Being raised by two mums ruined my LIFE
TV’s Mary Portas claims motherhood’s better without men. But in this haunting account actress HETTY BAYNES RUSSELL says . . .
THROUGHOUT my childhood it was a morning ritual. On waking, I would skip through to my parents’ bedroom and climb between the sheets for a cup of tea and some snuggles.
How lucky I was to know such consistent affection. While some of my friends struggled to forge a bond with their families, I took this easy intimacy for granted. To me it was entirely normal behaviour.
Only on closer inspection, and with the benefit of hindsight, I can now see this was anything but normal. For on the other side of the bed from my lovely Mummy was not my father, but Mary, my mother’s lover — a formidable and often frightening figure who was very much the ‘man of the house’.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say my mother was a lesbian, as she was completely mad about men too, but Mary completely captivated Mummy.
To this day, describing mother as bisexual — for that is clearly what she was — still makes me feel uncomfortable. This is not through some outdated prudishness: homosexuality, these days, is rightly accepted as natural and I am proud to count a number of gay people among my closest friends.
It is because, back in the 1950s, it was so far from the norm as to be scandalous. And despite spending my entire childhood living cheek-by-jowl with my mother and her lesbian lover, it was not until four decades later that the true exent of their relationship finally came out into the open.
And far from being a healthy, nurturing state of affairs, this arrangement — where I was caught in a destructive, triangular battle for my mother’s affection with another woman, while forced to watch helplessly as my father was emasculated and airbrushed from our lives — was simultaneously damaging and confusing.
Which is why, when I pick up the newspapers to read of retail guru Mary Portas, who has a two-year-old son with her wife Melanie Rickey, saying ‘motherhood is better without men’, my heart sinks. Those words could have come out of the mouths of either of my ‘two mothers’.
Of course, gay people can make fantastic parents. Indeed, who am I to say that an unconventional family unit cannot function effectively just because my own did not? Yet, has there ever been a point in history when parenthood was more bewildering?
WITH so many people vying for space and prominence within the family, I know, from experience, they can become hotbeds for resentment and jealousies which can cause irreparable, long-term damage to a child.
So how to explain the bizarre construct which passed for my family?
My mother, Margot, was a rare beauty who was never short of male attention.
By the time I came along, she had been married to my father, Leslie Baynes, a world-renowned aeronautical engineer, since the war. They had three girls and a boy before I appeared several years later.
Two years before I was born, my parents took out a lease on a beautiful country property with its own estate in a perfect little corner of Dorset. That was my home and, with eight years between myself and my closest sibling, I was effectively brought up there as an only child.
I adored my father, not that I saw a huge amount of him: he was hugely in demand and terribly busy, so he would be away during the week. But I would wait by the door every Friday, listening out for the sound of his car.
In his absence, another figure came to be of overbearing importance in my mother’s life. She was sculptor Mary Spencer Watson, raised on the same estate by her father, portrait painter George Spencer Watson RA, and named by my parents as my godmother.
I really cannot recall when the takeover happened, but happen it most surely did. For, as early as I can remember, Mary came to share my mother’s bed every night; Daddy had his own room. To my innocent mind, it had been like this for ever, and therefore was entirely normal.
At some point, so early in my life that I cannot remember it, she effectively took over as the man of the house, too.
Masculine to a fault, it was she who did all the odd jobs around the house and took charge of the discipline.
Daddy was sidelined and constantly humiliated, but bore the humiliation in silence. This was an era when same- sex relationships simply did not happen — not out in the open, at least.
Somehow, mostly out of shame, I suspect, my father managed to put up with this bizarre arrangement for the best part of a decade.
While I hung on my gentle, loving father’s every word, I never heard Mary or Mother utter a good word about him. Conflict was for ever bubbling under the surface. I vividly recall the arguments between Daddy and Mary over who should carve the Sunday roast, for example. What better way to illustrate the power struggle that was happening, insidiuously, under the roof of our home? With my father increasingly absent (who can blame him) Mary became the parent who assumed the duty of driving me around the Dorset countryside for endless ballet lessons and competi-
tions. I had a ‘career childhood’. From an early age I showed a capacity to dance very well, and my mother’s dream (as well as mine) was that I would become the next Dame Margot Fonteyn. This meant rehearsing relentlessly, resulting in even less time spent with my father.
Then, when I was nine, Mary and Mother took me away from him altogether. I still remember looking out of the car window and seeing tears rolling down his kind, gentle face as we drove away to our new second home in Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey — Mary, Mummy and me and three of my older siblings.
They said it was so I could be closer to the Royal Ballet School in Richmond, although I hadn’t even applied at that point, so I know that it was a flimsy excuse. From that point onwards, Mary’s principal role in my family was unquestioned. She and Mother were considered my parents by friends, and in my diaries I referred to them as M². Nobody questioned it, that was just the way it was.
MARY described us as ‘we three’. They held hands, kissed on the lips and behaved just like man and wife. When, confused, I asked where I had come from, my mother told me: ‘God and Mummy made you.’.
Daddy was airbrushed from history, in this as in all matters. Men, in general, were decried as useless, especially in the family context.
If you had asked me during my teens what I thought of the arrangement, I wouldn’t have missed a beat. I was not raised to question it — this was a normal, happy childhood, with the inevitable ups and downs, but plenty of love. Only now I know it wasn’t. The damage I had suffered only manifested itself when I was 15 and developed clinical depression and anorexia. From then on, it was a slow process of coming to terms with pain I had buried deep inside my troubled soul.
It was almost as if I carried their shame and acted it out in a selfdestructive way.
In my 20s I cultivated an overtly heterosexual blonde bombshell image, and formed a string of inappropriate relationships with men.
I was attracted to father figures, eccentric geniuses, as a rule, and ended up marrying the legendary film director Ken Russell, who died in 2011.
Even more confusingly, Ken and Mary were physically very similar in stature and colouring. What does that say about me?
Yes, I was loved, but at what price? For while I have no doubt that Mary loved me — her maternal instincts outweighed her veneer of masculinity — there was also horrendous jealousy there, which frequently erupted into violence.
She was jealous of me for the same reason she deplored my father. I was the apple of my mother’s eye, and as such perceived as a threat. While Mummy always treated me like a little princess, inevitably my special position in her heart led to conflict with Mary.
She could be terrifying, on one occasion flying at a male suitor — who had taken a shine to my mother — with a carving knife (mercifully, he dodged out of the way in time).
After this incident, I returned home to find Mary on her knees, pleading with Mummy not to throw away what they had together.
I was around ten at the time, and no idea what they were talking about. Most of the time, however, I was on the receiving end of this kind of behaviour (though I must confess to fighting back as hard as my slight frame would allow).
When I was eight we went on a caravan holiday to Scotland. I stumbled into a heated discussion between Mummy and Mary, incurring my godmother’s displeasure.
She pushed me backwards so violently I went hurtling through the air, landing outside the caravan, dropping three feet and landing flat on my back, winded and shaken.
A family member shot some footage on a cine- camera of that moment, and, after the holiday it was played backwards, as a comedy moment showing me leaping through the air to land on my feet in the caravan.
Only there was nothing funny about what had happened, nothing funny at all.
On another occasion Mary locked me inside a hen house that had no windows when, in her view, I had been naughty.
Unconsciously, I struggled with Mary’s masculinity, which my childlike mind instinctively wanted to challenge. When I was eight or nine years old, I asked Mary what she wanted for Christmas. She asked for a hammer and chisel, so I bought her scented soap.
I so wanted her to be a woman for once.
In any dispute, I was always reminded of where my failings came from: my father.
‘You’re a Baynes through and through,’ was Mary’s ultimate insult. I, meanwhile, was denied the opportunity to grieve his loss.
Never mentioned, except in ridicule, not considered necessary or even relevant, my whole relationship with my lovely father was effectively stolen from me.
We did manage to get the relationship back, many years later, when I was in my mid-20s.
I was, by this time, in recovery from anorexia and building a successful career as an actress.
It was only then that my father finally told me that my mother and Mary were in a lesbian relationship.
Astonishing as it may sound, this came as a shock to me. It transpired that my father, devastated and furious that he had been ousted from his family, had threatened to reveal all in his divorce papers.
It was only a week before the case was due to go to court that he withdrew his papers, accepting Mummy’s version of events that he had ‘abandoned’ his own family.
He was, after all, a man of standing and the ensuing scandal could have ruined all of them — and he still cared deeply about my mother.
As it was, he ended up bankrupt and living in a shack by the sea. He was broken by the experience — not that I saw one iota of sympathy from Mummy or Mary. They simply dismissed him as being ‘ weak’. Following the revelation about their true relationship, I was desperate for answers.
But when I confronted Mother and Mary they denied everything. They even went so far as to threaten to sue my father for defamation.
So, the lies, half-truths, confusion and damage were left to fester for many years to come.
My father died in 1989, but at least by then I had the comfort of being reconciled with him and back in regular contact.
Then I made the most shocking discovery of all. In discussion with my therapist I uncovered the repressed memory which went to explain so much about my emotional turmoil.
Amid huge upset, I suddenly remembered something I had witnessed at the age of four, when I stumbled across my mother and Mary being intimate together.
I cannot go into details — it is too upsetting — but I can vividly recall them sitting me down afterwards and saying how important it was that I should never mention what I had seen to anybody. Mary finally admitted her relationship with my mother in 2006, shortly before her death.
By now my mother was deep in Alzheimer’s, and while she outlived her lover by a couple of years, she had long since retreated into a world of her own. Mary told me of her chronic shame, and I did my best to reassure her: there was nothing wrong with their love — it was the lies and their cruel dismissal of my father that was the real problem.
It came as a relief to finally hear the real truth, but I can’t help wondering about the difference it would have made to all our lives if it had come out 20 years earlier.
KEN and I had one son together, Rex, now 22, before we split in 1999, and he is the light of my life. So it is not as if my own experiences put me off motherhood. I did, however, learn a lot of lessons about parenting the hard way.
I believe that if there is room for all parties involved to love each other unconditionally, then any family set-up can work.
But sometimes — frighteningly often, in fact — unconventional parental relationships end up being hotbeds of jealousy and confusion that are damaging to children.
That has been the problem for me all of my life: despite the enormous amount of privilege I enjoyed, it was a life of confusion and a lack of emotional security.
And that is why I was in therapy for so many years, trying to make sense of it all.
So by all means roll the dice, ladies and gentlemen, but don’t kid yourself about the fact you are taking a chance with an innocent life.