Why ARE people (even Saint Mary) so thoughtless towards childless women like me?

As Mary Berry says having children gave her an advantage that Delia didn’t have...

UNTIL now, the unkindest thing Mary Berry had said to another woman was that she had a soggy bottom. Never one to get personal, the nation’s second most loved grandmother — after the Queen — would, of course, be referring to a failed Bakewell tart by one of the Bake Off contestants.

While her fellow judge Paul Hollywood was left to be the nasty one, Mary was always kind and encouraging, especially to the failed female bakers reduced to tears when their Victoria sponge fell flat.

So it provoked astonishment when, on Monday, sweet, saintly Mary revealed a somewhat thoughtless side to her character.

In a panel discussion in London, An Evening With Mary Berry, she suggested she had a culinary advantage over Delia Smith because she has children.

‘I always felt that Delia, who I think is absolutely brilliant, hasn’t had the advantage of having children like I have, because you don’t half get the truth,’ she said.

‘As I’ve got children I’m very lucky because they will say: “Don’t do that again, Mum.” ’

A comment like that from one woman to another — childless — woman is enough to curdle creme fraiche at 50 paces. Mary and Delia have been friends for decades, so was it a mistake?

Surely Mary would have known that Delia had once been desperate to be a mother. The latter has said very little on the subject, but enough to hint at the heartache beneath her calm exterior.

‘ Yes, I would have loved to have children,’ she said in a magazine interview. For reasons known only to her and her husband, ‘it wasn’t to be’.

Any woman, like me, who longed to become a mother, tried and failed, knows the enduring heartache that it adds to your life — and how a thoughtless comment can kick open the wound in an instant.

The last thing we need is the smug mum brigade claiming they have the jump on us because, as Mary said, we ‘ haven’t had the advantage of having children’.

With one unfortunate comment, benevolent Mary turns out to be a ‘frenemy’. And not just to Delia, but to all childless women.

Delia did not choose to be childless but, like so many of us, she accepted the hand fate had dealt her and got on with her life.

AND in her case that meant turning herself into a multimillionairess and the UK’s best-selling cookery writer, with more than 21 million copies sold. A bit of frenemy jealousy there, perhaps, Mary?

I thought that we had left these careless views about childless women behind in my mother’s generation.

Back then, a woman without children was described as ‘ barren’, incomplete: it was always her fault, there was no such thing as male infertility.

They were sad aunts, to be pitied. But the next generation of childless women, including Germaine Greer, started to become very successful, rich and happy. Enviable, even.

Mothers who rightly took time away from their jobs to raise their children found themselves left behind on the career ladder, and before long pity was morphing into resentment.

The mystery of Mary’s remark is that both women are so successful. So why can’t she just be happy for Delia, that she has made a fantastic go of her life as a childless, and happy, woman?

Would she have made such a careless remark about a woman’s weight, race or sexuality? No, yet somehow childless women are still seen as fair game.

Has it escaped her attention that the world’s top chefs are still chiefly men, often with wives to look after their children?

They did not get their Michelin stars by parading home-made spag bol under their picky broods’ noses. They got them through hard graft and talent.

Underlying such comments is something far more pernicious. It is a form of ‘childless shaming’, the implication that women without children are inferior.

We’re like mille-feuille without the custard, layer upon layer of lightweight, meaningless pastry missing that one vital ingredient, what it really takes to be a proper woman — even though one woman in four falls into this category, being childless by choice or, more often, because of factors beyond her control.

Add that to the majority of gay people who also don’t have kids and you have a significant minority of what some mothers regard as incomplete human beings.

The notion that a childless woman feels human tragedy less keenly than a parent is one I have certainly encountered. I recently attended a dinner party where a casual comment from a tearful mum of three made me smart.

We were discussing the plight of starving children in Somalia, as you do while enjoying a threecourse feast washed down with wine so costly it would have kept a poor African family for a year.

I pointed out that while the people needed our urgent help, the Somali government was one of the most corrupt in the world, starving its own people.

She replied: ‘ You wouldn’t understand; you don’t feel things Blessed: Berry with daughter Annabel and grandchildren Louis, Hobie and Atalanta the way I do. You’re not a mother.’ I suspect that if a man had made a similar comment, she wouldn’t have thought to mention whether he had children. She would just have considered him brave and well-informed.

Some women do feel inherently that motherhood has given them moral superiority — that somehow they care more and are rounded decision-makers, able to make the right choices.

It seeps into the psyche of even the most intelligent people. Didn’t Theresa May’s rival for the Tory leadership, Andrea Leadsom, suggest she was a better candidate to lead the country as she was a mother of three?

‘I have children who are going to have children who will be directly part of what happens next,’ she said.

That was shortly before she withdrew from the leadership race because of the effect the publicity was having on — you guessed it — her children.

PERHAPS it is no accident that the two most powerful people in the country, Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon, are both childless. As is the leader of the Tories in Scotland, ruth Davidson. And the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Could Delia have been on to something when she opined: ‘Maybe one of the reasons I’ve been so successful in my career is that I don’t have children.’

There are compensations for the army of childless women after all.

Yes, Mary Berry has her new show, Mary Berry Everyday, on BBC 2, which is a poor replacement for Bake Off.

On her own, without Paul, Mel and Sue, she is as appetising as a burnt Victoria sponge.

And what’s the betting that after her unkind comment on Delia, Mary’s children will be saying: ‘Don’t do that again, Mum.’