My parents stayed together for the sake of their kids and it screwed me up – I’ve had two failed marriages and wish my folks got divorced

• Glenys Roberts’s parents stayed together despite being at war with each other 
• READ MORE: I’m unmarried and childless at 54! Kate Spicer asks if her parents’ messy divorce ‘screwed up’ her adult relationship

The last thing my father said to me before he married his childhood sweetheart, a year after my mother died, was: ‘I should have married her in the first place — then I would have had better children.’

Thanks for the memory, Dad. But then looking back, I remember few occasions when all was blissful harmony between my parents in their 45-year marriage.

Nor was the dig at me unusual. My younger brother got off relatively lightly, but then my father always wanted a boy. 

Despite the toxic atmosphere at home, my parents, Stanley and Marjorie, stayed together through thick and thin, probably because that was the way things were in those days. 

But far from inspiring me to embrace a lifelong marriage, their grim endurance made me determined never to relive the suffocating claustrophobia of an innocent child trapped in a war zone.

Journalist Glenys Roberts’s (pictured) parents remained married despite being at war with each other

I have been married twice, but not for long. Throughout my adult life, the minute it looked like history might be repeating itself, I headed straight for the door. 

Even when I had my daughter, it never occurred to me she would be better off living with two unhappy parents, rather than dividing her time between our separate households.

I thought of this reading, in Femail Magazine earlier this month, Kate Spicer’s explanation of why she could never commit. Her parents divorced when she was just six and she never wanted to repeat the painful experience of abandonment again — so avoided marriage and children altogether.

However, it’s not inevitable that children are happier if their parents stay together. I spent most of my childhood sick in bed with the worry of it.

I still can’t bear the memory of the drinking, the insults, my father’s bombast, the doggedly stubborn protests on my mother’s side, the awful silent meals when no one spoke, even to pass the salt. My mother died 30 years ago but the misery of our home life is as fresh as yesterday.

I was too young to remember the witty, handsome man Dad must once have been. My mother married him in 1937 when she was a 23-year-old secretary and he a 27-year-old rising star in a high street bank. They shared an interest in golf and surfing.

Two years later, the world went to war and, by all accounts, Dad became a changed man. I vividly recall his return from war destroying our peaceful household for ever.

My mother’s Saturday job was to have a steaming pair of grilled kippers ready on the kitchen table for my father, who would return cold and tired from watching his football game. One evening, when I was about seven, he forgot his house key.

In the minute Mum left the room to open the front door, the cat got the kippers. My enraged father turned on her and then on the cat, which he threw through the kitchen window even though it was closed.

When I was nine I remember pleading: ‘Please stop arguing!’ ‘We’re not arguing, we’re discussing,’ they answered as one. The only time they ever agreed on anything.

Glenys pictured with husband Doug Hayward and their daughter Polly Hayward, aged five months, at Polly’s christening 

My father’s go-to position was to humiliate my mother; my mother’s to humiliate him. She treated him like a naughty child, sending him to bed without supper if he drank.

She also refused him sex, leading to dreadful rows, which you could not fail to hear through the bedroom wall of our suburban semi.

Dad responded by treating her like a halfwit. ‘Poor little woman, not a brain in her head,’ he would say to me in a half whisper, obviously designed for her to hear. ‘She’d be nothing without me.’

This about a woman who had more education than him and had won all the school prizes.

Was it because he felt inferior that he treated her like a domestic slave? I still relive the ridiculous row when he refused her a washing machine. ‘What would she do all day if she didn’t have the housework?’ he asked me.

Seriously, Dad, she loved music, tennis, travelling.

No wonder I am determined never to be treated like a punching bag as she was.

And then there is the issue of fidelity. When I was 13, my father started confiding in me about his crushes on his secretaries. ‘Don’t tell your mother, she wouldn’t understand,’ he begged. 

I suspect he only ever cheated on her in his imagination, but she wouldn’t have appreciated how we stood for hours in the rain outside a mansion block in Marylebone hoping to get a glimpse of his latest fancy.

He also fantasised about his female clients, including the actress Glynis Johns and the dancer Gillian Lynne. His serial crushes have made me forever suspicious of adultery; I am out of the door if I get so much as a hint of it.

Glenys’s parents Marjorie and Stanley Roberts with dog Robin. Married in 1937, they stayed together through thick and thin despite the toxic atmosphere 

Far from feeling pleased that they stuck together, I grew up wishing my parents would have the courage to call it a day instead of wasting all our lives on trying to keep some guttering flame alight.

But no, my father was miserable, my mother was miserable and my brother and I were miserable, too. My brother has never married and I have always wondered whether our horrible home life put him off.

Children never dared reason with their parents in those days; we kept up appearances as they did.

However, the minute I left for university I never wanted to spend time in their depressing house again. At 21 I got a job in journalism and married a fellow journalist.

Oh how I tried to learn from my mother to love, honour and obey — as was still expected in the early 1960s. Yet somehow, claustrophobia immediately set in. 

It wasn’t my husband’s fault that the bell was tolling for the end of our union even as I walked down the aisle. I ran away from that marriage after a couple of years, thankful there were no children involved.

I was so determined not to marry again that, in the 1970s, I had my daughter out of wedlock, long before those things were fashionable. Would my relationship with her father have lasted if we hadn’t made the mistake of later tying the knot to please my mother-in-law?

Doug Hayward was a brilliant tailor who made suits for celebrities including Michael Caine and Roger Moore. He was the funniest man I have ever met and I adored him the moment I was introduced to him by a mutual friend.

Yet almost immediately after our wedding, he started running his fingers along the top of the pictures asking me why I hadn’t dusted them. Are there really women out there who make it a priority to take a duster to places no one can see or for the most part reach?

I suppose there are, because I come from a long line of highly domesticated women who could knock up a wedding dress out of a pair of old curtains and make the Sunday roast last a week.

Marjorie and Stanley’s wedding day in 1937. With a shared interest in golf and surfing, Marjorie was a 23-year-old secretary and Stanley a 27-year-old rising star in a high street bank

I admired their skills, but they all died early, worked to death by their unappreciative husbands. I didn’t intend to be one of them.

When I decided to call it a day after about five years of punitive domesticity, it was the worst thing I have ever had to do.

I loved my husband, I loved our daughter, I loved our home — but I had to end it or I would have had my mother’s wretched life.

‘Shall I wear the red or the blue tonight, darling?’ I would say. ‘Who cares?’ Doug would retort. ‘They’re not interested in you, they only want to see me.’

When I tried to write, he ripped the paper out of the typewriter and made me iron his shirt collars instead. I always did them wrong. Not on purpose, but have you ever tried to get the creases out of a shirt collar?

Our bitter divorce was finalised when my daughter was eight. She used to tell me she was proud of the split; we weren’t hypocrites and she knew we both loved her.

As for me, I was free. I wasn’t hurting anyone if I wanted a fling.

My best relationships have been with men I didn’t marry. Monty Python star Terry Gilliam was obsessed with his cartoons and if I’d forgotten to shop for supper, he would boil up a tin of condensed milk to make his favourite toffee.

The artist Adrian George only wanted to paint and could knock up a curry from whatever was in the cupboard.

The relationships ran their course and we parted friends.

Glenys as a child with her father. When Glenys was 13, her father started confiding in her about his crushes on his secretaries

The inexplicable thing is that when my daughter’s father got Alzheimer’s in the 1990s, I took care of him and enjoyed doing it — but then I wasn’t married to him.

I visited him and his carers several times a day. Just four months before he died, in 2017, we celebrated what would have been our 37th wedding anniversary in a local restaurant.

At the funeral, the priest offered his condolences to his widow and child. ‘Father,’ I said, ‘I have a confession to make. I’m not his widow. I haven’t been married to him for 30 years.’

‘Yes you are,’ he said. ‘Neither of you married again and you did your duty by him.’

I have always treasured those words because, deep down, I still believe marriage should be for ever. But why, when I witnessed my parents’ long marriage end in such unholy deadlock?

Towards the end of her life, my mother had a stroke and ended up in hospital. My father visited her most days but more to impress the nurses, with whom he flirted outrageously.

She was still a natural beauty but he had her hair done up like Barbara Cartland by the hospital staff and went back to his golf.

So desperate was I for them to have a loving relationship that I had architectural plans drawn up to make their garage into a hospital wing for her.

By then I had a successful writing career and wanted a harmonious home life, too. Mum would be able to wheel herself into the garden and enjoy the yellow roses she had planted and we would be a family again.

However, when I visited her in hospital and told her the plan, she mustered more emotion than I had ever seen in her. There was no way she was going back to that prison. So she remained in hospital till she died.

Glenys with her brother Alan. Alan has never married and Glenys has always wondered whether their horrible home life is what put him off 

At the funeral, my father snatched his hand away from mine. It was the undertaker who put his arm round me.

Then Dad went home, dug up her yellow roses and burnt them on the bonfire. I didn’t ask him why. I wanted to believe he loved her so much he couldn’t bear to live with any memories.

But then the old girlfriend surfaced, providing the clue to the whole thing. Dad had met her in North Wales, where they both lived in their early 20s.

He had begged her to come to London with him, where he would make his name. She turned him down. My beautiful mother, on the other hand, later accepted this economic pact.

All these decades on, my own daughter loves being married, despite her parents’ divorce. Meanwhile, I am all the happier for being unmarried, despite my parents sticking together.

Part of me still believes in lasting love, though, even though all the evidence suggests the contrary.

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