The 1960s were an exciting decade that I watched on television. Driving the children to and from school, to parties and friends, I had to be very careful how much I drank, regardless of the breathalyser. I was a passive smoker of a good deal of cannabis, and once took LSD, completely unaware of the strength of a single dose. This was a disastrous blunder that opened a vent of hell, and confirmed me as a long-standing whisky drinker.
Fay and Bea had taken charge of family life, and Jim and I were happy to follow orders. This was excellent training for all of us, especially the girls. They made the most of school and university, and have enjoyed successful careers in the arts and the BBC. They married happily and have families of their own. From the start I drummed into them that they were as entitled to opportunity and success as any man, and should never allow themselves to be patronised or exploited.
My daughter Fay Ballard.
As it happened, I could have saved my breath; they knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives, and were determined to do it.
Some fathers make good mothers, and I hope I was one of them, though most of the women who know me would say that I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other – in short, the kind of mother, no doubt loving and easy-going, of whom the social services deeply disapprove. The women journalists who have interviewed me over the years always refer to the dust that their gimlet eyes detect in unfrequented corners of my house. I suspect that the sight of a man bringing up apparently happy children (to which they never refer) alerts a reflex of rather old-fashioned alarm. If women aren’t needed to do the dusting, what hope is there left? Perhaps, too, the compulsive cleaning of a family home is an attempt to erase those repressed emotions that threaten to break through into the daylight. The nuclear family, dominated by an overworked mother, is in many ways deeply unnatural, as is marriage itself, part of the huge price we pay to control the male sex.
The absence of a mother was a deep loss for my children, but at least my girls were spared the stress that I noticed between many mothers and their daughters as puberty approached. As a father who collected his children from school, I spent a great deal of time by the school gates, and soon recognised the fierce maternal tension that made adolescence a hell for many of my daughters’ friends. Some mothers simply could not cope with the growing evidence that their daughters were younger, more womanly and more sexually attractive than they were. Sex, I’m glad to say, never worried me; I was far more concerned about what might happen to my daughters in a car rather than in a bed. A few words of friendly advice and the address of the nearest family planning clinic were enough; nature and their innate good sense would do the rest.
Sadly, many mothers refused to accept that their daugh
My daughter Beatrice Ballard.
ters had reached puberty at all. I once collected my daughters from a schoolfriend’s party, the first any of them had attended where boys would be present. Mothers were chatting near their cars, waiting for the party to end, and one of them laughingly described the pitch-black living room, thudding with music, where slumped forms of their precious daughters and the boy guests sprawled on sofas. Then one of the mothers emerged from the house and gestured helplessly at her friends. She was clearly distraught, barely able to walk or speak, and tottered down the garden path towards us. ‘Helen…’ someone called, taking her quivering shoulders. ‘Is Sally with a boy?’
Helen stared at us, as if she had seen the horror of all horrors. At last she spoke: ‘She’s holding his penis…’
The most important person I met in the late 1960s was Claire Walsh, who has been my partner, inspiration and life-companion for forty years. We met at a Michael Moorcock party, when Claire was in her early twenties, and I was struck immediately by her beauty and high intelligence. I often think that I have been extremely lucky during my life to have known closely four beautiful and interesting women – Mary, my daughters, and Claire. Claire is passionate, principled, argumentative and highly loyal, both to me and to her many friends. She has a wide-ranging mind, utterly free of cant, and has been very generous to my children and grandchildren.
Life with Claire has always been interesting – we have often driven together across half of Europe and never once stopped talking. We share a huge number of interests, in painting and architecture, wine, foreign travel, politics (she is keenly left-wing and impatient with my middle-of-theroadism), the cinema and, most important of all, good food. For many years we have eaten out twice a week, and Claire is an expert judge of restaurants, frequently finding a superb new place long before the critics discover it. She is a great reader of newspapers and magazines, has completely mastered the internet and is always supplying me with news stories that she knows will appeal to me. She is a great cook, and over the years has educated my palate. She has very gamely put up with my lack of interest in music and the theatre. Above all, she has been a staunch supporter of my writing, and the best friend that I have had.
When I first met Claire I was dazzled by her great beauty, naturally blonde hair and elegant profile. Sadly, she has suffered more than her share of ill health. Soon after we met, she underwent a major kidney operation at a London hospital, and I remember walking with her down the Charing Cross Road on the day she was discharged, on the way to Foyle’s to buy the ‘book’ of her operation, a medical text of the exact surgical procedure. It is typical of Claire that she took the trouble to write a letter of thanks to the surgeon who invented the procedure, then retired to New Zealand, and received a long and interesting reply from him. Ten years ago she faced the challenge of breast cancer, but fought back bravely, an ordeal that lasted many years. That she triumphed is a tribute to her courage.
Together we have travelled all over Europe and America, to film festivals and premieres, where she has looked after me and kept up my spirits. At the time we met, Claire was working as the publicity manager for a publisher of art books, and she went onto be publicity manager of Gollancz, Michael Joseph and Allen Lane. Her knowledge of publishing, and many of the devious and likeable personalities involved, has been invaluable.
Looking back, I realise that there is scarcely a city, museum or beach in Europe that I don’t associate with Claire. We have spent thousands of the happiest hours with our children (she has a daughter Jennifer) on beaches and under poolside umbrellas, in hotels and restaurants, walking around cathedrals from Chartres to Rome and Seville. Claire is a speed-reader of guidebooks, and always finds some interesting side chapel, or points out the special symbolism of this or that saint in a Van Eyck. She had a Catholic upbringing, and lived in a flat not far from Westminster Cathedral, whose nave was virtually her childhood playground. Whenever we find ourselves in Victoria she casually points out a stone lion or Peabody building where she and her friends played hide-and-seek.
I was so impressed by Claire’s beauty that I made her the centrepiece of two of my ‘advertisements’, which were published in Ambit, Ark and elsewhere in the late 1960s. I was advertising abstract notions largely taken from The Atrocity Exhibition, such as ‘Does the Angle Between Two Walls Have a Happy Ending?’ – a curious question that for some reason preoccupied me at the time. In each of the full-page ads the text was superimposed on a glossy, high-quality photograph, and the intention was to take paid advertisement pages in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. I reasoned that most novels could dispense with almost all their text and reduce themselves to a single evocative slogan. I outlined my proposal in an application to the Arts Council, but they rather solemnly