(a long post originally blogged on 16th july last year)
If I ever wrote with feeling about my parents' divorce and the battle for my custody I would do so from my own point of view as a bewildered child, or as my Imaginary Friend,. But that would a near novel-length epic.
It's much quicker, if less emotionally affecting, to describe everything from an adult's viewpoint, being as objective as I can be. But the description is bound to be one sided, because, while my father never stopped talking about it for the rest of his life, my mother blanked everything out as soon as it happened; I'm pretty sure she had a nervous breakdown, never treated or even diagnosed.
Of course, I tried to find out more of the truth from the few other wittnesses I knew. But they're all dead, now.
My father kidnapped me from my mother when I was six years old and took me firstly on holiday to a farm in Somerset. My little sister was considered too young to kidnap, and anyway a girl. My father's sister, M, who he felt close to, was who really looked after me. I loved her and she helped me feel very happy.
My mother, helped I think by Father Dennis, the fat priest who had recently converted her to Catholicism, approached a lawyer. She sent a telegram to my day demanding the restoration of "Conjugal rights" ie marital sex. As, according to my dad, she had been refusing conjugal rights for some time, this can be assumed to have been a legal manoevre.
My father - as well as having ambitions to write a philisophical book about the future of Liberalism in the 20th century: first title Creative Man in the Machine Age - as as this, he was a Surveyor, Auctioneer and Estate Agent. That year, he bought a run-down country estate, and we (me, him, my aunt) went to live in a flat above the stables while he supervised the conversion of the manor house into several units etc...
I went to a new school. The estate's gardens were beautiful. The sun seemed always to shine. One day I might upload a photograph to show you. I felt good, and as far as I can remember, I never missed my mother. She came to see once, but she was so miserable.
Meanwhile, unbeknown to me, the Battle for little Alec was raging - first in solicitor's letters and then in the courts. My dad lost in the first court, but appealed. And in the Appeal Court, the judges split 1-1, with the third (Lord Denning, no less. He only died a few years ago) giving the judgement of Solomon.
In the first court (records confidential and unpublished) my father lined up several neighbours to testify what a bad mother my mum was (years later, one did appologise to her): She didn't let me have any friends, she seemed very distant from me - honestly, I don't know what they said.
The most sensational aspect of the story was the role of Father Dennis, who my father maintained had provocatively interfered in the marriage. Certainly, his relationship with my mum seems to have been odd. One they arranged to meet in the women's underwear deparment of Harvey Nicholls (or that's what my dad anyone who cared to listen, for the neext 40 years).
He had found (stolen?) a bundle of letters the good Father had written to my mum, including some poems - sonnets he had written in praise of my mum. Love poems? I really think they were Platonic. He was a philosopher, too. A published philosopher, unlike my dad.
I believe these poems could have won him my custody. Certainly they would have got the Catholic Priest into a lot of trouble. But, instead, my father did a deal. In order for them not to be produced in court, he got a promise from my mother - who, now a Catholic convert, believed marriage was insoluble - to grant him a divorce.
He wanted to marry M.... T.... Of course, six-year-old Alec didn't know about her. As far as I knew, (when I was told anything) the court battle was about who was going to look after me. And he kept telling me it was going to be him.
But he lost the case, appealed - and the good judge Denning decided I should be brought up by my mother, but as a Protestant. No one, including myself, could change my religion until my 21st birthday - without permission of the court.
When I heard I had to go back to my mother, I got very ill. It was Christmas Day. I had to be rushed to hospital. I had double pneumonia, my life probably saved my antiobiotics, only just invented. And a writ-server stalked the hospital lookiong for my dad who was sleeping in my private room.
Eventually the writ was delivered, I was returned to my mum. But I didn't want to live with her. Whether it was my father and aunt's propaganda that had cause me to feel this way, I'll never know.