Kathleen Adkins

I enjoyed school apart from the cricket. Much to the boys’ annoyance, when I was supposed to be fielding, I was too busy making daisy chains to catch any balls that came my way.

My mother read home economics at Edinburgh University so it seemed only natural that I would follow in her footsteps. I read Philosophy and Literature there. It was the first time I had been away from home and I was dreadfully homesick away from my sheltered upbringing.

I met my husband at university and have never slept with anyone else. You don’t want to meet the love of your life too young but I don’t think having a lot of partners is the way to personal happiness. Maybe I was just lucky. But there was so much chemistry between us, which is just as well. In our society, without the chemistry, how can anyone commit themselves to sharing a lifetime with someone they may only have known for a year, whose background may be very different and with whom they may have no common interests? There’s a lot to be said for arranged marriages. Certainly my mother felt I could have ‘done better.’

When I was twenty-one, it wasn’t so young to be married. Like us, my youngest daughter married straight from university, at twenty-one and I felt they were far too young but things are so different now. The average age for marriage is thirty-five.

Fortunately my marriage worked out well enough for it to survive. In the early days, I suppose we compromised but it never felt like it. Everything could be resolved in bed and over the years I have adapted to my husband’s attitudes and he to mine.

His mother was the dominant partner in their family. Her word was law, whereas in my family my father made more decisions. My husband expected me to make all the decisions and I assumed he would make ones it didn’t occur to him to make. I became more decisive through necessity.

Although I’m sure it enhances a marriage to have common interests, my husband is an engineer and we have none except our family. At this stage in our lives it seems to be enough to hold us together and we are finally learning to value what the other does. We have always agreed on money, bringing up children and our respective roles in a marriage. The hardest area of compromise was in bridging the gap in our educational aspirations for our children. While my husband regarded mine as being overweening, I regarded him as being anti-pretension for the sake of it. He inherited this from his mother who came from a farming background and had a know-your-own- place mentality. I came from a much more middle class upbringing and went to a private school and when I married I assumed his aspirations for our children would be the same as mine. This wasn’t so.

We had less difficulty with the division of domestic chores. For a while I was bogged down with five children – my choice. My husband would have been happy with two. As my parents weren’t near and we couldn’t afford babysitters, I accepted the consequences and didn’t consider a career. I was the homemaker but my husband supported all my decisions involving the children. I can’t remember ever having an argument as to how to deal with a naughty child. He would ask them, What does Mum say? and if they lied they were smacked and soon learnt not to lie. I didn’t get round to having a life of my own. I can see from your expression that you’re horrified and that’s exactly the attitude two of my daughters have but I do think women have a much more emotional bond with their children when they are young than men. Even if you can change a woman’s mindset, you can’t change thousands of years of biology in one generation, which makes it much harder for a woman to carve a career than a man.

It wasn’t until the children were offhand that I started writing. My husband didn’t value that to start with. He would have preferred me to have a nice little part-time job, with a modest but regular income but he’s finally resigned to it.

I think that the division of domestic chores is more of an issue now that we are in an era of equal career opportunities. Both sexes are required to be more flexible. My eldest daughter writes and she is quite obsessive about her work. Her husband does as much in the house as she does. He even seems to enjoy ironing whereas I can’t recall my husband even holding an iron. To our generation it would have felt wrong.

If I were widowed I would never marry again. It’s such a huge commitment and without the chemistry of young love I just couldn’t do it. Besides, I am now too old to adapt and make the compromises I so willingly made the first time round.

I have no regrets about having five children. We see them all regularly and we are a close-knit family. In this day and age, I treasure it. I just wish I could have had two lives. I would have liked to do more travelling when I was younger and learnt more languages when my mind was more receptive. I would also have liked a career but certainly wouldn’t have found my ideal in my early twenties. With my upbringing the only choices were being a librarian, teaching or nursing.

After my degree I gained a post-graduate teacher’s diploma and became involved in French. I had a little after-school group for 6-8 year olds involving playing lots of French games in my house. I loved that. I also taught French in middle schools for a couple of days a week but the government kept changing the curriculum and demanding more and more tests. When I realised that, with the amount of time I was spending on lesson planning and paperwork, I could earn treble my hourly teacher’s salary as a cleaner, I gave up teaching, took several writing courses and began writing in earnest.

I write articles, short stories and poetry, which are published in smallpress magazines and copious travel diaries. I have written a children’s novel and am working on a four-book non-fiction ‘the Truly Amazing Diet of Mankind.’ I turned down an offer by Usborne but now I am not so sure of the wisdom of my decision. At the time I was reluctant to lose copyright and only be acknowledged for the research. They also wanted me to condense it into one book. If you think of the history of mankind we are talking maggots, mammoths and MacDonalds. How can one Usborne book cover all that? The whole idea started because, with five children, I wouldn’t put up with fussy eating. I told them that in other countries they eat sheep’s eyeballs and bears’ testicles. It’s just a matter of what you grow up used to eating. Man wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t been willing to do so. Consider what animals eat. Those which eat anything do best, including rats, pigs, gulls, pigeons – and Man.

My middle-class sheltered childhood has limited my horizons and my writing. We were certainly hard up as a family but I have never been down and out and never taken drugs. My mother used to correct my speech remorselessly and I in my turn have done the same with my children but it’s no longer important. In fact my middle daughter’s police colleagues call her ‘posh cop.’ Having an upper crust accent is a disadvantage in many walks of life and puts people off because they assume you consider yourself superior. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Experience is invaluable for a writer. My best stories come from first hand experience. One was about a very close classmate of mine. When she was eleven, her fifteen year-old brother abused her sexually. Her parents wouldn’t believe her. She had psychiatric help, which was a great stigma in those days. I was young and innocent and didn’t understand what she was talking about at the time. She disappeared and I never heard from her again. It was only in retrospect that I realised the trauma she must have gone through.

Another prize-winning story was triggered by my sister, who was schizophrenic. It’s unbelievable how little the National Health Service will help mentally ill people. Care in the community may be economically attractive for a government but it can be disastrous for families. There have been many occasions when Imogen was unstable and she would attack my mother with the bread knife. My mother was afraid to be alone with her and walked the streets of Oxford waiting for my father to come home from work. And just imagine later, how my poor sister would have felt if she had killed Mother. In her sane moments Imogen could, to her great distress, see herself for what she was but her voices were compulsive and overcame all reason or sense of reality. In many ways mental illness is far worse than physical illness because people don’t know how to react and fear the mentally ill. There is still stigma here although essentially it is caused by a chemical imbalance and not the sufferer’s fault. Imogen died in her forties after a massive heart attack, possibly due to all the drugs she was on.

I think maternal love is the strongest love of all. I have always put my children first. It’s in a mother’s nature. I still want to put things right for them even though they are now adults. My husband is much better at letting them get on with their own lives.

I don’t think I have ever been motivated by the search for power. I would hate to make decisions, which affect people’s lives. I have an older brother who is very forceful and happy to make decisions regardless of whether they are right or wrong. Respect is more important to me. Self-respect. Even now that my husband is resigned to my writing, he never reads it except when I have computer disasters and need him to sort it out. He never comments on my work and this upsets me because, if the situation were reversed, I would read his work, praise what I liked and say nothing if I didn’t so from that, in spite of all my modest successes, as far as his views of my writing are concerned, I draw my conclusions.

I have fewer nightmares now. I used to have many really bizarre ones involving moving material on escalators. I also worry that I won’t be able to cope in certain situations or whether I will remember things I should.

There are tight limits on my compassion. I give my family my all and that’s not something I wish to change because, apart from them, I resent anything that leaves me with less time to write.

My religious values have changed over the years. I was brought up to believe in God and never even blasphemed until I reached my twenties but now I agree with Richard Dawkins that there is no logical reason to believe in Him. If I were in a situation where belief and family conflicted, I would put my family first. However, on the all too rare occasions I go to church, I still enjoy the atmosphere, the stained glass windows, the choir and the traditional hymns of my childhood and though I may not logically believe, it doesn’t stop me from calling on Him – It – this external force - in moments of crisis so I defend anyone’s right to believe in God or a god if it gives them comfort and support and helps them to live a better life.

I’m now becoming a grumpy old woman. I may be more tolerant of people’s beliefs but I’m less tolerant of their foibles and more inclined to let life’s little irritations get to me.

The older I become, the more I realise that my most longstanding friends are the best ones: those from childhood, university and the parents of my children’s friends through school. We have so many precious common experiences and can freely confide in each other. My own golden rules are never to betray a confidence and never to borrow money or lend it.

I am concerned about my pension because, following advice, I opted out of my pension fund when I taught part-time. We haven’t been able to put much money aside so the future worries me. I just hope I will have enough for basic food and to be able to travel. Nothing stimulates me like foreign lands. Different races and environments make me re-examine my assumptions about life and teach me never to take anything for granted.

My mother and I were very disparate. I was never the daughter she wanted me to be. She would have liked me to be more demonstrative than I felt comfortable with. I couldn’t say I love you on cue even though I did and miss her now. Her death was my worst moment because I fluffed the chance to say it all convincingly. My father was also a disappointment to her. He wasn’t ambitious and failed to get the brilliant job she hoped for. My brother was much more dynamic and ambitious and achieved far beyond his academic abilities. Being the oldest and a son, in the eyes of their generation he was much more important than my sister and me. Although I didn’t register that as a child, it brushed off on my character. Tom could do everything and my parents always turned to him in times of crisis so I never took responsibility because it was never expected of me. I think parents always expect the most of their eldest child, which often makes them more capable of taking responsibility. In spite of this I have muddled my way through life with my family and a husband who is far from dynamic, thank God and has probably been the making of me.

Bringing up my children has been the most satisfying thing in my life so far, but writing has given me a new, absorbing direction and I savour being able to totally immerse myself in my work and being answerable to no one. I like to think I shall still be there for my family when they need me and I am looking forward to being a granny – a good granny - but it will not be the be all and end all of my life and I will make sure that I still have plenty of time for writing.

If I had a portrait in the National Gallery I would like it to be flattering so I would doll up to the nines and wear a really flamboyant hat. There’s nothing like a hat for transforming your image.

Footnote: my daughter wishes to make it clear that she has never eaten bears’ testicles.