‘Don’t think you can live without sex,’ said my mother. ‘That’s one of the worst mistakes a person can make’

IN YESTERDAY’S Mail on Sunday, A.N. Wilson revealed the brutality he experienced at the hands of a paedophile headmaster. Today, he paints a frank portrait of his parents’ incompatible but oddly loving relationship…

His parents had a deep physical bond but were desperately unhappy. In the final extract from his new memoir, A.N. WILSON describes how their union shaped his view of the ‘destructive’ nature of marriage

HARDLY a day of my childhood was spent without my being asked to take sides with one parent or the other. Marital warfare was the air I learned to breathe. When my father Norman made jokes, should I scream with laughter — as he was doing, even before reaching the punchline — or scowl, as my mother Jean was doing? My mother was quite open with me in her expressions of regret that she had not married a previous boyfriend.

Some of my most confused hours as a young child were those in which she would come upstairs to my bedroom to calm me from a hollering fit before I went to sleep. In the darkness, as she smoothed my brow, she would speak of our running away together to the remoter regions of Scotland, escaping the marital rows and the cigarette smoke.

She taught me to fear my father in those early days, just as, later, he taught me to sympathise, deeply, with his being married to a neurotic killjoy.

It was only much later, when I looked back on my childhood in the Potteries, that I truly appreciated the ceramic genius of my father, a designer who came from a family of at least seven generations of potters.

‘You’re Norman Wilson’s son,’ was how Lord Snowdon acknowledged me at a photoshoot for ‘The Best of Young British Novelists’. He’d met Norman during a visit by Princess Margaret to the Wedgwood factory in Barlaston, Staffordshire, and subsequently worked with him on a project at the Design Centre in London.

But it was Norman’s life as a director, eventually managing director, of Wedgwood that was all-in-all to him.

As a child, it was pure joy to climb into the passenger seat of his Bentley and be driven to the works on a Saturday morning. You would see the whole factory, a workforce of well over a thousand, lined row upon row, turning, modelling, painting, affixing handles to cups, while from loudspeakers Music While You Work blared forth from the Light Programme.

Norman, in effect the boss of the whole set-up, was clearly a big cheese. He was always coming home with accounts of other Big Cheeses who had been to lunch in the boardroom — Chancellors of the Exchequer, well-known journalists and members of the Royal Family, whose visits threw both my parents into a tizz.

My father’s conversation usually consisted of rehearsed stories about the Wedgwood family. As a growing child and adolescent, I’d hear the same anecdotes over and over again, and, as Norman grew older, his need to repeat them was compulsive.

Waiting in shops, standing on railway platforms or at the bar of a hotel, he would light upon total strangers and, Ancient Marinerlike, catch their eye. Later, in his old age, Norman would sometimes tell me to meet him in one of the Welsh inns where farmers congregated on market days.

At the door of the saloon, I’d hear his voice announcing, ‘Frank Wedgwood — always known as Major Frank, of course — was the nicest man I ever knew’. Not deflated by the visible lack of interest in his hearers’ faces, he would press on.

I felt by now protective of Norman. Come on, someone. Give it a polite laugh. The more civil of the drovers and hill farmers would say, ‘Well, is that so?’

‘Yup. Nicest man I ever knew, Frank Wedgwood. He was in the Boer War. Now his brother Cecil...’

In fact, the most important man in my father’s life was the then head of the firm, Josiah Wedgwood — known to me as Uncle Jos. This all-consuming friendship sealed off any possibility of Norman being interested in anyone or anything else for long, and it caused Jean as much grief as adultery would have done.

It was, moreover, the direct cause of a surely very legitimate resentment. Hanging out with Jos, who was a rich man, made Norman live beyond his means to a truly idiotic extent. He may have been a director of the firm (the only non-Wedgwood to have such an honour) but his salary nowhere near covered the fare for travelling luxuriously on transatlantic liners with Jos, or spending weeks in hotels in Vienna and the Italian lakes.

ONLY cads would have claimed such luxuries as work ‘expenses’. So Jean and her children lived modestly, not because we were Puritans but because Norman had spent all his money on his friendship with Jos.

Quite prickly about class, my father always believed he had successfully passed himself off as

a gentleman. In our Welsh village, he was known as ‘the Colonel’ — the rank he’d achieved during the war — and was breezily unaware that there was something cringemaking about this pretension.

He thought that wearing ‘natty suitings’, driving stylish old cars and calling himself Colonel Wilson made him grand, whereas those who were regular army officers or actual gents saw through the playacting at once.

He had been nearly 40 when he married my mother, who was ten years younger and worked as a letter translator at Wedgwood.

Once a lively young woman, the Jean I knew was what I suppose one would call agoraphobic.

She was thrown into a panic by the idea of going anywhere. She had not left England since the 1930s and if she was driven more than a few miles in a car, she suffered not merely from motion sickness but from near-hysteria.

What had happened to her? I suppose the simple answer is ‘marriage’. Seventy years on this planet have taught me, by observation and experience, that this cherished institution, while nourishing those rare beings for whom it ‘works’, is, for a significant number of those who risk it, an arrangement of life that is utterly destructive of the human soul.

NOrman’S tendency to fly off the handle and to swear was something to which Jean could never be reconciled. She herself was a smouldering crater of bad temper, but with her it was expressed by little outbursts of breath.

For dinner, she would cook vastly over-roasted meats, vegetables boiled, seemingly, for badtempered hours. Her way with potatoes was to boil them until they all but dissolved in the grey water. They would then be halfdrained in a colander, hit furiously with a fork, and slopped into a Pyrex dish. She treated the harmless spud as semi-toxic, often saying none of us could guess how nauseating she found their smell.

after slamming down the dish of mash on the sideboard, she would run from the room and put her head in the kitchen sink, with melodramatic groans. Her unrivalled capacity to extract unhappiness from any situation, however neutral or cheerful, coloured all my early life.

On a family picnic or a seaside holiday, Jean was a nightmare companion, everlastingly afraid of travel sickness and in a seemingly perpetual bate with norman, sucking in her breath rather than laughing at his jokes, wincing with fear as the Bentley swooped round bends in the road, groaning with theatrical boredom whenever the Wedgwoods were mentioned — and of course, when weren’t they?

Yet while irritating the hell out of one another, my parents were always, in a maddening sort of way, in love. Just as some very smelly people presumably do nothing about it because they don’t know they are smelly, so mummy and Daddy were unaware that their everlasting bickering made their company all but unendurable.

as Jean would recall much later, in her widowhood, there had been a deep physical bond. When my first marriage failed, she said firmly: ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can live without sex. That’s one of the worst mistakes a person can make.’

my father’s last 20 years were difficult. In 1962, when I was away at school, Jean wrote to me about an event as unlikely and as full of foreboding as it would be to hear that the ravens had left the Tower of London.

Following a takeover of Wedgwood, norman had been forcibly retired at 60. He had lost his entire raison d’être — on the one hand, designing and

manufacturing ceramics, and on the other, being the friend, attendant and junior to Josiah. Without these two pillars to his existence, his life had no foundation or purpose. Norman, who in my eyes at least had been a personage of power, even of glamour, was now a figure of pathos.

My parents devoted the rest of their days together to moving house, first to Worcester and finally to Wales. Locked in a difficult marriage (for them both!), Norman had no friends. He was encouraged by his wife to go on solitary motoring holidays in Wales. Yet his obsessive regret about the fate of Wedgwood and the cooling of the relationship with Josiah in no way dampened his readiness, on any occasion, to recall the sayings and doings of that remarkable dynasty.

By the time he was getting on for 80, I was living in Oxford. In the room where I worked, there hung a large Scottish landscape in a lumpy gilt frame. The picture had belonged to Grandpa Wilson and was only hanging there because no one else in the family wanted it. But it was a family object, so associated with Norman.

One March morning, I had begun my work when the landscape that had hung there securely for years leapt from the wall and thundered down on to the piano beneath. As soon as I’d recovered from the shock and propped the painting against a wall, I rang the Welsh hospital where Norman was having treatment for lung cancer. I knew beyond any question what had happened. My father had died that very moment.

Jean had another 20 years to live as a widow. All her daily bickering and irritation with Norman were forgotten the second he

died and, like Prince Albert, he became the Prince Consort who could do no wrong.

I did not weep at my father’s grave but many of the symptoms of intense bereavement — sleeplessness, appetite and energy coming and going — were there for weeks afterwards. Honesty compels me to say, however, that I also felt relief. I do not know whether I was relieved for Norman, that the 20 years of boredom and humiliation were over, or whether the relief was my own.

■ ADAPTED from Confessions: A Life Of Failed promises, by A.N. Wilson, to be published by Bloomsbury on September 1, £20. © 2022 professor A.N. Wilson. to order a copy for £18 (valid to 28/08/22; UK p&p free on orders over £20), go to www.mail shop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.