6

Married With Kids

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain
Matthew Arnold

When I was ten years old I thought it would be a funny thing to call
my mum a lice-ridden whore. It was funny, I thought, because it
was sort of surreal, a bit over the top, coming from a ten-year-old
kid, especially as profanities of any kind were a capital offence in
our house. Only a couple of years previously I had been smacked
and sent to bed for having said hell, and before that given a proper
beating for having stood at the top of the stairs with a sheet over my
head going, Whoooooo, whoooo, Im the Holy Ghost.
Anyway, I knew, as I chuckled to myself about the possibility of
calling Mum a lice-ridden whore, that it wouldnt be funny at all if
I was, say, sixteen, whereas it would have been much funnier if I
had said it to her when I was five, or better still a baby, perhaps as
my very first words and I privately reproached my younger self for
not having done so. And then, having conceived of this act, I found
it impossible to desist from carrying it out. This is a problem I still
have today. Something occurs in my mind which strikes me as
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absurd, or ludicrous, or simply funny, and I cannot resist saying it,

or writing it down. I forget that a lot of other people will certainly
not find it funny, and may indeed be offended. Sometimes, too, I
dont spend long enough considering the feelings of the intended
subject of whatever it is that has jumped unbidden into my mind. I
blithely assume theyll get the joke. Or maybe that they wont get
the joke but it wont matter because its still a joke and I know its a
joke and thats that. I cant remember who it was who said that
jokes are the last refuge of the bourgeoisie some grim and overvalued post-Marxist like Gramsci, probably, or maybe Adorno. I
understand that point, but I do not agree with it. I think the proletariat should be allowed jokes too. We all need a refuge. But I do not
think for long enough sometimes, that is true.
So, having chosen the appropriate moment, I called my mum a
lice-ridden whore and she beat the shit out of me with a stick. Fair
enough. I have no great objection to that, and had none even as I
was lying on the carpet trying to fend off the blows of the cane,
with Skipper capering around and barking and yelping in alarm and
attempting to position himself between me and Mum, ever the
principled conscientious objector. Ah well, she didnt get the joke,
I thought to myself it was always going to be a close call, that one,
the lice-ridden whore thing. But better to murder an infant in the
cradle than nurse an unacted desire, or something. Actually,
William Blake meant the opposite of that when he wrote it, but I
have chosen to interpret his line in a very literal and self-serving
sense.
The canes were kept in a corner of the kitchen, by the fridge. I
think they had previously been used for supporting broad beans.
You bind them into a kind of pyramid and the beans wrap themselves around, all the way up to the top if you do it right. Im trying
to grow some now, so we shall see. Anyway, I broke all the canes in
half one time when my parents were out, a sort of soft-left juvenile
storming of the Bastille or burning of the Winter Palace but this
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was a mistake, as the blows were far more injurious when administered with a shorter shaft of wood, the energy from my mums arm
less dissipated, I suppose. More direct.
It was always my mum who administered the beatings, and they
were very few and far between, probably a lot less frequent than I
really deserved. All my friends were smacked or beaten by their
parents; it was the norm, for better or for worse. I was unusual in
that my dad never got involved, or at least did so only once. My
mother was quick to rise to temper and easily goaded, whilst my
dad was placid and imperturbable. But I think there was probably
also an ideological difference between the two of them as well over
this issue, at least by the 1970s when people were beginning to
question the morality and indeed the efficacy of corporal
punishment.
As I mentioned, my dad hit me only once. It was when I was
about fourteen. I had been involved in some row with my mother,
almost certainly my fault, maybe goading her and giving her lip,
while my dad sat there in the armchair trying to watch the Nine
OClock News with Kenneth Kendall on the BBC. Eventually she
started screaming at him, Why dont you do something, Ned? Why
dont you impose some discipline upon this boy? You just sit there
and do absolutely nothing. What do you want me to do? he asked,
and my mother screamed back, utterly exasperated, HIT HIM!
And so he got up slowly from his chair with a grim expression and
smacked me in the mouth with the back of his hand. My mother,
still infuriated, stormed out of the house, shouting about how
useless he was. I put my hand to my lips and found blood, and a
tooth partly dislodged; suffused with shock and appalled self-righteousness, I gaped at my dad and said to him, Youve knocked one
of my teeth out! How could you do that? And before he could reply
I stormed out of the house too, crying. I hung out at the shops,
smoked a couple of cigarettes Id ponced off one of the kids down
there those awful menthol-flavoured Consulate things which
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were all the rage amongst us under-sixteens, until the cool kids
discovered the utterly ridiculous More brand and then, not
much later, made my way home. My dad was still in his chair, but
he stood up when I came in glaring at him with the bitter rectitude
of the victim. He looked forlorn and beaten and distraught. He
said, Im sorry. Im sorry. But what am I to do, Rod? I cant win
either way. He wasnt used to hitting me, he didnt know how hard
to hit, or where, so it wouldnt cause too much damage. Thats why
hed knocked one of my teeth out, I realised. I said, Thats OK, and
sat down to watch TV with him, waggling the dislodged tooth every
so often in a rather theatrical manner. My mum came home later,
still wrapped up in her fury. God knows where shed been.
I was the cause of most of the discord in our home, I would
reckon. When there were rows or at least those rows to which I
was privy it was usually about something Id been up to. But there
were not many rows, all things considered, and not much in the
way of discord. I remember some non-Rod row once when my dad
stayed sitting in his armchair, reading the Evening Gazette, refusing
to rise to the bait, my mum barking away at him and hurling contumely and insults and imprecations until she suddenly left the living
room and disappeared into the kitchen. She emerged a few
moments later bearing a washing-up bowl full of water, which she
threw over my fathers head as he sat there in his chair. He didnt
shift an inch, he just shook the paper a couple of times and went
right on reading the Gazette. I was actually ROFL, before ROFL had
been invented: rolling on the floor with laughter. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen, it was better than Cleese pretending to be
Hitler in front of those German guests. The incident had no seriousness or import buried within it, so far as I could tell, despite my
mothers genuine anger.
Were there other, more private, rows? Was the washing-upbowl thing an expression of deeply suppressed rage and dissatisfaction? Were there divisions between their respective aspirations,
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nagging doubts about their relationship, their marriage? Were

there infidelities, or even the distant prospect of infidelities, or just
yearnings to get the fuck away? Was the word divorce ever
mentioned, perhaps in the heat of an argument? I dont think so. I
dont know for sure, but I dont think so. My mum was a confiding
sort, so I think Id have found out from her if she was terribly
unhappy, or even a little bit unhappy. But no they rubbed along,
as they say. They seemed to love one another, and were satisfied
with what they had. In eighteen years I remember not a single argument about the division of household labour; it was shared, more
or less equitably. There seemed to be no sexual jealousy, either, or
at least none was shown in front of me. There did not seem to be
much of a romance going on, Ill admit, and this when I was older
disquieted me a little, the apparent lack of passion, the quiescence, the detumescence. As an adolescent I felt that this was
settling for less than they were worth. But they seemed instead
satisfied and content. Not resigned, mind you, just settled, mutually supportive an efficient and happy unit.
I may be wrong, of course, and beneath the surface awful stuff
may have been bubbling away which they skilfully shielded from
me but I dont think so. It was what they had, for better or for
worse, and they settled for it. Was this because the alternative,
separation, was still socially unacceptable? Or economically not
viable? Perhaps they were not of the temperament for affairs; or
maybe the whole business was unthinkable, for all the reasons
quoted above and more besides, just something quite beyond the
pale, something that was simply de facto wrong. I dont think the
thought of it ever occurred, and if it did, they took it to the grave
with them.
On the whole, that generation did not get divorced. I mean,
obviously, some did. I remember calling round at my best friend
Tims house in Guisborough sometime in 76 and there being this
weird atmosphere in the place, Tim looking strange and being
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evasive and uncommunicative, something shadowy taking place

off-camera, the air in the rooms stretched out and gravid, and me
bouncing around incongruously in my usual Tiggerish manner,
sort of like Zebedee at a funeral. Eventually a trained observer,
remember I sensed something was up, and asked Tim what it was.
Mum and Dad are getting a divorce, he said quietly. I cannot tell
you how shocking that sounded, as if he had announced a death.
Which in a way he had, I suppose. This divorce, the strangeness of
it, the upheaval, the mutual acrimony, became a large part of my
life for the next couple of years, not least because of my anxieties
about how to behave towards the estranged couple, both of whom
I saw regularly and adored. I knew too, of course, even in my adolescent solipsism, that the experience was rather more impinging for
Tim than it was for me: it was scarring for him. He does not look
back on mid-adolescence with indulgent fondness, with misted
nostalgia, with happiness, as I do. He would rather not talk about
the time. He would rather it had not happened. And back there in
that familiar front room of his house in Church Square he had
about him a reticence I had not seen before. It wasnt simply that
this was an awful time for him, with his parents splitting up. There
was something about it that was desperately shaming, too. He was
embarrassed, as well as strung out on the misery of the business.
But Tims parents were the only people I knew at that time who
got divorced, and by and large divorcees were regarded with grave
suspicion, and especially women divorcees. In fact, if you look at
the divorce stats for the UK, Tims mum and dad were, as ever,
being terribly au courant; they were just slightly ahead of the game.
The figures show a gradual and at times almost indiscernible rise
across the last 150 years, with a sharp spike in the immediate postwar years (following a loosening of the laws allowing divorce in
1937) and then a huge increase in the mid-seventies, following the
1971 Divorce Reform Act and subsequent amendments. In 1970
fewer than 60,000 people divorced; by 1981 the figure had risen to
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150,000, and it kept on rising until about 1986. It kept on rising

even as the numbers of people getting married reduced year after
year. Just recently it has begun to rise again, after a brief and gradual downturn. The divorce rate today is about 42 per cent of all
marriages, which suggests that it is still, rather wonderfully, in the
minority; however, fewer couples marry today than at any time
since 1862. The institution is squeezed from both ends, in other
words. People do not seem to have so much faith in it any more.
The divorce rate has risen 170-fold over the last hundred years, and
fewer of us are marrying. In 2010, the last figures I could find,
almost half of all children born in the UK were born out of wedlock.
And, as we know, non-married relationships do not last as long, on
average, as married relationships (for which the average, since you
asked, is just under twelve years).
This is a huge shift, and little discussed. The Roman Catholic
right bangs on about it every so often, when the mood takes them,
but nobody pays very much attention, because it is just the leftfooters inflicting God on us, interceding in our beholden right to
do what the hell we want. The political mainstream these days is
very clear: no stigma should attach to divorce or to those who have
been divorced after all, we have no fault divorces, in which it is
OK for both sides simply to agree that theyve given up the ghost.
Or just one side, for that matter, regardless of what the other
spouse might think. And certainly we are all clear that there is no
difference in status between a family in which the two adults are
married and one in which they have decided just to live together,
mkay, dont see the point of marriage, just a piece of paper isnt it,
in the end, etc. But we kid ourselves a little, because these latter
relationships do not last as long, and when there are children
involved, the little bastards, thats a problem, isnt it?
It certainly seems to be a problem, when you talk to the people
involved, especially the poorest people. I spent a couple of days
standing outside the Job Centre in Middlesbrough, interviewing
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everyone who came out for a piece on unemployment I was writing

for the Sunday Times magazine. The stories were all the same shit
jobs or no jobs, agency jobs paying fuck-all, or just sign on the dole.
Casual work, short-term contracts paying the minimum wage or
less than the minimum wage for a two-day week, a fugue of hopelessness. But there was one other thing that stood out the most
remarkable fact of all in a way, even though it was theoretically
nothing to do with the article I was writing. I suppose I must have
interviewed a hundred people, and every one, EVERY SINGLE
ONE, was either the product of a broken home i.e. their parents
had split up or had kids but was separated from their original
partner. Every one!
I realise that this is not a scientific analysis. I know that it was
not a carefully weighted sample, just whoever I could get to speak
to me (and some people, of course, told me to fuck off back to
London). But this experience had not made them happy; it had
made them very unhappy, in most cases and in almost all cases it
had either financially crippled them or made it virtually impossible
for them to look further afield for work. One way or another, as a
consequence of their living arrangements, they were fucked.
Emotionally, financially. The younger ones talked about the problems theyd had as a consequence of their parents being split up,
and the succession of strange men, or women, hanging around the
house whom they now had to try to get along with, and in general
did not like terribly much. And the older ones I mean sort of
around twenty-one and over talked about how they couldnt get
regular work because they had to look after their child (the women),
or how they couldnt afford maintenance for their kids, who they
hardly ever saw (the men). None of them said, I had a child with
my girlfriend when we were both seventeen and now weve split up.
Let me tell you, its absolutely terrific. Im really delighted both
with the lifestyle choices we made and the ease with which society
allowed us both to have a kid and then to leave it in the fucking
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lurch. None of them said that, if my shorthand is to be believed. In

every case that I came across, they either regretted their situation
but, of course, regretted it as if it had been imposed on them by
an outside agency and was really nothing to do with them (just like
the other big problem, the drinking) or, if they were the offspring
of a broken home, they blamed one or the other of their parents.
Incidentally, the majority of people I spoke to scored double top:
came from a broken home and were also themselves responsible
for a subsequent broken home. Yowser.
Why did they do it, then? Why have the kids in the first place?
And having done so, why split up? What was the point of all that?
Was it simply ineluctable, just something that you did, because
everybody else did it? Have some kids right now, cant feed them,
but never mind; in any case Ill clear off after a year or two.
Something to which they gave not a moments thought? Or just
something they were into for a while and then, mysteriously,
suddenly were not? Did the women have kids young because they
could think of nothing better to do, and the men connived in it
because, hell, thats what you do, give em the kids if it makes em
happy? Was it as the right insists the benefits that are on offer
once youve dropped a bairn? I dont think so or at least, I dont
think that this is the crucial point, even if it helps facilitate what is,
in the end, a bad decision. In a way it is more just a case of how
things are: having a kid at a young age is OK even if you cant
support it weve got a right to have kids come what may, everyones agreed on that. And breaking up after a year is OK too,
because everyones agreed its usually for the best. If the two of you
arent getting along, just make a fresh start, the kidll be OK
everyones agreed that everything will work out fine. Except when
youre poor, it doesnt work out fine. It doesnt usually work out fine
if youre not poor, either. But it definitely doesnt work out fine
when youre down at the bottom. Certainly not for the kids of
which more later. But not for the parents either, in the end.
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I did not put those questions I asked in that last paragraph

directly to the out-of-work Middlesbrough people and their bastard
offspring, so I have no way of knowing the answers. But I am
divorced too. I deserted my children for my own personal happiness: it is as simple as that, regardless if I sometimes reassure
myself with caveats, with a rationale which I have constructed for
myself out of cardboard or tinplate over the years.
I do not feel much better about the business knowing that because
maybe 80 per cent of their friends are from broken families too, or
because their entire extended family is shot through with divorces,
they at least dont need to feel abnormal. I think that what I did was
selfish, no matter how happy I am now, or how much I love my
wife, with whom Ive been for ten years and who has been wonderful with my two sons. It was rough on my ex-wife, obviously who
would point out, with some justification, that it is harder for a
woman in her forties (and with kids), as she then was, to find a new
and lasting relationship than it is for a man. Beyond that, though,
it was a betrayal of my boys. Having made the decision to have children, I should have stuck with it. But I didnt; my personal happiness seemed to count for more than anything else.
And when it came to making that decision, everything said go,
its your right, fill your boots. Society had no real opprobrium to
expend, although, in fairness, the Daily Mail managed to find
some. But in general, I could explain that I wasnt entirely happy in
my relationship, that she had her faults too, yknow, mkay, that it
was time to get the hell out. And so it became another no-fault
divorce.
And, once the lawyers had gotten involved, wrong on an epic
number of levels. The first thing that went was the house I had
bought; that went to my ex, rightly enough. Then there was the
money from my dads house, the one he lived in until he died, the
last house my mum and dad lived in together, their poshest house:
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180,000, virtually all swallowed up on legal fees. What a staggering and immoral waste of money. It would have been better, it
would have been more worthwhile, if I had spent the entire 180k
on crack cocaine. I mean, fuck it would at least have gone up in a
sort of smoke that was momentarily pleasurable. Instead it was frittered away on that most fantastically repulsive of modern luxuries
divorce lawyers. Oh, those lucky lawyers. You think of what it cost
my mum and dad to build up to having a house like that, the countless years of scrimping and saving and slogging away. All gone, in
virtually a moment, tossed off as if it were nothing. And it is not the
money, per se, that I am grieving about here: it is what that money
represented to my mother and father. When my father died, I took
possession of the old wooden attach case in which he kept his
personal effects. These included my parents savings books, dating
back to 1953, money they were putting by so they could give their
son a good wallop of cash when they died, fift y years of scrupulous
and painstaking accounting. Well, thats what I did with it. Cheers,
Mum, Dad.
And its become a familiar story, despite those online offers of
a quickie divorce for 37. We may have got rid of our manufacturing
industry over the last three decades, but the gleeful parasitism of
the lawyers, fuelled by our own stupidity, has taken up the slack;
the number of solicitors has risen tenfold in the last twenty years,
and divorce has been one of their most lucrative sidelines.
And theres another point. The loosening of the divorce laws,
and the swift removal of stigma from those who have been divorced,
came from the top down. It was designed to enable the more affluent in society to continue to pursue that most compulsive of post1960 pastimes, serial monogamy. Presented as a great blow for
modernity against the vicissitudes of the Church, bringing in a new
era of freedom and self-determination, the 1971 Divorce Reform
Act was in truth enabling only to those who could afford to divorce
which is why, in the early years, its effects were largely confined
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to the middle classes. If you are affluent enough, you can split up
the family home and make sure the kids still have the sort of material lifestyle they enjoyed when the family was together: the money
stretches. Sure, there is still, often enough, the emotional disruption, the acrimony, and the kids not really understanding what the
fuck is going on but at least they are provided for financially.
There is no such provision for those further down the social scale:
the children are almost always immediately subjected to financial
privation, no matter how assiduously the CSA badgers the departed
father for his twenty-quid-a-week maintenance. The mother is
immediately worse off, and is usually sent scuttling back into the
kitchen, unable to afford the cost of childcare, which would enable
her to work. Like so much socially liberal legislation presented to
the electorate as a wonderful means of acquiring those most liberal
of things, freedom and equality, divorce reform benefited only the
well-off, by and large. The working class bought into it, and ended
up broke. In truth, it was legislation designed to enable the affluent
to fuck around with impunity (no fault, remember!), and hang the
rest.
Hang the kids. Children from broken homes make up 80 per
cent of the population of Britains psychiatric units. Various studies, from mainland Europe and here in the UK, suggest that children with only one parent suffer twice the incidence of psychiatric
illness, suicide attempts and alcohol abuse. They also suffer lower
self-esteem, are more likely to engage in sexual activity at a younger
age, and are far more likely to use illegal drugs. They are also more
likely to be sexually abused, they score significantly lower on intelligence tests, are more disruptive at school and show higher levels
of aggression. They are also more likely to end up unemployed or
in less well-paid jobs. Whoever the 1971 Divorce Reform Act was
brought in to enable, it was certainly not the children. It was not
the children, and it was not the poor. And with the exception of
those women who were able at last to get the hell out of physically
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abusive relationships far and away the most beneficial consequence of the Act it was not the vulnerable.
Wheres the glamour, though, in staying married? Wheres the
glamour in resisting temptation? From the early 1960s onwards,
high-end culture extolled the virtues of sexual transgression adultery, divorce as being synonymous with freedom. John Updikes
novel Couples, published in that most fractious and infantile of
years, 1968, was perhaps the first to explore the ramifications of the
post-Pill paradise, all these zingy new freedoms, through the adulteries of ten fairly-well-to-do Massachusetts married couples, and
in particular the short but well-hung serial adulterer Piet Hanema.
Hanema: anima. The man is life itself, avidly fucking his way
through the female population of the fictional town of Tarbox. His
only transgression, in the eyes of the other couples, is to make his
adultery, and subsequent divorce, public. Unconfined sex has
become a sort of church, in Couples, at which the youngish middle
classes each week kneel and pray. An agreeable replacement for the
real church, which in the novel burns to the ground. Conflicted and
prescient, Updike was himself a gently wavering Episcopalian and
student of theology who nonetheless was not averse to a bit of sideline shagging, here and there. There is something extremely attractive in the decadent lifestyles of the affluent white-collar monkeys
in Couples, their beautiful and spacious timber-framed New England
homes and uproarious parties, the kids parked with childminders
or just left to their own devices.
Couples certainly had its impact upon me when I was sixteen. But
from Updike, via Roth and Barth and Amis and Bradbury and virtually every serious novelist, and playwrights like Ayckbourn, you get
the message: this is where life is, in these transgressions, in this
clamorous excitement. This is what we are here for. And in the
background the fugue of idiocy, the moronic inferno, of celebrity
fuckstories, who they are fucking and for how long they are fucking
before moving on and fucking someone else. Why do they do it?
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the late columnist Simon Hoggart once asked rhetorically, of the

sleb marriages which last three days and the endless, indefatigable,
gruesomely detailed infidelities. Because they can. And so,
because this is a meritocratic world, can the rest of us; because
were worth it.
The alternative, I suppose, is to be caught sitting in your
armchair watching Kenneth Kendall on the TV and having a washing-up bowl of water poured over your head by your wife, who is no
longer the minxy life model from Camberwell Art College you met
in those still-austere days of 1952. Wheres the glamour in that, etc.
Should they have divorced, my mother and father? Not because
they were unhappy, or the relationship was abusive in any way;
simply because, hell, theres a world out there, and its surely time
to move on. So many things to see, so many people to do. But that
new, burgeoning culture did not speak to them the way it speaks to
us now. They were still marooned in that boring time of responsibility and propriety. Thank Christ.
The counter-argument is smooth and difficult to assail. Why
deny people the right to escape from marriages in which they
were unhappy? Sure, why would you, without dragging poor God
into the question, and those vows you made to what is widely
perceived by our masters to be a wholly fictional being and of
irrelevance. But even allowing this, it rather depends upon your
definition of unhappy: whether it is a grinding, unrelieved misery
which harms you and everyone around you, or just the sort of
existential dissatisfaction you feel when you watch an advert on
TV and compare it favourably with your own life. Or you have met
someone else and really quite fancy her, if youre honest. Phew,
what a scorcher.
And then, the argument goes, onwards and slightly deeper
that the single-unit, monogamous nuclear family was an economic
construct designed to facilitate the Industrial Revolution, and that
it may have outgrown its usefulness, now we no longer have any
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industry and women are not expected to confine themselves to the

home. Well, maybe. Maybe thats right. In which case, design some
sort of system which might reasonably replace the nuclear family,
for the benefit of all rather than just the affluent. For the benefit of
the children.
The notion of romantic love was a construct of balladeers in
thirteenth-century France, much as it is still the mind-numbing
staple of balladeers today. Beyond that, sexual relations were a
thing of pragmatism and organisation, a sort of historic, tripartite
compromise between what our respective genes told us to do, and
what society, or God, wanted us to do, and what made economic
sense. That self-fulfilment stuff was well down the agenda. But
there was a happiness in this arrangement, I suspect. Today,
marriage is entered into too lightly, and cast off too easily.
My dad sort of dissolved when my mum died. He had passed out
in the consultancy room at Middlesbrough General Hospital, just
slumped to the floor, when she was first diagnosed back in 74
and then eleven years later, when she died, did the sort of strungout and medium-term equivalent. He took little pleasure in stuff,
he existed, he went from day to day. He was there, for a while. He
said to me once, shortly after Mum had died, that at night, when he
went to bed, he would settle down and then suddenly be awoken by
the feeling of the bed going down on the other side, this distinct
shifting he felt the weight of my mum getting into bed with him.
He felt it utterly, unarguably. It happened. It was real. He said this
to me just this one time, looking for an explanation, hoping that I
might be able to explain it away somehow. What is it thats happening up there at night? Is it her? How can it be? He was the least
superstitious and sentimental of men, the least credulous. When
he died I found photographs of my mum in his otherwise empty
bedside drawer; smiling standing by some roses; another on a boat
in Scotland with him, their hair blown askew by the wind from the
loch; and then a third, standing in her smartest stuff, surrounded
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by snow, outside the front door of our house in Middlesbrough,

Christmas Day 1976.
Maybe they were just lucky, to have had that. And then again,
maybe longevity tends to make that happen.

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