In the 1960s, when the author moved to Israel with her Jewish partner, little did she know her mother’s disapproval would last for decades

When, in 1982, ill health and unhappiness led my mother to kill herself, she wrote this to me: “I love you so much that now I am weakening I’m going to beg you to try to forgive me. No words of mine can thank you enough for the love you have given me … the kindness, the sharing, the laughter and the many happinesses. It’s because I want those to be the things you will remember that I am going.”

I absolutely adored her, and I know she loved me. But there were times when the life choices I made in around 1960 severely tested our relationship.

A journalist had found out that I had gone to live in a kibbutz just when my career as a writer was seriously taking off. My first book, The L-Shaped Room, had been made into a successful film, I had had plays on TV and radio, and my second novel was getting good notices. And off I’d gone to Israel – non-Jew though I was – to live the simple life with Chaim Stephenson, my Jewish lover, in a kibbutz.

“For me, it would be like shutting myself voluntarily into prison!”

These words jumped out at me from an article sent to me by my press-cuttings service.

Unable to contact me, the journalist had recourse to my mother, living in my old home in Barnes, south-west London, and (I hope in a moment of madness) she had given him just the earful he had doubtless been hoping for. The stark words in the press cutting should not have given me the shock they did. I knew how she felt. Had I not listened to her, night after night in the next bedroom, sobbing her eyes out as my departure on my great adventure drew near? Did I not know that she disapproved of my choice of partner because he was Jewish? And working-class? His artistic credentials as a sculptor did not, alas, weigh with her, as she didn’t reckon him as a breadwinner who could keep me in the middle-class style I was surely entitled to. And wasn’t a kibbutz basically an outpost of communism? Lifelong Conservative as she was, it was everything she detested.

And there was something else. My mother was passionately patriotic. She did reckon me, as someone who might some day write something significant about Britain – other, that is, than what she judged to be a rather sordid story of unmarried motherhood. When I began my “career” in the kibbutz as a worker in the chicken houses, too tired at night to do anything but fall into bed after supper – eaten in the communal dining-hall, not even decently at home in our one-room flat – her letters were redolent of dismay. They were along the lines of: “You are wasting yourself and your talent. The bizarre life you’ve chosen will stultify you. It’s soul-stunting. How can you be a writer in those conditions?” She didn’t add: “Among all those Jews who are exploiting you,” but I could sense her thinking it.

I had to hand the baby over to begin his ‘communal rearing’. That was too much for her

In addition, of course – and here I certainly can’t blame her – there was the “situation”. Even in the early 60s – a relatively quiet era in the Middle East – there were constant cross-border raids and counter-raids, shelling up north and the ever-present possibility of all-out war. Enough to keep any mother, especially of an only child, nervous and resentful.

Nevertheless, when our first baby was born in 1965, my mother came over. Everything was done to make her welcome. She was given a room and our friends visited her with offerings of cake and flowers. By this time I had imported my old Morris Minor – strictly not according to kibbutz rules but it was so useful in getting me to and from the high school, where I was now teaching English, that doctrinaire eyes were turned away.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lynne Reid Banks and her partner Chaim Stephenson. Photograph: Courtesy Lynne Reid Banks

My mother hadn’t driven for years but she bravely drove Chaim to the hospital to visit me and the newborn. All good. But then came the moment when I had to hand the baby over to the baby-house to begin his “communal rearing”. That was too much. With an air of leaving me to a fate worse than death, she went home.

My career as a teacher gave me immense satisfaction, and compensated for my inevitable difficulties in the baby-house, where I kept rebelling against the system. My mother, at the far end of a postal service, our only means of communicating, grew more and more bewildered and disapproving. Though she tried to hide it I knew her too well, and in trying to defend the kibbutz I got into written quarrels with her.

In the run-up to the six-day war in 1967, at which time I was at term with my second baby, the situation, perhaps especially as seen on British TV – tanks massing, bombers poised for take-off – was so threatening that my poor mum (according to my aunt – my whole family, of course, was worried sick) lost her teeth. It really must have been awful for her, but I refused to leave – nobody was leaving.

The war, when it came, was short but ferocious. My second son hung on in there till his father was demobbed, so I passed the war so big I was unable to squeeze into the slit-trench hastily dug, just for me, into our lawn. Not that, in the event, there were air raids, except one Syrian plane that dropped a bomb in a nearby field of corn as it high-tailed for home, leaving the Haifa refineries intact. But it was a scary time. I wrote about it at length and in graphic detail to my mother.

Two years later, I made a home visit just before the birth of our third baby, and furtively searched our large house for my letters, which included descriptions of day-to-day life, the children, my minor triumphs in the classroom – oh, and my meeting with Israel’s former prime minister David Ben-Gurion to report on my Easter crossing into Jordan. I couldn’t find them and asked where they were. My mother gave me a long, startled look.

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“I burned them,” she said.

“What? All of them? Why?”

“There were so many! I thought you had kept copies.” Sorry, love. No you didn’t. It took me a very long time to get over this because of what I knew it meant: she hated all those accounts of life in the kibbutz, and she thought – which makes some sort of sense – that reading the quarrelling ones after she died would have upset me.

She paid a last visit to the kibbutz in 1969. It was a very happy time, oddly enough. This time she wasn’t merely polite to the children. She cuddled them and we went swimming in the kibbutz pool and she even unbent with Chaim, teasing him and treating him as she only treated people she liked. I truly thought the animosity was all over. Was this change because by this time I had written my third novel, one that she couldn’t deny rose above her category of “story-telling” into her other one, labelled “real writing”? She couldn’t claim that the kibbutz had suffocated me.

When we left the kibbutz in 1971, she threw herself into making ready for us, renting us a furnished house near her, putting my father’s last car back on the road, rallying all my old friends. She even contacted people she thought might be useful to Chaim as a sculptor. Everything in the garden was lovely. Except it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. When I saw how she distanced herself from the children, I tackled her. Actor as she was, she said she didn’t want to play the part of “grey-haired old granny”. But wasn’t it au fond because her grandchildren were Jewish that she didn’t want the role?

Antisemitism is a disease. That’s what I think. It’s like a virus that can infect an otherwise healthy psyche. It’s also a curse that can mar what could have been healthy, happy relationships.

• Between Myth and Reality: the sculptures of Chaim Stephenson, is at the Crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London, until 10 May