The significant question from the point of view of the children is: are they being brought up in a stable family of two parents, a stable family of one parent, an extended family, or an unstable family of constantly changing partners? Whenever a divorce settlement is arranged, the 'best interests' of the children have to be considered above all. If the partners are always quarrelling, the courts accept that divorce may be the only solution, but they are very keen to ensure that the children remain in contact with both parents. If, as usually happens, the children live with their mother, the father must be allowed regular access to them. And it must be said that hundreds of thousands of divorced couples make immense efforts, week in and week out, to ensure that the children continue to have a real relationship with both mother and father. The 'weekend dad' is a sad phenomenon, in the sense that he is often grieving that he is not seeing his children more often, and that all he can do is to spend his weekends hanging around with them in the park, or taking them on trips, because he is not part of their home life. Such arrangements can continue for years.
Not all fathers manage to keep in touch with their children after the separation or divorce; some of them drift away, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps with relief. But there exists a strong assumption that fathers should continue to be real fathers to their own children, an assumption which is powerfully upheld by organisations of fathers who believe they are not getting enough access to their children. Being a good dad matters in Britain.
Sometimes, as in Dave's case, the father meets another woman and settles into a relationship with her. In that case, the agreement - expressed or implicit - is that the new partner must be willing to take on part-time childcare of the children of a former relationship. Some step-parents find this quite easy; they are naturally maternal (or paternal) and comfortable at acquiring new members of the family. In Ken's case, since his wife had died, there was no-one to feel resentful and jealous of Stella as she became a full-time mother to Ethan, then aged 3. From Ethan's point of view, he acquired a new mummy, a sister and a brother... and then a baby brother. He was not quite old enough to be able to grieve consciously for his mother, so Stella became his mother - although of course Ken and Stella explained to him as he grew up that his birth mother had died when he was a baby.
Life is not quite so simple for people in Jacky's position. She was familiar with the half-term visits of Holly and Jake to their home in Manchester, and accepted the occasional week when Dave took his children on holiday without her. But when Holly, aged 16, turned up on their doorstep, demanding to stay, she was not delighted. In fact she was against Holly staying permanently with them. Like many stepmothers, she suddenly felt protective of her own children, as though Holly was a threat to them. Only after long discussions among all four of Holly's 'parents' did Jacky agree that perhaps the best solution was for Holly to spend her last two years at school living in Manchester with them. As a busy mother and primary-school teacher, she felt it was a considerable sacrifice to take on Holly as well.
These complicated extended families are common in Britain. Although they can be confusing for all concerned, some children find it a relief to be able to move from one family to another when they are teenagers, especially if both sets of parents are always careful not to criticise the other set. And smaller children often act as a powerful bond for troubled adolescents who can pour out all their anxieties to their little half-brothers and sisters.
By 'mixed marriages' I mean marriages or partner relationships between parents of different ethnic groups. Since, as I explained in the first chapter, it is difficult to know when an individual is to be defined as 'ethnic', the term is not very useful. Nonetheless, the government, for statistical purposes when analysing the population, divides us into these groups. Basically, in Britain, they are 'White', 'Asian' and 'Black'. Any children with parents from different groups are described as 'mixed-race'. (A child of white British and white Polish parents would not be described as mixed-race.)
In my examples of British families today, Ken and his Nigerian wife had a baby, Ethan, in 1993, while Jonas and Stephanie have had a mixed-race baby, Denise, in 2008. Ethan and Denise are typical in today's Britain. They are among those one in nine children growing up in British families who are mixed-race; and the evidence is that these mixtures will get ever more mixed. Already nearly half the black men of Caribbean origin have a white partner, and about a third of black Caribbean women. Black Africans are also rapidly assimilating to the British population. Sociologists point out that the notion of 'race' is going to mean less and less to contemporary children who go to school with children of different ethnicities, and take them for granted.
Kate and Tariq are a more unusual couple. Statistically, the groups who do not yet assimilate so easily are those of Pakistan and Bangladesh origin who are strongly aware of their Muslim culture, and who tend to live with other Pakistanis or Bangladeshis away from the mixed areas of our cities. However, inter-ethnic marriages between Asians and others, particularly non-Muslim Asians, do occur and are occurring more frequently.
Fifteen years ago, mixed-race marriages were a subject for worry and concern; articles appeared in newspapers and magazines discussing the possible prejudices and bitterness from either side. Now such relationships are so common that nobody is astonished or taken aback by a couple walking down a street, one white, the other black. Russians have sometimes suggested to me that mixed-race relationships should be a matter of anger or mourning by white British people who are watching their 'own' culture disappear as other races take over. As someone who was born into a Britain where black people were extremely rare, and who has watched the whole phenomenon of the immigration of blacks and Asians into my country and their gradual assimilation over two or three generations, I think this is huge misunderstanding of what is going on in my country - and what has always gone on.
First, we have always had immigrants and always absorbed them. A hundred years ago thousands of Jews, fleeing pogroms in Russia landed up in London. A century later their greatgrandchildren are dispersed throughout the population. The population is not less 'British'.
Second, cultures are always changing. Farming traditions in Britain up to the outbreak of the second world war included the use of horses (although tractors were being introduced). Horses no longer work on farms. I do not think that anger or mourning are the right reaction, although I might feel sad that picturesque horses are no longer posing in fields - but that is sentimentality. If I were asked what is the biggest change in the two decades, I would say nothing about Black British, White British, Asian British, but point to the computers on every desk, in every schoolroom, and to the way in which they have changed our work, our entertainment and our shopping habits.
Thirdly, generations change. In the seventies our immigrant populations were still seen as 'exotic', 'obtrusive', 'troublemakers'. Laws against inciting racial hatred were passed, but proved not to be enough to prevent race riots in the early 1980s. Since then, slowly but steadily, generations of primary school children have grown up in playgrounds where they take for granted the other ethnic groups around them. These children grow into adults, and in their turn pass on to their children what they have come to accept as normal.