‘Becoming a dad at 50 saved my life’

William Cash and his younger wife, Laura, on the redemptive joy of late fatherhood

My birth nightmare started around 1.45am on 26 January, when my wife, Laura, and I were following the signs to the Princess Royal Hospital, Telford, and found that the only slip road off the M54 to the hospital was closed due to overnight roadworks.

There was a diversion sign, which we followed. But after around two miles with no signs to the hospital, Laura and I started to panic. The contract ions were coming increasingly fast. When Laura typed the hospital postcode into the satnav, we were sent back to the roundabout we had just come from. At this point she was screaming. ‘Hold tight,’ I said. ‘We’re going through.’ I heard a loud thump as I drove over the traffic cones and headed at speed down an eerily empty M 54. After about half a mile, we reached the f lashing lights of roadworks. Next to a steamroller, a dozen beefy-looking road workers looked at us with bemused curiosity.

‘We have a life-and-death emergency,’ I said to the foreman. ‘My wife is about to give birth in the car. So please let us through.’

He refused, saying that ‘health and safety’ prevented him. I got out of the car and pleaded with the work team to let us through. ‘Don’t any of you have wives and children?’ I yelled. Then Laura’s waters broke. At this point, with my wife screaming and the road ahead blockaded, the full terror of the situation dawned upon me. It was 2am, we were trapped on the M54 and the birth of my son was now imminent. I called the‘ emergency’ maternity unit number on speakerphone, and they immediately called the police. A maternity nurse came on the line and started giving instructions to Laura to control her breathing and slow her contractions. Meanwhile, I was preparing for the worst: a birth on the M54.

Thankfully, the police arrived in minutes to give us a two-car escort to Telford hospital with blue lights flashing all the way. Laura gave birth to our son, Rex, within 10 minutes of arriving there.

What this perilous drama brought home was not just the lucky escape we had but the very precariousness–and good fortune – of becoming a fat her at my age. I was 48 when Laura, my third wife, then 31, gave birth to our daughter, Cosi ma, in June 2015, and now, at t he age of 50, I had a son.

There is something different about being a fat her for the first time at almost 50. Only 1.25 percent of men father their first child at 50 or older. As I entered my mid40s, I had felt an overwhelming sense of failure at not having a family; a sense of failure that was compounded by two painful divorce sin my 40s, a nd a sense t hat a lt hough I had some success in my career as a writer a nd publisher (I founded Spear’ s finance magazine back in 2006), in my heart I felt I had failed not only in human relations but as a human being. What was wrong with me?

I married my first wife, Ilaria Bu lg ari, of the Italian jewellery family, in 2003, when I was 37. I married my second wife, the political philosopher Dr Vanessa Neumann (known as the‘ cracker from Caracas ’), in 2007, aged 42. Her previous boyfriend had been Mick Jagger, a man who had his eighth child( and fourth son) last December, aged 73. But to be a debutant father at nearly 50? That is like being a social delinquent.

My journey to fatherhood has been very far from how I thought my life would unfold. I expected to follow a similar life pattern to my parents, with a family by the time I was in my mid-30s at the latest. I can clearly remember, as a young graduate trainee at The Times, passing the cheese puffs around at my politician father[ Sir] Bill Cash’s 50 th birthday party in Westminster in 1990. After being a top constitutional lawyer, he had entered the Commons as an MP in 1984, where he soon started his‘ Thirty Years’ War ’, as he calls it today, to save British sovereignty from the EU superstate.

I do sometimes worry about not being around to raise my children. That terrifies me. Which is one reason why I’ve had a complete lifestyle change( I gave up all alcohol and coffee for Lent). My grandfather, Captain Paul Cash, was killed in action commanding a tank in the Normandy landings in 1944, and I know how much not knowing him affected my father. My grandmother later remarried and he had a loving stepfather, but the wound of losing his fat her in t he war always ran deep. My father was just four when he died.

My father was very good to me – he used to wrap me up in a huge white towel after baths, and put a mini-cricket bat in my hand aged about five – but I wouldn’t say he was a ‘nappy man’ (‘occasionally’, he says) or an especially modern dad.

My mother, though, was very much the ultimate hands-on loving mother( in an Hermès navy silk scarf ). She gave up work after I was born and spent her days pushing me around London parks in a Silver Cross pram. A sense of close family was always important to my mother as she hardly saw her own parents growing up. Her grandfather worked as a senior civil servant in countries such as Kenya and Malaysia, which meant she stayed with friends in the school holidays and often didn’ t see her parents for up to six months at a time. So she craved a close family and children herself while still young, marrying my father aged just 22.

In my early 20s, I didn’t give any thought to marriage or family, or even much to girlfriends, being more interested in my career as a foreign correspondent in Los Angeles. But it wasn’t as if I didn’t want to become a father when I finally did attempt to settle down and marry, upon returning to London after nearly a decade lost in LA.

However, fatherhood just didn’t happen during my two first marriages. Over the duration, I spent many hours in the fertility clinic of The Lister Hospital–and clinics in Harley Street– having innumerable checks. Whether they had come for IVF, egg donation, egg sharing, reproductive immunology, egg and embryo freezing, blood tests or sperm tests, nobody in the waiting room looked at one another or talked about why they were there.

I never discovered why I was unable to have children in my earlier marriages. Once, a grand Knights bridge doctor pronounced it was‘ lifestyle ’. I had become an over worked deadline junkie. Too many parties, too much coffee, too many Nurofen Plus, too many long lunches and late nights. I was totally unfit and was ignoring the fact that I was getting older (I was in my late 30s) and that my wife Ilaria’s biological clock was

I expected to follow a similar life pattern to my parents, with a family in my 30s

I didn’t feel I deserved success. I felt I had failed in the very heart of life

ticking. I didn’t notably change anything in my life before my third wife, Laura, did get pregnant – other than not drinking for a few weeks before we went on holiday in the Côte d’azur in the late summer of 2014.

What the experience of being married twice and not having children taught me is not to take fatherhood for granted. When Cosima was born, it felt like a miraculous gift that made memo redetermined than ever to be a good father – and husband, for that matter.

Whether not having children was responsible in any way for my two divorces, or led me to lose my way in a selfdestructive way in my 40s, I don’t know – there were endless love affairs, near misses with the altar and some (often unsuitable) relationships between my marriages. It’s certainly not true that only women experience a ‘crack up’ or personal breakdown in their later 30s and 40s when they find themselves( whether married or single) unable to have the children they so want. Men can become just as personally unhinged by the disappointment of not being a father, only you don’t hear about it as much.

My two divorces and lack of children affected me on so many levels. I suffered a sense of deep personal despair: nothing less than a spiritual ennui – what Cyril Con no ll yon cede scribed as‘ a certain will-to-failure or repugnance-to-success’.

The truth is I didn’t feel I deserved success. I felt I had failed in the very heart of my life. I was a double-failed husband. I even blamed my failure to write more books on not having children–s pending hours and hours writing endless love letters to a stream of women when I should have been writing creatively. As I hit middle age, I identified again with Connolly (who also had his share of marital unhappiness), when he described himself as ‘approaching 40, sense of total failure’.

Above all, and most disturbingly, I began to lack all faith in my own judgment. My attempt at a cure was to restore my family’s Elizabethan home in the ancient hamlet of Upton Cressett in Shropshire, which my parents had left in 2008 to move into a converted medieval tithe barn next door. The red-brick Tudor house with twisted chimneys was almost as much in need of help as I was. I attempted to use the power and beauty of English Renaissance architecture to rescue myself.

Aged 43 and a double divorcee, living on my own, I hid away while I at tempted to restore my broken self by embarking on this two-year renovation – trying to create a private Arcadia and pull a drawbridge up against the world. The old wreck of a manor house had been bought as an overgrown ruin by my parents in 1970. But even after finishing the project in 2009, I still felt a failure. The house needed a family to live in it.

My search became increasingly frantic: I nearly became a step father to a beautiful and bright little girl called Stephanie when I fell madly in love with a Dutch art dealer called Helen Macintyre, after my second divorce. I would have married her and tried to be a good father. The fact

that I would have been step father to Boris Johnson’s daughter (they had an affair) didn’t actually bother me in the least. We got as far as star ting to redecorate Upton Cressett before around 20 paparazzi descended one morning on our doorstep.

There is a 16-and-a-half-year age gap between myself and Laura. We first met back in 2009 – in the middle of my second divorce – after sitting next to each other at a dinner that a publishing pal was hosting in a new Italian restaurant in Belgravia. People used to say to me, ‘God, William, you are so lucky – being with someone so much younger must make you feel so young.’ In fact, the age gap makes you feel much older. But now that I am a parent in my 50s, I think there are clear ‘family bonding’ benefits to being an older father. Indeed, I’d say the positives far outstrip any disadvantages. For instance, I actually get to spend time with my wife and family. Had I had a family in my mid-30s, where would I have raised them? At the time, I was living with my actress girlfriend in her attic bedroom on the sixth floor of her family’s house in Mayfair.

Living in a rambling, albeit often freezing, old country house in Shropshire (my own childhood home from 1970), my daughter and I feed her two rabbits in their large pen, shared with a white peacock called York and around 18 rare-breed chickens. I get to read her bedtime stories and climb into her pink Wendy house (decorated with the banner ‘Cosima’s Cottage’). Almost every day.

I’m not one of those fathers who don’t get back from work until after their children have been put to bed. Until I had to regularly carry a podgy toddler up the stairs to change her nappy, I didn’t realise how physically demanding bringing up young children is. But pushing the pram along the steep nature trails of Wenlock Edge in the afternoons is certainly more exercise than I used to get in my party days as an overweight bachelor in London.

I don’t have to be in a London office five days a week. I work from a converted pig shed (next door to my wife’s millinery studio and workshop) and get to ramble around at home watching my children cuddle our pugs. I drive Cosima to nursery. I probably spend more time with my daughter than any of my friends do with theirs. We are lucky to have a part-time nanny who lives in a cottage in the grounds, and being open to the public for teas and tours means that we do have a cleaner. I do nappy changes for Cosima, and as an early bird who gets up at 5.30am, I do some morning feeds for little Rex to give Laura a break.

The children have made me feel younger and renewed my sense of purpose, more than any of the younger girlfriends that I went through in my 40s. Having children is a great age leveller.

An inner darkness has lifted–an invisible despair that was present but which I couldn’t diagnose at the time. After nearly drowning in my 40s, I feel I’ve finally landed ashore.

Pushing the pram is certainly more exercise than I used to get in my party days

Clockwise from above cash with first wife ilaria bulgari, helen macintyre, and second wife vanessa Neumann. Top with his father, bill cash, and family, in 1984