My mother her lovers and me

HER father was a drunk, while her mother's sexual rivalry led to an affair that ended in tragedy – yet author Julia Blackburn insists her memoir is a homage to family

When she was 13, Julia Blackburn's father dedicated a poem to her, which she often called to mind when in need of solace. Staring off into the next room – as she'll do for much of our conversation – she quietly recites For a Child.


"And have I put upon your shoulders then,
What in myself I have refused to bear,
My own and the confusion of dead men,

You of all these, my daughter, made my heir,
The furies and the griefs of which I stayed
Quite unaware?

Perhaps because I did not with my tongue
State these sharp energies into the mind,
They are the shadows you grew up among;

You suffer darkness because I was blind,
Take up the chaoses that in myself
Were unconfined.

If I should say, I also know the tart
Flavour of other men, as my excuse,
And took into myself their broken heart,

That's not the point, abuse remains abuse;
May chaos though have light within your mind
And be of use."

"This poem is tremendously important for me. In times of trouble I'd say, I've got the chaos, but OK, I had to use it in some way. I had a funny kind of eccentric stability through things, somehow."

Stability? Is she serious? Blackburn's new book, The Three of Us, recounts such a disturbing tale that the first words I utter to this woman I've never met are: "What a relief to see you looking so happy and sane!" Laughing, she asks: "The book has jolly bits to it, doesn't it?"

By her own description, she's "an apparently prim English lady of a certain age". Agreed, though I'd place the petite writer at the boho end of the scale. Still, her vowels are precise, and together with the dignity of her bearing, present an intriguing contrast to the story of an upbringing as tempestuous and dramatic as any Restoration tragedy.

She does look every inch the author of several acclaimed volumes of biography and two novels short-listed for the Orange Prize. She does not look like someone who, while still a teenager, took up with her mother's ex-lover, a man whose suicide left "the mark of Cain" upon her.

There are other dissonances, such as her unfinished sentences, but the most notable is her revelation that, after years of being watched and sexually assessed by her mother and others, she was middle-aged before she felt able to look people in the eye. She tells me this while staring off into space, only turning to face me after full paragraphs, as if by way of punctuation.

Perhaps that's a professional tic, fostered by spending all day thinking and then rendering ideas into prose. When she does look at me, her gaze is friendly and unflinching. But whenever I bring up a moment of emotional intensity, of which there are many in this memoir, she responds by laughing. I'm left pondering the difference between nervous laughter and a chuckle acknowledging the dramatic incongruity of one's circumstances. In her case, I'm still unsure.

Born on 12 August, 1948, Blackburn entered a house in conflict. Her parents had met in 1943 when Thomas, still married to his first wife, sought a companion to go rock climbing in Wales. Rosalie de Meric had never been climbing, but one of her admirable qualities was a ferocious courage, and she bravely scrambled up the hills behind Thomas, winning his heart in the process.

Soon after his divorce they wed, but the union was stormy and tainted by infidelities from the beginning. Once, armed with a carving knife to make good his murderous threats, Thomas chased his bride round a table. An alcoholic, he was also addicted to barbiturates that, "combined with the alcohol made him increasingly violent and so mad he began to growl and bark like a dog".

Despite his outrageous behaviour, Blackburn is endlessly forgiving of her father. He only tried to kill Rosalie, after all, but her mother's sin was employing Julia as a human shield, knowing he'd never harm his child. "He was disastrous in so many ways," writes Blackburn, "and yet I never felt threatened by him. I could be frightened of the madness and the drunken rages, but I never doubted the honesty of his relationship with me and that was what really mattered."

Not so her mother. "She rarely got drunk and didn't use prescription drugs, and she was sociable and sane and flirtatious and I was always afraid of her. Right from the start I was her sister and her confidante and, eventually, her sexual rival, as the boundaries between us became increasingly dangerous and unclear."

Rosalie wanted a baby, but when it arrived she felt appalled by its neediness. "She felt that she hadn't given birth to a new life, but instead had given birth to herself." This lack of boundaries led to a breathtaking roster of inappropriate behaviour, from showing the child nude pictures of herself taken by a former lover to a graphic description of her miscarriage.

When Blackburn hit puberty, Rosalie went into overdrive. Sounding like Edina haranguing Saffy in Absolutely Fabulous, she'd ask: "Do you know the facts of life, darling? Do you know what men do?" She confided that she faked orgasm with Thomas, and stuck her prised-apart bottom in Julia's face to illustrate a complaint about post-pregnancy piles. (This all had such a lasting effect on Blackburn that she couldn't tell her own daughter the facts of life, hoping she'd accumulate them somewhere else.)

Evincing the wry humour that elevates this book from the rank and file of misery memoirs, Blackburn writes: "After she had explained everything she could think of explaining on the subject of heterosexual behaviour, my mother moved to homosexuality." When Blackburn was 11, Rosalie decided it was time to show her a dildo and describe how it might be employed by lesbians.

A year or so later Blackburn's parents split up. Her father moved in with Peggy, who became his next wife, while her mother filled their Putney home with a succession of lodgers. They were not only expected to pay rent, but to meet her sexual and emotional needs. With each new arrival Rosalie pronounced herself in love, and such was her jealous insecurity that whatever Blackburn did – even walk into the kitchen eating a cheese sandwich, she jokes – she was accused of flirtatious behaviour.

It's true that several lodgers were attracted to the blossoming adolescent, but it was number seven, Geoffrey, who changed everything. He was an art teacher prone to depression, in his late forties and with four young children from previous marriages.

After many scenes, Geoffrey ended his sexual relationship with Rosalie, though they remained close, even sharing a bed. It was a painful time for her mother, but Blackburn had begun travelling and having complicated relationships of her own. She tried keeping her distance, hanging on until she was old enough to leave home for good.

In 1966, desperate to salvage the romance, Rosalie insisted that Blackburn be like a daughter to Geoffrey so that she could be like a wife. The more they were together, the more Blackburn felt an affinity with Geoffrey, who was also being bullied by her mother's over-sexualised ways.

Meanwhile, Blackburn embarked on a relationship with another of the lodgers, Herman. Rosalie claimed to have chosen him for the teenager, and he would become her second husband after Rosalie's death in 1999. Does she find it at all ironic that, at the end of the day, her mad mother chose her husband? Blackburn wrinkles her nose. "Her motives were slightly complicated," she says, referring to the fact that Herman was brought in to distract her from Geoffrey. "But I do see that sometimes the end explains the beginning," she adds.

The very day she was to set off on holiday with Herman, Blackburn ran off with Geoffrey instead. He'd been pursuing her, insisting: "The only way you can ever escape from your mother is by living with me."

Why did she fall for his line? "In a way it was correct, because it meant breaking all the taboos – then I couldn't go home. And he seemed very stable and seemed to provide an adult way of life which I could step into. It was almost like being the adult daughter in the family. I was closer in age to his children than him, so I suppose that was the thing. It was certainly an argument that I bought. In retrospect I was wishing we could have been friends, that he could have been a mentor figure. That would have suited me much more easily."

But why become his lover? Why not keep him at a distance? "Although I was precocious in some ways, I was obedient in other ways. He gave a clear line of escape. There was also the thing of, if you keep being accused of a crime you haven't committed, of which you feel innocent and are being told you're guilty, it's a darn sight easier to be guilty. I felt I'd been accused, if I even talked to a man, of trying to seduce him. So that, and I also had this terribly precocious 'Let's talk about literature' style, so I felt that I understood his mind and that this was a soul partner. I was also bound to him because we both were suffering under my mother's domination."

Ultimately the relationship foundered. The age gap made socialising with peers awkward, though at weekends Geoffrey's children would stay and Blackburn played with them, reverting to her teenage self instead of trying to act grown up. But her mother wouldn't speak to her, and her father wrote threatening legal action against Geoffrey for "gross moral turpitude".

Mostly, though, her heart wasn't in it. She writes: "I didn't feel bound to Geoffrey in any way. I knew that as soon as I was strong enough I would leave him and set off into the world, and I was confident that when the moment came he would give me his blessing." Blackburn couldn't have been more wrong. In 1969, when she initiated a split Geoffrey remained calm, proposing a trial separation for contemplation. He went off to his country cottage, promising to see her in six weeks' time. Instead, he killed himself.

"I didn't resent him and for a long time I didn't get angry at him for taking his life and leaving the whole bunch of us behind, but afterwards I did get the feeling that this was not a very good move on his part," she says with typical understatement.

Geoffrey's suicide bound Blackburn to her mother more closely than ever, though they would not discuss what happened for another 30 years. "I had this one thing that I needed to sort out with my mother because it kept going around in circles. The sexual rivalry and running off with Geoffrey, and him dying. If he hadn't died we could have sorted things out much more easily. But his death meant I felt that I had blood on my hands and that I was bound to my mother by guilt."

Having her own daughter in 1978 inspired Blackburn to reach out to her mother. "I thought with a daughter the old wound could be mended and she could be a grandmother in a way that she'd never been able to be a mother. I wanted to give it a second run. She was my only family member and I wanted to resolve our differences and didn't know how. But we just happened to have a dead body between us."

Mother and daughter were perfectly civil to one another for years, maintaining a pleasant but super-ficial friendship, and Rosalie was a good granny. "She had a couple of wobbly bits with my daughter when she got slightly inappropriate, but basically she didn't think my daughter was herself, nor did she think that my son was a potential lover, even though she was very charming to him because he was male."

Apart from Herman, who remained on the periphery of her new life and who, with his own wife and children, occasionally visited Blackburn and her family, no-one else knew about her past. "The story was so huge and complicated that I could never properly tell anybody, not even my husband. At one point when I was writing Daisy Bates in the Desert I went to a therapist to talk about childhood and started looking at it a bit, but I didn't even know the whole story. I hadn't read my diaries or my parents' diaries, had not seen the whole trajectory of it. It was so damn complicated that one feels ashamed of it in a way."

Then Rosalie came to stay with Blackburn during the last month of her life and the two women, mellower, more accepting and more willing to speak honestly, talked out their differences. The result has been liberating and Blackburn's relief is palpable. "I couldn't have written this if I hadn't had this time with my mother. It wasn't that we hated each other – it was, as my father noted, as if a ratchet had got stuck in my childhood, which couldn't get unstuck. The fact that it was unstuck meant that it didn't matter (anymore], and that's the miracle."

At the end, Rosalie faced death as she'd faced the mountain: courageously. "She was totally unafraid. It was very much like a birth; she was going towards something and in the context of being loved and not in pain, and it was a very moving thing."

Blackburn herself contemplated obliteration at the height of her terrible troubles. "But it occurred to me that if I'd fallen apart, my mother would have made a whole myth of me and my father would have written a ghastly poem about, you know," she adopts a pompous literary voice, "the daughter who I loved is now since dead, and that would have been a disaster because then they'd have taken possession of me completely, as part of their mythology."

Now they're in your mythology, instead? She laughs again. "I think it's a kind of homage to them, for all its tales of horror. That they lived their lives and did both have very good endings, which I think, more and more, is important in life. And they did their best."

The Three of Us by Julia Blackburn is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £16.99.