The Woman of Substance. Piers Dudgeon

make a woman feel her best – attractive, feminine and desirable. [He] can make a woman believe she’s special, wanted, when he’s around her, even if he’s not particularly interested in her for himself.’

      In Act of Will we sense the same about Vincent. There are arguments not only about Audra’s highfalutin ideas, but about Vincent’s drinking and a ‘fancy woman’, and fears that he will leave home and never come back. ‘“Go back to your fancy woman,” I heard that,’ said Barbara. ‘That happened when I was little, I remembered it and I did ask Grandma, “What’s a fancy woman?” And I know that my mother rejected Winston constantly. No, she didn’t talk about it, but I knew about it somehow when I was in my teens. How do children know things?’

      Recently, as guest on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, Barbara admitted that she hadn’t been able to write Act of Will until after her parents had died, ‘because I really wrote in a sense about this very tumultuous marriage that they had. They were either in each other’s arms or at each other’s throats. He was very good-looking and he had an eye for the girls at times.’ Later, she said to me, ‘But that’s life. I think Winston had a bit of an eye for the ladies, but that doesn’t mean that he did much about it. Listen, the more I write, the more I read of other people’s lives, the more I realise how terribly flawed we all are.’

      In the novels this is the message about fathers in general. In Everything to Gain, Mallory Keswick says: ‘He was a human being after all, not a God, even if he had seemed like one to me when I was growing up. He had been all golden and shining and beautiful, the most handsome, the most dashing, the most brilliant man in the world. And the most perfect . . . Yes, he had been all those things to me as a child.’

      In Act of Will, although Vincent’s family all dote on him, Grandpa Alfred has ‘no illusions about him’. Vincent has ‘temperament, stubbornness and a good measure of vanity’, and is easily sidetracked from his purpose. His daughter gets her strength of purpose from elsewhere, from her mother’s ‘iron will’, like Barbara.

      Despite what Barbara said, that ‘when you are an only child you are a unit more’, one can imagine that this difference in character between mother and father was fertile ground for disagreement, and it is not uncommon for Barbara’s fictional heroines to recall a childhood trauma of expecting the father to up and leave the family home. In Everything to Gain, Mallory is suddenly shaken one day ‘not only by the memory but by the sudden knowledge that all the years I was growing up I had been terrified my father would leave us for ever, my mother and I, terrified that one day he would never come back.’

      Mal and her mother discuss Edward, her archaeologist father, in this vein. Mal cannot understand ‘why Dad was always away when I was a child growing up. Or why we didn’t go with him.’ Her mother talks about his not wanting either of them along ‘on his digs’. Mallory is no fool, however. She remembers ‘that fourth of July weekend so long ago, when I had been a little girl of five . . . that awful scene in the kitchen . . . their terrible quarrel [which] had stayed with me all these years.’

      In the electoral records of Upper Armley, there is a period when Winston is not included as an inhabitant of the family home. Freda is the sole occupant of electoral age when they are living at Greenock Terrace in 1945, the first record available after the war years (when none were kept), and Barbara considers that ‘the trauma [of expecting the father to leave] must spring from the war years. [In Tower Lane] we had an air-raid shelter at the end of the garden. My mother and I would go in with a torch and I’d worry about where my father was.’

      ‘Your father was very often not there?’

      ‘No, he was out having a drink. That was Daddy.’

      Besides the Traveller’s Rest on a Sunday, his favourite watering holes were ‘the White Horse, and the other was the Commercial in Town Street. He’d have to walk home, and during the war I thought he was going to be killed,’ said Barbara.

      ‘So the picture I have is of you and your mother sitting in the shelter. Were you there alone or were the neighbours in there too?’

      ‘No, it was ours. There were three in a row, but they were awful. There were seats to sit on, but no radio because you couldn’t plug it in, could you? Yes, you put bottles of water and some things in there and a Thermos flask Mummy would fill. A woman wrote a very chastising letter about six months ago saying, “I don’t know who did your research for the Anderson shelters, but they weren’t like you made it out in The Women in His Life. I belong to the Society of Anderson Shelters People,” or whatever . . . she will have been all of eighty!’

      ‘It must have been strange to be in the dark with nothing to look at or do, in a makeshift shelter and in the knowledge that bombs could rain down on you at any time.’

      ‘Well,’ Barbara remembered, ‘we had candles and my mother always took a book, because she was a reader. She didn’t knit like my Auntie Olive.’

      ‘Did you take a book as well?’

      ‘I can’t remember, but I know that I listened for that unique, very particular step. It was like a missed step – because of the artificial leg, his was not an even step. There was a lot of worry about my father. I used to worry about my father, it’s funny, isn’t it?’

      ‘Children do worry about their parents,’ I say.

      ‘Why? A fear of losing them?’

      ‘Sometimes.’

      ‘I used to worry about him being out when the sirens began to shrill. He always went out, not every night, but some nights a week he’d go down to the local for a pint. Usually he was down at the pub, locked in during the raid, and then later we’d hear his step down the garden. And I’d be so relieved I thought I would cry.’

      What we have here is the classic ‘only child’ situation, touching in the extreme. You want to reach back in time and wipe the worry from the busy mind of this girl who took the responsibility for family relations upon herself. In reality, as in Act of Will, the only child was doing a balancing act between mother and father, which can’t have been easy. Barbara would have had to stand alone under the burden of any unhappiness in her parents’ marriage, and it was not done to complain about this. She would have had nobody to understand her worries and grief, and, clearly, the situation between Freda and Winston did become sadly polarised.

      One day Barbara said to me about Freda, ‘She neglected my father,’ and, later, that Freda ‘shut the bedroom door’ on Winston. In Everything to Gain, Mal’s parents, like Vincent and Audra in Act of Will, sleep in separate bedrooms, and this is deemed by Mal ‘with a sinking feeling’ to have been the reason why eventually her father must have romanced other women. And it comes out that, yes, her father was having affairs. The hindsight conclusion reached is that the Keswicks were ‘a dysfunctional family’, and the uncertainty of her parents’ marriage made Mal want ‘to have the perfect family when I got married. I wanted to be the perfect wife to Andrew, the perfect mother to Jamie and Lissa. I wanted it all to be . . . to be . . . right . . .’

      We see this in Barbara also, when, after her marriage to Robert Bradford in 1963, she wrote a trio of manuals for the American publisher Simon & Schuster about being the perfect wife – How to be the Perfect Wife: Etiquette to Please Him, Entertaining to Please Him and Fashions that Please Him. When a journalist discovered these in the 1980s, the cry went up: Can this be the same woman who created Emma Harte? No journalist had an inkling of the fear out of which Barbara’s desire for an even-keel marriage came.

      However, it is also clear in both Act of Will and in reality that Winston, even if he was a bit flighty, was not the crucial factor. What led to separate bedrooms was the mother switching her attention away from the husband to the child – to Barbara – and that happened for reasons that went deeper than sex. One event that conspired to sharpen Freda’s focus on Barbara at the expense of Winston was the tragic death of their firstborn, a boy called Vivian. ‘He died from meningitis six months after he was born and some time before I was born,’ Barbara told