Imagine you have written a book detailing your parents’ relationship: how they met, married, divided and divorced. With their permission you used their notebooks, diaries and letters to track the course of their lives. You wrote down your conclusions and sold them to a publisher. Then your parents read the book for the first time and told you what they thought of it - and you. How would you feel? I have an idea, because I did exactly that. And I was terrified.
After they read it, my mother wrote to me and my father e-mailed me. My mother thought it was a good book: evocative, accurate more than inaccurate, and forgiving. My head spun with relief and pleasure. Then my father’s e-mail arrived. He, too, said it was good - good when I was describing things I remembered - but inaccurate and wrong about him. We exchanged forcefully honest e-mails, spoke, met and it was all alright.
Both my parents complained that my book invaded their privacy, but both forgave me. What they think now I am not sure, although they dread undue attention and the judgments of strangers. For all that they may be proud and happy, I have certainly bought more worry into the lives of Robert, a young journalist in the Redford style when they met, and Jenny, in her dreams a sort of Julie Christie playing Holly Golightly (you can see why they object to the imagined descriptions of them at the start of the book).
My mother said she had never really planned to have children; my father said it was one of her reasons for their partnership. They were happy when they first had me and my brother, but our impact was immediate: my mother loved us more than she loved my father, and my father fell away from her. It seems to me now that their marriage was never going to last but it is certain we hastened its demise.
My parents are friends now. The publication of my book is certainly giving them things to talk about. Whatever happens, I am certain that I often had a bad effect on my parents’ relationships, originally involuntarily, but not always. Now I am of the age to have children I wonder if what goes around comes around, what have I set in store for myself? Imagine I marry and have children - and lose most of my wife’s affections to them. Imagine the worry and the shame of not being there, with and for them. The look in their eyes when we meet, after months and years of them living with their mother, knowing nothing but stories and the absence of me?
My brother and I came between my father and his partners, by default but also by demand. A father may not want more children but puts those he has before all others, unless and until they fall out with his new partner. He may rarely see the children and the only person he can talk to about them is his new girlfriend or wife, who, through no or little fault, is part of the problem. Then his less-seen little ones grow into their teens and twenties, and bring all of the troubles of those years. Do you see flashes of your old self, distorted snaps of your own nature, your ex-wife’s?
My brother has always been good, but I ran into and made trouble of various kinds. Did I ever intentionally put a hatchet into any of my father’s relationships? No. But effectively, several times.
And I dealt my mother’s chances of happiness more serious blows. When, after years of raising us alone on our remote hill farm, she met someone who could have made her happy, I was nervous, fretful, jealous, neurotic and overbearing. It’s easy to make excuses for a child of 11, almost distasteful to do otherwise. Psychologically, I screamed blue murder. Many knights in shining armour would rather deal with anything than a child with its hackles up. I was truly sorry when the relationship failed, but again I contributed to its destruction.
We hear a lot about parents’ responsibility for children’s behaviour and perhaps not enough about the other way round. To the extent that we raise damaged children we can expect damaged adults. My family and I were lucky. We are friends, we survived and more, we try to be good. Addressing trouble from one’s early years is common now. My experience has taught me to think about how much I might have to apologise for, as well as what I do not. I didn’t appreciate this until I wrote it all down: I have not seen a shrink.
Horatio Clare is a former researcher and producer on Radio 4’s “Front Row”. His book “Running for the Hills” is published by John Murray.
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