest and most amazing thing. I didn’t tell Franc about that; it was far too personal.

But I did tell him that my daughter and grandson came home to us a few days later and her boyfriend moved in too. For a while our rented house on the hill felt a bit like an episode of The Waltons. I thought it was a nice story, showing how we coped and held together as a family. It showed I was a good mother.

I told Franc, too, how it all came crashing down and we had to leave. Our elderly landlord became ill and his niece, with one eye on her inheritance, served us notice to quit. We loved that house, and thought we’d be there for ever.

I told him about the practical difficulties of finding a new home for us that would come even close to the one we were leaving. I was very upfront about struggling to find something we could afford on my income. The problem with renting your home is that when your landlord decides to have the house back you aren’t given much time to find a new one. That narrows your options considerably.

Then I told him about a happy thing, which was also a bit sad – Number 1 Daughter married her boyfriend the following spring and they moved into their own home. I told him about the peculiar loneliness I felt sitting by myself at the top table amongst the groom’s family.

I explained that our new landlord had asked how I would feel if he moved back into his house, with us – my two younger daughters and me. This felt wrong. Why would he want to do that? I decided I didn’t like or trust him so I put my foot down and, just like that, he decided we had to leave. We’d only been there six months.

Now we were living in our third home in a year – a cramped two-bedroomed house on a new estate. We all hated it, but it was the only thing available, and it did at least have the benefit of being in the right place for schools, friends and shops. Most importantly, it was affordable.

We’d only been there a couple of weeks when, out of the blue, my ex-husband reappeared after an absence of eight years. It wasn’t as if he’d been looking for us; his reappearance was pure chance. Number 1 Daughter was at a local garage when she spotted him. ‘That’s my dad,’ she said to her husband.

When she told me, I felt the fabric of our lives tearing again. She hadn’t wanted to mention the encounter because she didn’t want to hurt me, knowing that even after all this time I would still feel the sting. She had, though, told her sisters and they wanted my blessing to pick up contact with him. They knew I would give it. He was their father. They – and he – had every right to see one another. Our eight years’ exclusion from his life hadn’t been my choice and I felt he owed them something. We’d weathered so much together but I knew, I just knew, that this would be the end of us as we were, as a family. The time we’d had, growing together and being happy, was coming to an end.

It was a nasty shock and one I certainly didn’t tell Franc about. It felt too soon.

But while we were cuddled up on his sofa I did tell Franc how my life seemed to be turning into a series of leaps from one frying pan into another. I had to tell him that. I wanted him to think I needed him but, of course, he already knew that. Everybody needs to be needed, though, don’t they?

I told him about how I had been earning a living, that my income came from several freelance jobs. One of them was as a bank secretary at one of the city hospitals, which was how I knew Jeannie. This was the job with the biggest and most reliable wage packet and I enjoyed it enormously. I’d recently applied for – and got – a permanent secretarial post there. All that was by way of explaining how I’d come to meet him. Wasn’t that lucky? I finished my tale of woe determinedly upbeat with a big smile which said, And now there is lovely you so everything will be all right.

Looking back at my stash of work papers tells me something I had forgotten – that I was invited to apply for the role when no suitable candidate had emerged from the formal recruitment process. The invitation came from Doreen Milson, who would become my line manager – the same Doreen who told me I could do no more for my ‘kids’. At the time I remember feeling intense relief at the promise of some necessary security: holiday pay, sick pay, regular hours . . . such riches. Thinking about it now, this invitation and where it came from should have sounded alarm bells – I’d heard rumours – but I didn’t stop to think about that. Stability was what we needed and stability was what I would provide.

Much later, I recalled one of my colleagues mentioning that working on site was a lot different from freelancing, adding something vague about office politics. Office politics are a given, we all know that. But had I known then what I know now I might have made a different decision – although my choices at the time were pretty limited, by which I mean I didn’t have any.

Looking through my old diaries I see a woman who in spite of a shitload of catastrophe was doggedly persevering, organized and more or less on top of it all. This surprises me, because I came to believe that I was an accident waiting to happen.

In fact, despite everything being a bit seat-of-the-pants at times there is steady common-sense neatness about the entries. I’ve marked down Number 1 Daughter’s antenatal appointments. There are entries for school timetables, sports days, parents’ evenings, concerts and exams, periods. I have a regular appointment at the hairdresser and occasionally I have a facial or a manicure. I have a social life and I’m running a very efficient parent taxi service. I know precisely when my TV licence quarterly payment of £25 was due. My father came to stay for a weekend and the rugby Six Nations championship is marked down with the scores. Pets go to the vets. I take the children and their friends to see Jurassic Park and Independence Day at the multiplex twenty miles away. The girls go to parties. I drive all over the place in my old blue Metro following up on commissions for wedding dresses, evening gowns and hand-painted murals, and collecting freelance secretarial work – the hours I’ve worked on the various jobs are meticulously itemized. My blood pressure, unsurprisingly, is a tad on the high side (it still is) but I am across everything – on it like a bonnet. I am lost in admiration for forty-three-year-old me. And dismayed at what I know is coming.

What my diaries don’t show is how I felt the very second I woke up at the start of each day, even before opening my eyes – the knotted stomach, hands curled tight into fists, the gut-crunching terror that everything would unravel. The family doctor had prescribed antidepressants to help me cope but still every hour of every day was lived in fear of a blow that would finally finish us off. It wouldn’t take much. That fear left me vulnerable.

In fact it took three blows to do the job. The first was the reappearance of my ex-husband. The second came much sooner than I had anticipated and it brought me to my knees.

When I got home on Sunday evening after my third (lovely) Saturday night with Franc, Number 3 Daughter told me straight out. Some things are so terrible there is no other way to tell them.

Sally was a close friend to my girls, almost an honorary daughter. This couldn’t be right. She was only a teenager – teenage girls did not suddenly die. I made her say it again in case it wasn’t true.

I recall slipping down to the floor and folding up in a corner, my back against the wall. My daughter tucked herself in next to me and we held each other for a very long time. We were too shocked to cry.

There had been a car accident – Sally in the front with the driver, Sally’s friend sitting in the back. The car had been going too fast, caught the kerb on a corner, flipped over and as the rear window burst outwards the friend in the back went with it and into a thick hedge, which saved her life. She told us later she remembered picking things up – a shoe, a CD, a bag – as she walked back through the rain to the overturned vehicle. She looked inside but Sally wasn’t there. She was some way off, lying in the road. That was the moment she knew.

I needed to round us all up, get the wagons in a circle, know my girls were all safe. How could I have been away for a whole twenty-four hours? Bad mother. Where was Number 2 Daughter? Did she know? No mobile phone, no contact, a void. With the reappearance of her father she had wanted her own space away from our tiny cramped home and the fractious hole he’d punched through our lives. At seventeen she was staying with her boyfriend’s family. She was close enough for me to keep an eye on her and I’d thought we were OK but now I didn’t know where she was. They were all so close – this little group of friends. They’d grown up together. I didn’t know what to do. What could I do? What did I do? I can’t remember.

On Monday morning we did our best to carry on as normal. All the young people who’d known Sally wanted to be together and their school provided the support for their sorrow. I was content that that was the right place for them to be. I went to work but left at lunchtime on compassionate leave, too distraught to concentrate. I drove back to see my friend Quinn, an artist and a New Yorker who lived on the road where Sally had died. Quinn was eighty and I wanted to break the news to him myself, for this heavy blow to fall gently. He knew us well, we were close and I loved him dearly.

‘Oh, pet lamb. You’re all beat up. Come in. Come in.’ He had a rumbling, cigarette-roughened voice. He told me he had seen the blue lights from the emergency services on Saturday night but had not known they were for Sally. Grateful that I’d come to tell him myself, he made me sit down, opened a bottle of vodka and we held a two-person wake. That was Quinn – always the right words, always knowing what was needed. It was Quinn I turned to at this desperate time – not Franc. I didn’t feel I knew him well enough yet.

Sally’s funeral was the following Friday. Our instructions were to wear something she had liked with as many birds as possible. I’d been to see her mother and father, sitting on their sofa and trying but failing to find the right words. Her mum told me she hadn’t known Sally had a tattoo until she’d seen her at the hospital and noticed the tiny bird inked onto the side of her foot. It matched the one on Number 2 Daughter’s foot – they’d had them done together in secret. I remember still not believing what had happened, even as I held the order of service in my hand, even when the coffin, smothered in white flowers, came into the sunlit church. I remember the courage and steadiness of Sally’s parents and her brother, of a tight group of battered young friends. I remember dear, lovely Quinn, who I’d never seen in anything but jeans and a T-shirt, wearing a suit – pinstripe, circa 1945 from the look of it. When the vicar began the service by talking about God’s great plan, he muttered, ‘Bullshit,’ and I squeezed his hand. Afterwards we stood on the churchyard path, smoked cigarettes and talked.

What happened next is fogged in my memory. A friend invited me over for lunch and managed to give me food poisoning with an overripe pheasant. The following day I was weak and fragile and my daughters needed me so I didn’t go over to Franc’s until Sunday – a whole week since I’d last seen him. Others having a claim on my time seemed to have irritated him, but I chose to see this as an outward manifestation of his need for me. I called him a heartless bastard, although I said it with a smile. A warm hug of a letter arrived for me by post the following week. It was dated 23 November.

The letter began with his usual ‘Darling Ellen’, and in it he told me that he had enjoyed spending Sunday with me ‘even if it ended . . . well . . . you know’. He said he understood how I felt because he had been ‘in the same situation’. He said he would do his best to take care of me and make me happy and he ended by saying that he couldn’t wait to see me again, to kiss me and hold me and ‘well, this is it’. He signed it,

Two days after Sally’s funeral my youngest had her fifteenth birthday. My diary tells me that we did what she wanted most – had a takeaway, watched a video and went shopping – proper Mummy-and-sister time. Then she had some proper Daddy time – weekend visits had quickly become part of our routine. I never saw him because he picked her up on the corner of the street. Though this was painful I thought it was right. They had a lot of time to make up. I especially thought this when she came home with the CAT boots she had been longing for but which I couldn’t afford.

Our family was fragmenting and a treacherous vacuum forming in the spaces between – spaces into which Franc slipped with nonchalant ease. I saw him three times that week and he deftly changed the subject whenever I began to talk about Sally.

After a week – on 30 November – he sent me a fax at work. I wasn’t sure about this but Jeannie, whose desk was beside the fax machine, was also receiving one, two and sometimes three faxes from Dave almost every day. And he worked with Franc. Jeannie said not to worry, so I didn’t.

At the moment I can’t fax you for one hour (or more) as usual. So just a quicky one.

Then he phoned and asked me to book a restaurant in my neck of the woods for the following night. I remember he picked me up in his car – a proper date – and over dinner we talked about him. He told me how when he’d moved from France he’d spent the first two weeks staying in a motel room and how lonely he’d felt. He told me about arranging with Jeannie’s boyfriend, Dave, to rent a house he owned and how lonely he’d felt there too. What he didn’t tell me was why he was here in the first place or why he took a job so far from home. Then he told me that Sophie, his fiancée, was coming over to spend the weekend with him – that weekend, so obviously I couldn’t be there. He was very matter-of-fact about it but understood that I felt hurt, despite pointing out that it wasn’t as though he hadn’t been straight with me. He even tried one of his jokes. He said he’d had to make a thorough search of the house for my long red hair. I was a nuisance and moulted like a bitch, he said, smiling and pleased that he knew the English word for a female dog. I laughed too. When he took me home, Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ was playing on the car radio and he held my hand tightly all the way. Then he drove back to his empty, lonely house. The way I felt when he left me hadn’t been part of the deal I had made with myself when I first met him.

Years later, the wreckage Franc left behind contained several of my letters to him including this one, written the day after the ‘Sophie’ dinner:

2 December

My darling Franc

I wanted to write to you again before the weekend . . . I want, if I can, to explain to you how I really feel about you. That way there can be no doubts, on my part or yours, and you will know exactly what you mean to me, which I hope will help you to sort things out in your mind.

For me this is a very difficult situation, as I know it is for you too, and it seems even more strange to be writing to you like this when I have only known you for such a relatively short time. However, we are both adults and as such we should know our own minds . . .

I really look forward to seeing you and, like you, it feels as though the time we spend together is too short. We have so much to talk about, being so similar we would, we are never short of conversation. It doesn’t matter what we do or where we go, being with you is a constant delight and I love it. You are a kindred spirit. A lot of the things you do and the way you do them are exactly the same as the things I do when I am at home . . .

I feel for you this weekend and, because I am a little selfish, I feel somewhat hurt and confused myself. I will deal with it but when I think you might go away from me . . .

You asked me if I was sure I loved you, I hope this letter answers the question for you. You also asked me to say what I was thinking. I hope this letter does that too.

I do not know Sophie and I do not know what is, or has been, between you. I cannot hate her or say bad things about her but I am jealous, I can’t help that.

It IS too soon to decide anything . . .

Please try not to hurt me, Franc, I feel things very deeply and I feel very vulnerable over the way I feel about you. I would risk or give up a great deal for you.

Helen xxx

But reading between the lines tells me quite a lot about Franc and his methods. I sound measured and a little formal – perhaps mirroring him (wanting him to like me). I have played down my own hurt at a fairly brutal disappointment and I have called us ‘kindred spirits’. I have hinted at what I feel but held back from expressing it. Franc has played the ‘alone’ card and I have empathized because I am alone too, not in the sense of having no one – I have several good and trusted friends as well as my children – but because my circumstances at the time are isolating. Franc is making it him and me against the world. He is making himself my ally and events in my life have conspired to help him. I have said I am ‘selfish’ but at the same time it sounds like an apology – ‘I’m sorry I feel this way but . . .’ when in fact I have every right to feel concerned for myself. I have suffered enormous loss, a terrible shock, and my family life is balanced on a knife-edge.

It is unfortunate that Franc happened along at precisely that moment. It wasn’t simply that I was naive – I was caught up in a series of personal crises, exhausted and distracted. I was looking for someone to prop me up and he was there, so as a default I cast him in the role of rescuer. Given that was exactly how he saw himself, he was more than happy to oblige.

I thought I knew who I was but it turns out I didn’t know myself nearly well enough, or at all. Perhaps that’s the question – not ‘how’ but ‘who’. When I met Franc, who was I? To understand your present and future you have to know your past. In my quest to understand the woman I was and am, I have to know the girl.

I was a people pleaser, always have been. It was only when I reached my late fifties that I made an effort to put a stop to that nonsense but it’s proving surprisingly difficult – what you might call ‘work in progress’. Ingrained habits – like nail biting, eyebrow pulling, hair twiddling, chewing my bottom lip and saying ‘yes’ when I mean to say ‘no’ – are the deep-rooted knotweed of my psyche. Performing my womanly duty of making sure that everyone is happy, that I get a great big beaming smile and a ‘well done’ at least once a day, was something I assimilated into myself without protest or question and it became an excuse for not asking what I really wanted . . . me. My life was a carrot-and-stick exercise, which narrowed my outlook and made me no more self-reliant than one of Pavlov’s dogs. Along with so many of my generation I was coached, disciplined and moulded into that most desirable of creatures – an eager-to-please, biddable young girl who would grow into a woman whose most fervent wish in life was to not draw attention to herself (‘don’t show off, darling’) or to offend anyone, ever. I learned to keep any disobliging thoughts to myself, or I’d squash myself into the family dog’s basket and confess all to her (she was wonderfully discreet). If I’m angry now it’s because I have realized far too late that I seem to have spent a great deal of my life striving to live up to the expectations of others and I did this without even thinking about it, complicit in my own mediocrity. That thought and the fact that for much of the time I have failed are profoundly distressing. It feels like a shocking waste.

But then people don’t always tell you when something has gone wrong. I didn’t know, for instance, that my father wanted to disown me after my divorce when I changed from my married name to my mother’s maiden name rather than the family name. I did it with the best of intentions – my mother was the last of our Walmsley-Johnsons and I wanted to preserve the name and her memory a little longer. I only found out about the offence it caused (but not why) in a late-night pub conversation with my older brother while our father was slowly slipping away from us in a hospice. It was a painful thing to hear at a painful time and I wasn’t able to contain a small sob. My brother, embarrassed, excused himself until I’d regained my self-control. The men in my family have always been contemptuous of feminine tears.

For twenty-five years I’d had no idea and yet it explained a lot, made sense of some distances and coolness. That said I still don’t understand it. There is, I am sure, some other long-forgotten thing connected to the name but nobody ever talked or talks about it. I can’t carry the blame for something I didn’t know about (an unknown unknown) and yet it nags – a conspicuous, if unconscious, failure to please on my part, an extra parcel to add to the burden of a lifetime’s guilt for not being perfect. It hurts. It shouldn’t but it does.

I have a photograph of a smiling little girl in a frilly frock, a wreath of flowers in tightly curled hair, carrying a posy. Standing in a snowy churchyard I am a bridesmaid at the wedding of my parents’ friends. It’s a black-and-white picture but I remember the dress was pale yellow and it had a little cluster of silk flowers at the waist, trailing ribbons, and the skirt stuck out just like my mum’s favourite star-sprinkled navy one. I think that was 1960 or ’61 and I still love pale yellow and lilac together. And sticky-out skirts that rustle when I walk . . . and heels that tap . . . and stars. I am happy because everyone else is happy and this is what little girls are supposed to do and be – a credit to their parents. An early success in the art of pleasing but at a cost: I was freezing cold, the dress prickled and for most of the time I was bored silly.

Ten years or so later I am a bridesmaid again and this time my dress is burnt-orange Crimplene with a high lace collar and bib. It is fitted over the bust and then flared to ankle length. My hair, long by now, has been teased and backcombed and sprayed and with the addition of not one but two hairpieces it is piled high on my head and has a large velvet bow pinned at the back. And ringlets. It feels like hell. Again the dress prickles and again I am freezing cold and bored silly only this time I don’t put up with it because I am a teenager. As soon as I am reasonably sure it won’t cause offence I take down my hateful crispy hair and change into something I like better. Every time that photograph comes out I get, ‘Do you remember that? You were a right little madam.’ I still think ringlets are ridiculous and I hate Crimplene to this day, although over time I’ve found it in my heart to forgive burnt orange. I didn’t enjoy the feeling that I’d let everybody down. On the whole, I decided, I preferred it when everyone was happy and pleased with me.

When I was thirteen, my French teacher had the bright idea of teaching us a song – in French, obviously. Once we’d all had a jolly lesson singing together, she decided to go around the class at random and whomever she chose would stand up and sing one verse, solo. She picked me first and I refused out of shyness so she made me stand up for the rest of the lesson pour encourager les autres. It was a summer’s day, we were in a Portakabin and it was very hot. The sun streamed through the windows, chalk dust drifted and danced. I remember my skin prickling and sweating; I was sure everybody could tell I had my period. Every so often she would turn to me and ask again and each time I shook my head, mute with embarrassment, and disappeared into a towering, shaming blush. I’ve never been able to sing in public since, and in church I mime. In fact, any kind of performance has me reaching for the sick bucket, which makes taking to the stage professionally at various points in my life really very surprising. It was a game effort to beat the handicap. Eventually, though, I had to stop on account of the vomiting.

That French teacher wasn’t the first to render me incapable of functioning. Chadwick, Chadfield and ‘Sparky’ preceded her – a sequence of maths teachers so terrifying that I’ve been number blind ever since. At one point I persuaded my mother to cut off all my long hair in the touching belief that Chadwick wouldn’t recognize me in the next day’s mental arithmetic class: ‘And what’s your name, new little girl?’ Aside from being shit at maths, a large part of my confusion was that what I was being asked to do ran in direct contradiction to everything I’d been taught about being a girl. I was so inculcated with the rule of not drawing attention to myself that I became effectively paralysed when all eyes were, legitimately, focused on me.

When Franc and I had been together for a few months I began to brush up my French. I had an idea that he would be pleased if I was able to chatter away to him in his own language. The first time I tried it he hooted with laughter, rather unkindly I thought. He said my accent was ‘tragique’. I misheard him and thought he’d said ‘très chic’. It was awful. My throat closed up and my larynx froze when he explained my mistake and I never uttered as much as a ‘bonjour’ to him ever again.

These are unhappy things. Some of it is, of course, about good manners and being kind and considerate to others but quite a lot of it isn’t about that – it’s about choice. I didn’t choose not to stand up and sing; I didn’t choose to be a bridesmaid, I didn’t choose to upset my father when I changed my name. I did choose to get married although I knew even as I was doing it that it was a very bad idea. I did choose to sleep with Franc on our first date and he chose to do that too, which makes it a bit rich that he brought it up in almost every argument we ever had – ‘I wish you hadn’t done that, Ellen’ – as though I was a tart and he had nothing to do with it. I didn’t choose to get myself raped by a work colleague in 1976 but I did choose to go back to a dinner date’s house in 2002 and then I chose to go along with what came next because it seemed to be the safest option, and anyway I had only myself to blame.

As I go through life I sort of hope my choices will be understood and that I will be forgiven for an occasional blunder because blunders happen to everyone. Most choices are fine but some are a little bit wrong and others catastrophic. So what? I’m quite philosophical about my mistakes now but there wasn’t really room for failure and human error when I was growing up. It’s taken me a lifetime to understand and embrace the concept of ‘freedom to fail’. The first time someone said that to me I nearly fell over: ‘You mean it’s OK to get it wrong?’ Getting it wrong certainly wasn’t the philosophy in my family. I was pushed and pushed to be better, to be perfect, to be an exemplary young woman, and all my girlfriends were pushed too. It must have been an awful shock to my parents when I reached my teenage years and hit back – they must have felt as though they had an alien in the house. It’s not that I was particularly wild – a good many of my school friends were far worse. I was always the one to wimp out if things looked like they were getting too lairy, although I did (don’t we all) get outrageously drunk one night; that was down to inexperience and I discovered that drinking whisky and cider together in a pint glass will always end badly. Many years later I learned that my paternal grandfather had been a violent alcoholic but no one thought to mention it at the time – I expect from shame – even though it would have brought understanding. I flouted my 10.30 p.m. curfew (obviously). I started smoking (badge of honour in the early ’70s). I had boyfriends (mostly unsuitable). But I remained a top-stream grammar-school girl (playing down my academic achievements to boys because they didn’t like swots) and a virgin, earmarked by my headmistress for Oxford. Not that much of a lost cause then.

The last time I got a good hiding was when I was fifteen. I don’t remember what I’d done but I was in my bedroom with my Marc Bolan posters, my Dansette record player and the blue-and-silver psychedelic flowers I’d painted over my wardrobe doors. I remember my father’s rage and the stinging red handprints on my leg; I also remember him then turning and putting his fist through my bedroom door. I was terrified and whatever it was, it was all of it my fault. But I didn’t cry. All I wanted for a long time afterwards was to have everything happy and normal again, for all the tension and terse conversations to be over. Not that my father was habitually violent – he wasn’t – but he and I shared the same red-headed temper, quick to flare but equally quick to subside. It was more usual for Dad in extremis to walk slowly down the garden, thoughtfully pick up a rake and then break it over his knee. Afterwards he’d sit behind the greenhouse for thirty minutes or so; pipe smoke would be seen curling upward – like a papal signifier that all was well. When he reappeared the crisis would be over. Having said that, I remember a good walloping with the back of a hairbrush for climbing up onto the porch roof and not being able to get down again. I can see the house and the porch and I can see my father reaching up to lift me down. To then be roundly spanked gave a bit of a mixed message. I was five years old.

At one point in my fifties I tried seeing a psychotherapist because I thought it might help me to deal with a few things that had been bothering me. When she asked me how I felt about having a violent father I was furious. ‘My father was not violent!’ I yelled. Then I walked out and never went back.