There's More to Families Than Meets The Eye

Looking way, way back to when I first met my wife's her parents, I now realise that the writing was on the wall for what later transpired. Her parents, on the surface at least, seemed friendly enough. However, in the end there were disturbing undercurrents which left a lot to be desired.

My biggest fault was I was from a large working class, council house family of limited means. We didn't have any of the trappings of my future parents in law, like their own house, a car, telephone, colour tv, etc etc etc.

But my parents were good people and we had a home full of love aug- mented by the basics, to sustain life, even if only just.

My wife's parents had their own house, though only a two bedroom semi detached in suburbia. Her father was a professional police officer at a big city headquarters. Her mother was a simple shop assistant.

They were lower middle class, or upper working class if you prefer. Due to her father's job they had status, at least in their own minds if not the community. They were what we used to call two penny millionaires. It was all about keeping up appearances.

My wife's mother had great aspirations for her eldest daughter, wanting her to marry a doctor or a bank manager, somebody with some level of standing and respect in the community. In other words, her mother was an upper working class, uneducated, shallow, aspirational snob.

What her mother wanted was to be better than everybody else through her daughter. It was important to be able to boast to the neighbours "Oh our Jill has married a very important doctor you know."

My ex used to tell me that when she took a boy home to meet her parents, if her mother did not approve, she would sit and pick her nose in front of the boy to put him off her daughter. Disgusting. And it would not surprise me to know she used to flick those bogies from her nose at the boy for good measure.

My future father in law was certainly long suffering of the woman's stupidity, as I was to learn over the ensuing years. And far too often for my liking, I was a victim of her socially disagreeable ways.

My future wife was studying at university, about fifty miles from home, and her parents were over for a visit. Jill, as I shall call the woman who became my wife and mother of three children, was in her final year of studies for a degree in fine art. And I have to say she was an exceedingly fine artist. She was also very dedicated to the point that the only way I could get to spend some time with her was to agree to be a model. This I was more than happy to do, even if posing by an open window for hours on end did cause me to get an attack of what is called Bell's Palsy. The final result made it all worth while.

We were all stood in Jill's shared student flat admiring the portrait of me when her mother piped up as she gave me a dirty look, "Well, I suppose you can always change the head later Jill." Fortunately, although it was an awkward moment, we got past it.

A year later Jill and I were living in London and her parents came to visit us there. We had decided to get married and her parents immediately offered to pay for the wedding, but at a cost of controlling the whole thing. The future result of that condition was lost on me at the time we acquiesced, but we would know soon enough.

At the wedding, in 1977, I discovered to my horror that hardly anybody beyond my parents from my side had been invited, half a dozen people in total, including four very good friends of mine. Out of a guest list of 150 that really wasn't very much at all. I guess my future parents in law reasoned that since they were paying for the wedding, it would be mostly their family and friends that would get to enjoy it.

On the day of the wedding, unbeknownst to me, my parents went to Jill's parents house and it did not go down well. Jill's father asked my father what he would like to drink. Now at that time my father had a serious kidney problem and he really wasn't a big drinker. In an effort to control the volume of liquid he took on board my father asked for a short, a whiskey and water on ice. Jill's father apparently replied "Oh will you now, well you can have a pint of beer like all the other men." It was delivered, according to my lovely mother, as a put down.

To make matters worse, when everyone left Jill's parents' house to go to the wedding, my father forgot his trilby. When her parents returned home Jill's mother threw the smart hat in the bin. Now my mother and father never mentioned this at the time so as not to spoil our day, and I only found out from my mother almost twenty years later, after Jill and I got divorced.

The other memorable thing that happened at our wedding was that because Jill's father delayed us leaving the church for the reception for photographs, by the time Jill and I got to the reception hall, all the food had gone! That was because long before we got there all of Jill's extended family had rushed the buffet and cleared it with mountains un-necessary food piled high on plates. Jill and I had to go round begging her extended family if we could have some food for the bride and groom. What class.

Over the ensuing years Jill's mother never lost an opportunity to put me and my family down, as if she and her husband were well above us. I well remember one time when Jill's father invited us to some sort of shindig at police headquarters, long before we could even afford to buy a car.

Since the police HQ was quite a trek involving two buses and a train we had a problem. Now at that time Jill's father had bought a second hand Volkswagen Beetle for when his son had his birthday and passed his test.

In the meantime my father in law spent every weekend doing up the old car. So, when we got that invite it seemed logical for us to ask if we could borrow the Beetle to make the trip to the police HQ for the party.

Well, even though I was a highly qualified and experienced driver, including heavy good trucks, Jill's insipid mother refused to let us drive the Beetle on the grounds that I might crash it and wreck it. So, buses and trains it was. Now I come to the funny, not to say hilarious, part.

Several weeks later Jill's brother had his birthday and passed his test. To celebrate he took his friends out for a beer. On the way home it was raining and Jill's brother, through inexperience and too much alcohol, lost control of the car at a roundabout and crashed it into an electric sub station, completely destroying the station and the car and almost killing all of his mates. I call that Karma.

Still on the subject of Jill's brother, his parents had plans for him to follow in his father's footsteps. They felt that they had discovered the secret to a successful life and wanted the males in the family to follow suit. A uniform was what you needed so that people could look up to you. Jill's brother applied for a job in the force and abysmally failed the entrance exam.

In time the boy got a job in the civil construction business as a theodolite Johnny working on motorways. He met a nice girl and got married and his parents sold them their house at half the asking price on the open market.

Unfortunately Jill's brother had by this time developed a weakness for consuming large quantities of alcohol, in other words he was an alcoholic. This led to a breakdown in the marriage not long after the wedding and a downward spiral into a life of complete disarray and poverty.

One day Jill's mother called in to see her son, not knowing how far he had fallen. She caught her son totally naked in bed with a barmaid from the local pub lying next to him. Bed linen was strewn all across the bedroom floor and all she could hear was a loud drunken snoring sound.

This was a far cry from the days when her son was a young teenage boy. She used to get up in the night to go into his bedroom to straighten his body out. She would stand at the bottom of the bed pulling on his ankles until his legs were completely straight! Loco or what?

Well, this time she dragged the poor barmaid out of bed screaming all sorts of horrible insults and promising to make her pay for her audacity to screw around with her son, a married man.

Jill's mum then went round to the pub where the girl worked and demanded to speak to the manager. When the manager came over to see her she told him to fire the girl who was nothing more than a 'dirty harlot!' This took place in a bar full of local customers. For this the manager ordered Jill's mother and father to get out before he called the police. The poor barmaid was so traumatised by being humiliated in such a public way she had to leave her job. Meanwhile the woman's wayward son sank even deeper into an abyss of his own making.

Jill's brother finally reached the pit of his fall, poor lad, when his other sister, not my ex, called in to see how he was doing. She found him in a kitchen, once a model of fine quality and beauty, in ruins. All of the kitchen cupboards had been stripped out and sold, along with all domestic appliances, all to pay for yet more alcohol. All that remained was two taps sticking out from the wall. Her brother was on the floor in his underwear, frying an egg inside a biscuit tin propped up on two house bricks standing on end, with a lit candle in between providing the necessary heat. Oh the shame of it all.

Well in time I lost track what happened to that boy I sincerely hope he found a way out of that mess, I think he did. It wasn't entirely his fault. Personally I blame the parents to a very large degree.

Well, back to me and my in laws. My mother in law never lost the opportunity to put me down if she ever saw me making any progress in life. You would have thought that they would have been happy to see their daughter's husband doing well in growing and supporting his family, their daughter and grand children. Not so.

After I completed my first degree my mother in law could not stand to see me proud of what I had achieved. "It's not a proper degree though is it Liam."

"Why? What is a proper degree?"

"Well it's not from Oxford or Cambridge is it?" she said snootily.

"Well you better be careful mother in law, neither is your daughter's degree from Oxford or Cambridge." I replied.

I would dearly loved to have said something like "Says the woman who can barely write her own name or add two plus two." But I thought better of it, not wanting to cause offence to my wife or her father.

And that was how we spent our lives, she insulting me and me treading on eggshells so as not to cause offence. The fact was I got a far better result than her daughter, my ex, and a darn sight better than anybody else in her family. The problem with my mother in law was she was all mouth and trousers, all show and no substance. It was all about putting on appearances, with nothing to support the impression they tried to give that they were hard working, intelligent respectable people. To make matters worse, the woman constantly found reason to hate on me.

My in laws had bought a house on a mountain side in Italy, near the mediterranean coast. And everybody in the family was invited over for a free holiday, everybody except for me and Jill. It was a dig at Jill for having married me, a lowly working class scruff. And yet, I had put myself through university twice and was earning a darn sight more than Jill's parents ever had combined. And thanks to my career success we lived in a beautiful detached house in half an acre of garden, with a live in nanny no less. So much for her uneducated snobbery.

In the end Jill's parents did have the last laugh I suppose. After my divorce, via which Jill had fleeced me, Jill was gifted a substantial amount of money by her parents. And that was half of the problem, Jill's parents rewarded failure.

In the end my parents in law played their part in alienating my three children from me with malicious tales about what a loser I was.

In later years my eldest daughter told me that when she was staying with her nana, Jill's mother had asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up, which is what grand parents usually do. However, when my daughter said she wanted to work in performing arts her nana replied snootily, "Well I don't know why, fat lot of good it has done your good for nothing father."

What was totally lost on my mother in law was that I had in fact had quite a successful career in the performing arts, in theatres, film and tv, not to mention my writing career and my musical career as a singer songwriter. And more to the point, I had earned decent money doing it all.

Looking back I realise that my ex mother in law was one of those people who could only put herself up by putting other people, preferably a lot more successful than her, down. The insufferable woman was almost illiterate and struggled even with basic maths. She was intellectually challenged and knew it, and she hated anybody smarter than her.

And I have to say my ex father in law was not much better. In the middle of my divorce he assaulted me with a deadly weapon whilst my five year old daughter clung on to my hand terrified. At last he had shown his true colours. And even when years later when he was at death's door and I telephoned to commiserate with him, he chose to insult me with recycled lies about me!

Despite my poor start in life I actually became highly qualified with two degrees and I was very successful in my career, with a far above average income.

Jill and I had a wonderful standard of living her parents could only dream about. However, I do believe that even had I become the Prime Minister of my country, it would not have been good enough for Jill's mother. She was never going to get over the fact that I came from a very poor working class family. Basically, I didn't have the breeding she demanded.

Ultimately my ex parents in law were lousy, failed parents of their own three children and wanted a second go by trying to parent their grand children. However, poisoning their grand children's hearts and minds against their biological father was not a good way to start that process of parenting.

Well, without wishing to sound in any way vindictive, the last time I saw my ex mother in law was a photograph of her with her mouth wide open catching flies as she appeared semi comatose, uttering "Ga ga ga ga goo." in some mental institute. Both she and her arrogant crashing bore of a husband have long since died and I am happy to have outlived them both.

Am I being too harsh, too judgemental? I do not believe I am. I put up with a lot of their crap over all the years I was married to their daughter and I sucked it up princess to avoid confrontation. So now it is my turn to have my say.

I am still estranged from at least two of my children and my ex parents in law had far too much to do with that. So I guess in the end nobody wins in the oft called game of 'Happy Families'.