The choppy sea of family life

This is a lovely book. Judy Golding writes of her father —indeed of both her parents — with candour, humour and great insight and perception

This is a lovely book. Judy Golding writes of her father —indeed of both her parents — with candour, humour and great insight and perception. More than that, here is an exemplary memoir of childhood, not remorselessly chronological, but drawing on the jumbled past to give an account of what it was like to be a child in an unusual family.

She describes an intense marriage, which was devoted and intermittently stormy. She sees herself and her brother David as always taking second place, especially as far as their mother was concerned. William Golding had dumped his longstanding girlfriend the moment he met Ann, a beautiful, vibrant and strong personality, who was passionate about him all her life, as well as being exasperated by him on occasion.

Judy writes of her mother with tact and delicacy, but it is clear that her relationship with her father was for her the crucial one: ‘I didn’t hate her. I simply knew I couldn’t rely on her, because she wasn’t very interested.’ And, indeed, one reads with surprise that Judy used to be put on a bus alone, aged five, to make the hour-and-a-half journey to her grandparents in Marlborough, a casual approach to parenting that would have the social services taking an interest today.

But it wasn’t all like that. This was a tightly knit family, but one for which circumstances changed dramatically. Life with a father who was an impecunious schoolteacher became, by the time Judy was in her teens, life with a novelist whose burgeoning fame brought journalists, television crews and a more cushioned lifestyle.