My parents loved each other so much there was none left for me: The daughter of author William Golding on why sometimes a marriage can be TOO strong



William, the author of Lord Of The Flies, and his wife Ann were so deeply in love with each other that their children felt pushed to one side. His daughter Judy describes how this has left her with a lifelong feeling of rejection . . .

Lack of love: Judy Golding

My brother David and I loved being told stories, and my father’s tales were spell- binding. He would take you away somewhere else, to some different, vivid world.

One story was about my parents’ meeting - our own personal creation myth. It was a different world, even though it was about our parents. It developed as we grew older and in a sense it continued after their death as I learned to understand them more.



The story begins in April 1939, on the brink of World War II. Two young people meet at a Left-wing group in London. He is 27, gifted, lively, very masculine. She is a year younger, strikingly beautiful, witty, determined. They fall in love - if not at first sight, then certainly, they say, in the first half-hour.

For a while, strangely, the London turmoil around them goes away. They feel almost as if they are alone together. They look at each other and see certainty.



Each of them becomes a brilliant mirror reflecting love, admiration, warmth and, above all, an exuberant sense of possibilities. They know they will never be bored. The simple moments of life - eating, sleeping - suddenly take on a gorgeous quality.

Greyness ebbs away. Sorrows weaken - her father’s death from cancer, her brother killed in Spain. He thinks: ‘Maybe I’m not a failure. Who knows, if she believes in me . . .’

There are some feelings of guilt - they are engaged to others - but they know there isn’t any question. This sudden and total commitment is greeted by friends with scepticism, even cynicism. They are a famously flighty pair. No one expects it to last, but then in 1939 nothing was expected to last.

On September 3 war is declared, and on September 30 they marry. It was, they say, obvious. No proposal, no engagement ring. No fuss, no dressing up. They meet with a few friends at Maidstone register office and then go to the pub. For the next half-century and more, they are the most important people in the world to each other. And so they lived happily ever after. Well, almost.

The trouble was that the mirror soon had to include the two of us. As a result, it didn’t work quite as well. And my parents’ absorption in each other kept my older brother, David, and me out of their gaze, out of focus. It took me years to recognise this fact - I thought it was normal. For as long as I can remember, I have known that my life was not as vivid, not as central, not nearly as important as that of my parents.



My brother David was born in 1940, a few months before my father went into the Navy. For the next five years, David and my mother were together, with my father merely an intermittent visitor - often an exciting one in the eyes of his son, but not always benign.

My father records occasions when his competitive nature and intense need to be with my mother - to have her whole attention - made him harsh to his son.



His account of these occasions is full of bitter self-reproach, but also a helpless self-recognition - and the unsparingness of the professional writer. David was born without a heel on one foot. So, while my father was away at sea, my mother took their son to hospital appointments, did exercises with him, managed his special shoes and splints. War made this extremely difficult, but she was determined. And successful - my father always said she had given David a foot.

Family divided: William and Ann Golding on holiday with their children Judy and David in the Forties

But the process reinforced the links between my brother and mother. Handsomely as my father paid tribute to her dedication, I think he was also jealous. On one occasion, on leave from the war and determined to have my mother’s undivided attention, my father shut his four-year-old son in his bedroom, where he became hysterical and distressed. It was my grandmother, not my mother, who released him. This is by my father’s own account.



I can’t claim to know about these events directly, but I did see other examples as we grew up, times when I could see resentment in my father towards his son. And I could see my mother caught between them, much as later I saw my father caught between my mother and me. I arrived in July 1945, at the very end of the war - a round, white-haired baby, mostly happy, but oddly prone to scream the place down at night, a prey to terror and boredom, a combination my father understood.





'It was as if our parents were the stars and we were the supporting actors in their life together'

My mother did not. She still talked to me in her 80s of her anger at those broken nights. She told me several times that if I had been their first child they would not have had another: ‘We were too tired,’ she said. I felt greatly ashamed, even at the time, but I could not conquer the fears that leapt to life. I screamed and screamed.



Eventually, my longed for and exhausted father would appear. With exemplary patience, he would try to calm me, amuse me or cajole me back to sleep. As far as I can gather, this went on night after night. My brother says it was clear to him as a six or seven-year-old that my parents felt I was to blame - something I certainly felt as well.



As a parent and grandparent myself, I understand the tiredness, but I think the intensity of blame is unusual. We lived in Salisbury, where my father taught at the local boys’ school. At first, my mother’s many talents were more obvious than his. She dressed beautifully, making clothes defiantly from expensive fabrics and complex patterns, despite the austerity of the postwar years. A talented actor, she belonged to several amateur groups. Meanwhile, my father was teaching full-time, running several school societies and classes for the Workers’ Educational Association and, above all, trying to write.



He practised diligently, a habit he learned from his other great pursuit - playing the piano. He wrote short accounts of walks, expeditions, sailing holidays. He attempted novels, but these seemed hopeless - depressingly, even he didn’t value them. They were, he said later, other people’s novels. My mother tried to encourage him, but she was always truthful - one of her great qualities. He needed reassurance from her and in a way it was a bargain: the relationship was based on it and therefore rock solid.



Story of success: A shot from the 1963 film version of Lord of the Flies based on the novel by William Golding

This was partly why they needed freedom from their children - it gave them the ability to reflect back the confident, affectionate picture the other one needed. As they were so busy, most weekends I was sent to Marlborough to stay with my grandparents. It was 30 miles away, and my mother put me, aged five, on the bus and sent me off on my own.



My grandfather met me. Luckily, it never occurred to me that he might fail to turn up at the bus stop. At the end of the weekend, he brought me all the way home. I had unquestioning faith in him. I never felt quite the same about my mother. For one thing, she did not seem to find me interesting or important. She took things from me. She spoiled occasions such as my birthday, especially if she felt my father was making a fuss of me. She did not like me to be ill and argued away my earaches and coughs.





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Days went by while she ignored the fact that I was in pain, sick or unable to cope.

My father was a warmer, more understanding presence, at least to me.



But then it was easier for him. During the day, he was at school, snatching odd times to write, surrounded by an adult world where the demands on him were professional. My mother was the one stuck at home. She ran the home smoothly, though I don’t think it really interested her, not the way clothes, acting and, above all, my father interested her.



When his fame arrived - appearances on The Brains Trust, a BBC documentary, the film of Lord Of The Flies at the Cannes Film Festival (with a party on a boat, of all things) and, of course, a sudden relaxation of the customary nerviness about money - we weren’t surprised. We knew already that he was remarkable. People forget now that my mother was as well. However, at that point, 1960 or thereabouts, there was a hint of trouble.



The situation became more rewarding for my father than my mother. He was lionised for his writing. There was more money, more free time and when he spoke others listened, perhaps too respectfully. Once, a friend of ours actually hushed my mother so he could hear my father. One of her drama societies planned to stage a new production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. In the Fifties, she had played Hermione, the beautiful, wronged wife of the morbidly jealous King Leontes.



For the new production, however, she was offered the part of Paulina, the Queen’s older friend and champion. Insulted, my mother refused. Sadly, that was the end of her acting. Paulina is an interesting part and it’s a shame that she couldn’t take it on. But she could no more do that than I could stop being frightened of the dark. She was still beautiful and witty, still essential to him. She was the closest ally in his writing, the first to read anything - an attempt or a hesitant draft.



Missed opportunities: Judy wishes her relationship with her father could have been different



She gave him the confidence to be unusual, to be bold. The balance was kept, but not as perfectly as before. And I believe it required effort from both of them.



Difficulties arose, too, from their children, both of us suffering troubled adolescences. This caused them huge anxiety and it even impinged on their joint project - my father’s work. We knew we reduced his concentration, made it harder for him to write. My mother even told me that one novel, The Spire, would have been a better book if I had not been so troubled. I hope she was wrong, as The Spire seems pretty near perfect to me. And I doubt she said this to my father.



For David and me, the future became threatening. I can see from my father’s journal that this circumstance permeated his state of mind, too, adding its own weight to his years of difficulty in writing. We were all aware that David and I needed to leave home, but couldn’t. Mysteriously, we appeared to have had an ambition bypass. It was as if our parents were the stars and we were the supporting actors in their life together.



No doubt these experiences sound trivial, but they are indicators. The real thing for me, at any rate, was a sense of their comparative indifference. My mother showed it and occasionally my father did, too. Even at the age of five I was ashamed of how little she seemed to care about me. I hid from myself the possibility that he did not care quite enough either.



When my father was 75, he had a big party in London. I enjoyed it tremendously and felt I had been rather a success, an impression supported by a slightly mordant appraisal from my mother. When my father’s 80th birthday approached in 1991, I assumed I would be included, too. But I learned that my mother had decided not to invite me or my brother. Unusually, I protested, but she remained adamant.



My father phoned me and offered to ‘make a fuss’. But I could see there was no point.

It wouldn’t be much fun going to a party where the hostess doesn’t want you, especially when she is your own mother. I remember that she told me: ‘It’s really a very small party.’ Three-and-a-half years later, I was mourning them both — their gifts, their brilliance, their laughter and their love for each other. I missed them terribly. As a wise friend foresaw, I even missed the qualities I had complained about.



In the 15 years or so that followed, I came to acknowledge their complexity, their sense of helplessness, their love not only for each other, but also, in their own way, for us, and their grief at our missed opportunities.



© Judy Golding/Guardian News & Media Ltd 2011. The Children Of Lovers: A Memoir Of William Golding By His Daughter by Judy Golding (Faber & Faber, £16.99).