On Leaving a Sinking Ship

from the series, 'Aspects of the Family Court'

Danuta was the wife of one of my husband’s friends. She had told me she didn’t want to be my friend when she learned I was a grandmother. She was ashamed she said to know anyone that old. (I was 47).

This was the kind of thing Danuta said, it was vaguely annoying but not worth getting in a stew about. So I continued to give her the three free counselling sessions I had foolishly promised her. (I did this for the worst of reasons - to keep my husband happy and thereby, supposedly, strengthen his friendship with Danuta’s husband, the journalist, Timothy Garton Ash, who would go on to play a significant and detrimental part in my and my children’s lives.)

When Danuta learned I had issued divorce proceedings she came to the door, invited herself in and proceeded to lecture me. I was she said ‘leaving a sinking ship’.

My husband had primed her and she, like everyone else, had either been oblivious to his tactics or had consciously gone along with them. He had been spreading lies. His career was over, he was finished as a writer, he would never earn another penny and to top it all, I was so cruel as to be divorcing him.

The judgement of Solomon, William Blake

It was true he was a good actor and particularly good at the self-pity parts but how come the friends and the professionals appointed to the case (two court welfare officers, an expert witness, any number of witnesses and the judge) actually believed such lies? Did they? Or did they just pretend to?

All that early promise, all that shortlisting for prestigious prizes, all those scintillating reviews for his writing, all that acclaim in Hollywood, all those invitations and commissions to write for, among others, Stephen Spielberg, Geena Davies, Maurice Sendak, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul McCartney, Robert de Niro, Anthony Hopkins, Isabella Rossellini, all of it had come to nothing!

The lady of the realm and the Queen’s Counsel who represented my husband didn’t have to do much to persuade the judge of this scenario. The judge, a mere grammar school boy, in his measly little county courtroom knew exactly who to take his orders from - the almighty from the High Court in the great metropolis of London, barristers who seemed to be appointed not only for their privileged education, society backgrounds and their skill with the law but also for their height - both barristers on my husband’s team were well over six feet and towered above not only me and my lawyers but also over the judge.

Through an endless pre-trial exchange of letters between lawyers, my husband had refused to reveal his wealth and no amount of demands would force him to. Eventually, after months of costly litigation, his lawyers had produced one A4 sheet of paper with some numbers on it. This was meant to disclose his earnings and assets over the last decade.

Even these heavily massaged figures showed in fact that his earnings had been half a million pounds a year for at least the past ten years.

They revealed nothing regarding the immense royalties that would go on being paid for the rest of my husband’s life, gave no record of the assets that had been stashed in numerous financial strongholds, and avoided wherever possible all mention of ‘windfalls’ - huge amounts of money deliberately paid as a one-off by film studios and publishers and hard to trace.

It is of course easy to manipulate the figures when you are self employed and making enough to pay for any number of financial advisers, accountants and agents but you would think that any judge dealing with financial matters would be alert to such goings-on.

But being alert and aware was not the same as acting on what you saw. Judge Paul Clark never challenged my husband about anything and always gave him what he wanted. Both a sycophant and a misogynist, he was set on destroying the woman who had dared to challenge ‘our national novelist’.

It wasn’t only the contortions and manoeuvrings of intensive litigation that caused the truth to be silenced; it was also etiquette. It was as if it was bad taste to point out that the money my husband was paying his lawyers for just one morning of the lengthy hearing exceeded by far what he was proposing in maintenance payments for me and the children in a year. We were all playing our parts in a fiction, a courtroom drama no less, and it wouldn’t do to expose the illusion. It was all make-believe and truth had no part in the proceedings.

So we all went along with it, we had no choice, we were coercively controlled, not only by individuals in this extended scenario but by the system itself: my husband’s career, according to this new version of events, had, all of a sudden and without warning or explanation, collapsed, and he was on the scrap heap. He would be lucky to find any kind of a job and was heading irrevocably for bankruptcy.

The judge knew perfectly well that figures were being manipulated. But he knew, too, that my husband must get everything he asked for. He was, after all, not only rich but famous. Judge Clark fell in with my husband’s outrageous lies and wrote in his judgement,

‘The standard of living must fall, perhaps dramatically, because of the massive drop in the husband’s earnings since those golden days beforehand.’

The judge didn’t explain what he meant by ‘golden days’ and gave no evidence of a ‘massive drop’. In fact, Ian McEwan had been very successful even while still a student on the UEA creative writing course where I met him.

By the time of our divorce twenty five years later, he was being called ‘our national novelist’, he had a number of successful films and a fine collection of novels and stories to his name. He had been short-listed for the Booker Prize and would win it shortly after our divorce. He was already working on getting his books onto school curricula as set texts, a goal of many writers producing as it did, an endless stream of income. It was hardly credible that Ian McEwan, the darling of the literary world for the past quarter of a century, was suddenly going to be forgotten.

My husband drove a very expensive car and lived in a very expensive house, wore expensive clothes, travelled all over the world ‘staying in the best hotels’, ski-ed in the most fashionable resorts, took cruises to the Antarctic, holidayed in the Galapagos, went on African safari, partied with film stars, hung out with directors and actors, spent lavishly on games of poker, took the children gambling in Las Vegas…

But even if his lawyers knew nothing of any of that, they must at least have known about his legal team.

Having done his research, he had taken on the most expensive lawyers in the UK whose client list included Bernie Ecclestone, Paloma Picasso and the then Prince Charles.

There are two main issues in the divorce courts: money and kids. Mothers invariably spend everything they have - time, money, sanity, energy - on the kids thereby leaving fathers to dominate the area of money. And whoever gets the money gets to decide the future. (Which includes the kids).

***

It is said that the most dangerous time for a woman in a relationship is when she tries to leave it. That is when women get murdered.

If they don’t get murdered, they get attacked and if they get attacked it is not only by the husband and the mates he will have co-opted into supporting him, it is also by the law itself which, surprise, surprise, will come down on the side of the man, especially the wealthy, well-connected, well-educated man.

When I told my husband I was divorcing him, he didn’t kill me. He didn’t even physically attack me. He just said, ‘I am going to make you look such an arsehole’ and got on the phone, following up his calls to the most expensive lawyers in England with calls to his friends on the press who would shortly be helping him make me ‘look such an arsehole’ (and, rather than publish my letters of complaint at their libel and lies, would print more defamation instead and sit back while I got prosecuted for breaking the terms of the silencing litigation my husband had imposed on me)).

***

Over many years, I have watched the way the divorce process works and used to write about it back in the seventies and eighties.

In the late sixties, when women were just getting confident enough to leave their husbands, it was the Campaign for Justice in Divorce (the CJD) that spearheaded the attack, determined to put them back into their box and, above all, to prevent them having a fair income after divorce. The kids didn’t matter too much at that point. Throughout history children and their mothers had been the property of fathers and husbands. But in more recent times it had been acknowledged at least tacitly that children should live with their mums. In the 1950s it had been gospel that young children should be with their mothers every single day. Mothers who went out to work were frowned upon.

I took a lot of notes on the CJD back in the day and even wrote a couple of articles about it (published I think in Time Out and the Guardian). I wanted to refresh my memory so I looked it up in Wikipedia. But Wikipedia has had a makeover. It is hard to believe it still considers itself to be a depository of facts. In the process of pursuing an ideology it has managed to offload most of its female readers and nearly all of its female contributors, thereby leaving a seriously unbalanced site .

It has an entry on Leo Abse, the Labour MP who founded the CJD and was its main spokesman for many years, but there is no mention of the CJD itself, an organisation that struck terror into mothers and was the blue-print for all those men’s rights groups that have followed it.

Abse would be joined of course by many men but also by a good many women, mainly second or even third wives, supporting their husbands and trying to avoid losing money through the payment of maintenance to the first wife. ‘Clean break’ became the go-to phrase, sounding so neat and simple but meaning something akin to destitution for the mothers who had devoted their lives to their children. (Hard to remember now but back then there were almost no nurseries and what playgroups there were deliberately set their hours so mothers were unable to leave their kids for more than an hour or so.) Women were discouraged from leaving their small children with anyone else, including the children’s fathers. The clamour of the arrogant and ignorant young childless women in the Women’s Lib movement for ‘24 hour nurseries’ was meaningless and ignored by the public while the genuine need of mothers of young children was ignored not only by the public but also by the Women’s Lib movement.

The only group that could have given any support, Wages for Housework, was side-lined by the women’s movement and disparaged by the media.

In my experience, no-one has seriously tackled this difficult but essential issue: how is a mother to bring up her children without a man to provide? Must she remain tied to a violent and abusive man - or even just a feckless and dependent one - for the sake of an income?

***

Along with the CJD came Gingerbread which had started innocently enough, as a group offering support and a bit of social life to single mums (you never heard the phrase single dads back then) and as men seeped in further and further to what had been an exclusively female concern, so fathers put themselves forward.

Before we knew it, men had taken over and groups emerged with titles that were blatantly coercive: the title, ‘Families Need Fathers’, says it all. No debate, no discussion, fathers knew what families needed: families needed them even if the ‘families’ had chosen to live without them.

Families Need Fathers acted as a pressure group to force fathers onto women and children who may have been in the process of escaping violent or coercive relationships.

***

Women’s independence was still a long way off (getting a mortgage, for instance, was still difficult if not impossible for a single mum) and the men’s rights activists were in the ascendant, quite literally when they climbed onto the rooves of the Houses of Parliament.

Fathers demonstrated, performing ‘pranks’ like dressing up as Father Christmases. They were dads and they did what dads did, having fun, entertaining the kids, but they didn’t do what full time mums do, quietly get on with running the home and caring for the children, attending to everyone’s needs and letting their own take a back seat.

Fathers’ protests could easily have backfired since they showed an egocentric irresponsible nature. But instead, the fathers achieved what they aimed for, they made huge inroads into the legal system itself. Lawyers and judges leaned over backwards to grant them their wishes and they even themselves joined the fathers’ groups.

Fathers were making a splash and rich and famous men were getting involved. Cue Bob Geldof. Extremely well known after the success of Band Aid and by now very wealthy (no longer the scruffy Boomtown Rat I had met in Dublin some years before with his glamorous girlfriend, Paula Yates).

By this time, Geldof had not only got custody of his own children but had even won, in a particularly nasty court battle, custody of the child of Paula Yates and her partner, born well after Paula’s separation from Geldof, against the desperate claim of the child’s natural grandparents.

There was no longer any pretence that a caring loving mother or grandmother was the best person to bring up a child. It was now patently clear that the rich and famous would win that right. Egocentricity trumped quiet concern. Money and fame took precedence over domesticity. Geldof was an Alpha Male and therefore he got what he wanted. And what he appeared to want was not only to win any battle against his wife, even after her death, but to exercise power over women in general.

He wrote misogynistic aggressive articles overspilling with obscenities; reading the welcome page to Families Need Fathers was like reading Penthouse on steroids.

But of course, like other men in this male supremacy movement, Geldof was a victim, a sinking ship no less.

‘I cannot describe the feeling a father has for his children. It is a crying shame that not enough emphasis and support is given to the dad when there is a marriage breakdown,’ he said and went on in campaigning mode: ‘My next big cause is bringing the rights of wronged fathers to public attention.

‘I kid you not, this is now my big concern. Nothing else matters.’

This was serious. Geldof had put immense energy and purpose into Band Aid which had been a project that had encompassed generations and continents and involved huge numbers of participants as well as, of course, massive audiences, raising vast amounts of money.

Peter Anderson, of Families Need Fathers, said he was delighted at Geldof's new crusade.

‘The momentum is now rising behind our cause and has been for some time. It was the Child Support Agency that first brought our plight to the attention of the public,’ he said.

‘Before that guys were being pushed out of homes and stopped from seeing their children. Then along came the CSA, who said not only can you not see your kids but you have got to pay for them as well.’

I wonder how many women have succeeded in ‘pushing’ their husbands ‘out of homes’. When my husband refused to move out, even temporarily, I was advised to apply for an ouster injunction. I didn’t do so, fearing how my husband would react; I hoped we could separate in as simple and efficient a way as possible. So my husband stayed alone in the large Victorian house with the pool and the park-sized garden while the children and I moved into a rented two-up two-down which had once housed the servants to the big houses.

On our first evening in our new little house I cooked a special meal. But it was interrupted when my husband came banging on the door and shouting. When I opened the door, he forced his way in. In order to avoid a row in front of the children, I pulled up a chair and invited him to join us.

In no time he had achieved litigation that stated that my new rented house was actually his second house.

***

There was no longer any need for fathers to scale rooftops or to dress up as fantasy figures, they no longer had to strive to get noticed. They were now not only noticed; they were running the show.

It had become normal for the judiciary to become members of Families Need Fathers and other men’s pressure groups. Members hob-nobbed with judges and were invited to get-togethers at the Inns of Court. They were now shaping policy. And still no mothers’ groups, to my knowledge, were invited. And still judges involved with men’s/fathers-rights groups were not required to declare a conflict of interests and much of what went on was veiled in secrecy.

Mothers were not rich or glamorous and they didn’t get together in groups: there was too much else to do and babysitting was expensive and very rarely the best option. Misogyny was mainstream. Now all it had to do was clean itself up, history needed to be rewritten.

Bob Geldof’s swearing and ranting was eradicated and Wikipedia, by now a heavily dominant men’s encyclopaedia, was edited to give the cleansed narrative.

***

It was canny of my husband to choose a solicitor who was married to a High Court judge who was an active and vocal supporter of fathers’ rights. In no time my husband would be dining with this power couple and their friends in the judiciary and soon after that, he would have attached himself to the judge, accompanying him on his tours round the country and inviting him to speak at conferences and literary gatherings with him. I watched as the judge fell in with my husband’s wishes just as easily and readily as had so many others, with apparently no consciousness of the manipulation taking place or even of the coercion.

***

There had been a time when it had seemed that the values offered by mothers - self-denial, modesty, sympathy, nursing, patience etc- had been of some importance in the field of childcare. But like everything else the field of childcare got taken over and other values prevailed. Childcare was now subject to the law and litigation and mothers were forced into antagonistic responses that didn’t come naturally and had nothing to do with the real attributes and qualities of mothers.

In my own divorce, it was fame, success and wealth that were the predominant factors. The fact that I had stayed at home with my children was used against me. ‘Penny doesn’t work,’ said my husband disparagingly in court contradicting one of his own witnesses, our cleaning lady, who said I worked too much.

In fact I did ‘work’ but my work as a counsellor and therapist was deemed irrelevant and the fact that I had chosen to work from home to be available for the children was not considered of any importance.

The judge, deeply impressed by my husband’s fame and success, spent an inordinate amount of time in court gossiping about and with the witnesses, making sure the court knew that he too, was ‘a public figure’ and he took every opportunity to display his knowledge of literature and big words.

My husband had taken my name off all the bank accounts eighteen months previously and had never made the standing order he had promised. I had been trying to run the house and pay the bills during my husband’s long absences in New Zealand and Australia, Canada, Russia, the United States, Europe and the British Isles.

My husband had chosen for the court hearing to be of ten days’ length, thereby forcing me very close to destitution and, though I had qualified for legal aid, I never received it and was told by my solicitor who chased it up, that my husband’s lawyers had interfered with my application at the Legal Aid Board. I sat in court day after day worrying about my children and the inadequate child care arrangements I had in place and worrying too about the cost of this case: I would be paying for the judge’s discursive ramblings about Trollope and his meandering ruminations about Aldous Huxley’s experiments with psychedelics.

Judge Paul Clark didn’t only want to gossip about literature from the past. Even more intriguing was the literature of today and even more gripping than the literature itself were the living breathing writers whom my husband actually really truly knew. The court discussed Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Drabble, Angus Wilson, Martin Amis - and my husband even brought his literary agent to perform for him as a witness.

The judge was impressed and joined in whenever he could and when my barrister brought the conversation round to the only subject that concerned me - the care of my children - Judge Clark could not restrain himself. Here was the chance of some real unadulterated literary gossip!

Drugs that had already been acknowledge by my husband included psilocybin, LSD, ecstasy, mescaline, and of course, hashish and cannabis as well as the Home Office licensed drugs supplied by his medical friend. And now, in court, my husband’s literary agent was describing guests at one of her dinner parties snorting cocaine.

This was too much for Judge Clark. His excitement, not at the drugs but at the guest list, got the better of him and he blurted out,

‘Who was there?’

But he was to be disappointed. Unlike the judge, the literary agent remembered she was a professional: she had her clients to protect and so she kept mum.

(NB. It is worth getting the transcripts if you can.)

***

Was my husband an Alpha Male? Or was he a Sinking Ship? Or was he both?

The combination of the two is common enough as to be downright corny. The Alpha Male wants to win everything, which means someone else, usually the wife, has to lose everything. But the Sinking Ship wants endless sympathy, mainly of course from women. To get both means blinding everyone to the truth and it is amazing how easy that is to do and how often it happens. It is embarrassing to watch women demean themselves in their abject pandering to the man who is now oh so lonely, oh so sad, oh so needy and to see them take on your husband or ex as if he is a stray dog ejected into a hostile wilderness by his callous ungrateful owner.

My husband had forced me to sign a document drawn up by him that took my name off the joint accounts. I would no longer have access to any money except what I could make from my own clients and with that I would still have to run the home and look after the children.

He would, he said time and again, pay me a sum to keep everything going. This would be a fixed sum and be paid monthly into my account. Of course, it never happened.

It was apparent to me that my husband’s plan was not to divorce me but to make me divorce him. That way, I would be the villain and he would be the abused sufferer, a sinking ship no less.

It was after my husband had had my name taken off the bank accounts and was spending a large amount of time abroad while I was trying to bring up the four children and run the home on a very scanty income that I thought to investigate another account we had opened many years before.

My solicitor had in fact already made enquiries about it but my husband’s solicitors had insisted that the account was no longer functioning.

I managed to get past the obstruction of the bank manager who had been set guard to protect my husband’s wealth and to prevent me getting access to my own bank accounts and I got to the account. I didn’t attempt to take anything out but what I found was shocking. The account was by no means ‘dormant’ as had been claimed but was bursting with goodies!

Among the film scripts my husband had written was one called ‘The Good Son’. It was a simple story, with the aim of being a box office hit and appealing to a popular audience. It involved two boys, one was bad and the other, good, but because the bad boy was so manipulative and scheming, all the people who could have helped control him had been twisted into believing the good boy was bad and the bad boy was good.

‘Sounds a bit schizophrenic,’ I said when I read the script but, although I read everything my husband wrote, I rarely gave negative criticism.

Because no-one would believe that the bad son was actually bad, he had had free rein to cause havoc, and that included murdering his little sister and his mother. (Luckily, though, they didn’t actually die, but the tension was at super-high box-office levels.)

When I had first read the film script, I hadn’t commented on the murders (my husband had been writing about murders all the time I had known him) but I had suggested he remove a scene in which the bad boy drops a human-like dummy over a freeway bridge causing a pile-up which he runs home to watch on the television news.

My husband had ignored my suggestion, the script had remained as he had written it and the film had been made.

Made but not shown.

The film had been banned.

It hadn’t been banned specifically for the reasons I had flagged, the motorway pile-up and the killings of women and girls. The film had been banned because it depicted children as murderers. In England the Bulger case had just come to court and the public had been deemed too sensitive to see such a film.

James Bulger was a two year old who was abducted by two ten year old boys who proceeded to torture and to murder him.

My husband had been disappointed when the film was banned and there was no red carpet, no glamorous party, no crowds in Leicester Square. But he arranged for a private screening instead, inviting only his medical friend, whose name he had bestowed on the good son. Dr Dolan’s pubescent son was also invited and my husband insisted on taking our son too. Our son was a pre-teen; the film was not only an X but a banned X with a warning.

I was not happy but there was no way I could have any influence so I went along to the screening too.

***

My husband had told me that, the film having been banned and withdrawn, there would be no income from it. What he hadn’t told me was that the film had only been banned in the UK. Elsewhere no-one had heard of the Bulgar case and violent movies involving child murderers were still box-office hits and so my husband had found a use for the joint account we had opened all those years before. Large sums had been put into it and I had known nothing of it and had been told by my husband’s lawyers that the account was closed.

Though Judge Paul Clark was well aware of this attempt to deceive the court, he didn’t care and nor did he care about any of the other attempts at deception - lies and perjury, for instance, were waved away by the judge time and again.

The lies that had been told about The Good Son were brushed aside. My husband was a sinking ship, this was the lie that had been sold to everyone including the judge and there was no good reason to change it. The truth didn’t get a look-in.

In giving his financial judgement, the judge said,

‘Both parties need reasonable houses particularly in view of the shared residence order that I have made.‘

This was the first I heard of the ‘shared residence order’ that would in effect take my children from me. I had never agreed to one and it was hard to see how anything could be shared when only one person wanted it.

The judge saw no need to explain how the ‘shared residence’ order would work. Countless surveys had shown that they simply didn’t work and numerous mothers had been driven half mad with trying to make even ‘access weekends’ work. Children came back tired, stressed and anxious and their lives became chaotic. Clothes got left in the wrong house, homework was frequently not done, dads took the children along to whatever they were doing that weekend, parties until the small hours, trips out with new girlfriends…

Living as a separated couple has a huge impact on the children and yet the judge in my case, who presumably should have been an expert on the effects of separation and divorce on children, could scarcely have been more ignorant.

He would simply drop his decision on the whole family like a concrete slab from the heavens, leaving us to deal with the fall-out. The farce of forcing one partner into shared residence would become tragedy.

There was no way I could afford to live in the same vicinity as my soon-to-be-ex-husband and the judge must have been well aware of this. He also knew that I had plans to move away. He may not have known the full truth of my husband’s involvement with his girlfriend and the fact that they would shortly be marrying. But he did know that the girlfriend lived and worked in London and had no intention of moving to Oxford. The court welfare officer had done everything she could to fall in with the false scenario my husband had concocted which could do nothing but cause harm to the children. A judge who bothered to read the documents provided to him and who retained a sense of critical realism would have found it easy enough to unpick the lies he was being told. But Judge Clark was not that judge.

Judge Clark ignored all that and the fact that I had made it very clear that I would not be staying in Oxford. His job, as he saw it, was to provide my husband with everything he wanted. He fell over backwards to do this and acted as a mouthpiece for my husband, quoting him in his judgement:

‘‘I imagine we both have to have the same kind of houses,’ said the husband. He will have some mortgage capacity, the mother little. The one thing that is overwhelmingly clear in this case is that both parties will have substantially to adjust their standard of living from that enjoyed in recent years - the dream is over’.

He went on: ‘The only benefit I find the wife potentially to have lost is that of a widow’s pension by virtue of the divorce, if, on retirement the husband elected to surrender part of his pension to provide that.’

As it happened, the husband had never needed any mortgage capacity and never would, and, as it happened, he would not be electing to surrender anything to the wife and the wife would soon be not only leaving Oxford but leaving England.

The judgement explained that the judge does ‘not find it appropriate to make a specific finding about any loss of pension rights. I consider it among the more general subject of the parties’ financial resources and financial needs, bearing in mind that the money and the assets in this situation have in effect all been provided by the husband and the wife has or will have substantial capital resources at the end of this case.’

Back in the day when I used to collect and collate quotations to form an archive I could draw on in my journalism, I had saved a case of a woman who was a cleaner, using her earnings to help support the family. When she and her husband divorced she was not permitted to keep any of her earnings or claim a portion of the family assets since the judge said, her husband had paid for her original bucket and scrubbing brush and therefore her earnings all belonged to him.

That judgement was made in the 1950s.

The huge emphasis on ‘fathers’ rights’ had returned us to an old familiar world.

I was to receive nothing to recognise or acknowledge my role as wife, as mother or even my role as muse. I would get no sympathy: that was all reserved for my husband.

Judge Clark quoted my husband in his judgement, writing:

‘I can understand the husband’s feeling of having lost ‘the most important person in my life - the single most important influence on my work.’ Judge Paul Clark was recently divorced from his own wife and people in the court had remarked to me on how much I resembled her. Perhaps the judge’s sympathy for my husband was displaced sympathy for himself, otherwise known as self-pity.

Pretending to believe my husband’s narrative and his financial declaration, the judge awarded me £10,000 for three years and £5,000 a year for the two children of the marriage (which never did come my way). I was to receive none of the assets, pensions or life assurance policies etc. When the three years were up and I was in my fifties, there would be nothing and I would have to ‘paddle {my} own canoe’. My two daughters by a previous marriage whom my husband, throughout our marriage, had been proud to call not his step-daughters but his ‘daughters’ were totally ignored in this judgment as they had been throughout the hearing and all that had preceded it. Despite the fact that the girls had spent virtually every day of their brothers’ lives with them, helping with their care, the court welfare officer had refused to interview them and they were never mentioned in the court proceedings.

My husband went on to buy an imposing house in a Bloomsbury square, a country house with a pool and a paddock in the Chilterns, a mews house in central London, an architect-designed house on the West coast of Scotland, a period house in fashionable Gloucestershire with a grand entrance up double stairs, as well as a lake, woodland etc.

He didn’t take out a mortgage and of course he didn’t own all these houses concurrently - only some of them. He continued to travel all over the world still staying, with his wife, ‘in the best hotels like a couple of swells’, he continued to make a lot of money from the movies and a huge amount from his fiction, he continued to be celebrated as ‘our national novelist’, receiving accolades and honours, cropping up on shortlists, in constant demand for reviews.

Journalists followed his career and reported to me that he was making more than his three closest rivals - Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes - combined.

Judge Clark obviously thought that by giving my husband the ‘joint residence order’ he had sought, he was doing him a favour. But he hadn’t thought it through. There was no way I could live near my ex-husband when the discrepancy in our wealth and earning power was so huge. A joint residence order could never work.

Joint residence meant my husband would remain in total control of the family.

In effect the judge was giving my husband ‘sole custody’ and this was something my husband had been adamant he didn’t want. Though I had applied for sole custody, my husband never had. Sole custody might mean he had to cut down on world travel, snitch on his ski-ing holidays, give up his walking holidays, and how would he go on staying with his girlfriend in London?

God forbid, ‘sole residence’ might mean he would have to attend parents’ evenings, sports days, concerts, carol services. It might even mean he would be responsible for the children when they were ill. He might have to worry about veruccas and nits! How would that fit with the intense concentration needed to write a novel?

The judge wanted to upset and humiliate me. He knew that my children had been at the forefront of my life and he had even, on an earlier document, called me ‘an excellent mother’. (I always did the nits/verrucca/dentist thing without any protest, having learned it from my mother who had learned it from her mother who had learned it from…)

I had applied for ‘sole residence’ knowing that that would be the only way I could retain my independence and the only way the children would be free to make their own choices. Any compromise with ‘joint residence’ would put me back under the control of my husband. I would be back being his wife but with no hope of any working relationship. Friction and conflict would rule. And I wouldn’t even be able to apply for a divorce - that had already happened.

My husband had not applied for sole residence. The lies he had told to the court welfare officer and the judge and the lies his friends had told in witness statements would lead us all into a very tangled web with the children as the prey at its centre.

The judge’s judgement cancelled out the divorce. He, like other judges in this case, was set on turning the clock back. It wasn’t that he wanted to abolish divorce, only women initiating it or benefiting from it.