Fay Weldon's life, like her novels, was full of drama trends now
My husband and I met in bed, wrote novelist Fay Weldon, the mistress of the zinging one-liner.
She meant what she said: they had sex as strangers at a party and fell in love the next morning.
That confession was typical of her — shamelessly naughty, shockingly liberated, defiantly outspoken.
Fay Weldon, who has died aged 91, couldn’t open her mouth without provoking outrage.
Fay and Ron Weldon had three sons —Dan, Tom and Sam — and Fay was stepmother to Ron’s teenage daughter, Karen
Fay Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw in 1931, in Alvechurch, Worcestershire, into a thoroughly unconventional family
‘Selling your body is not any big deal,’ she announced 20 years ago, after revealing in her autobiography that she worked as a nightclub hostess during her first marriage in the 1950s.
‘Rape is nasty — death is worse,’ she told a speechless James Naughtie on Radio 4’s Today programme in 1998. ‘If you are alive and unmarked then there are worse things that can happen to you.’
Feminists didn’t know what to make of her. She refused to condemn the male sex, but any man who crossed her was made to regret it bitterly.
‘I am probably the one, the only feminist there is,’ she said cheerfully, ‘and the others usually come round to my way of thinking in the end.’
Her life, like her books, was crammed with astonishing sexual adventures, betrayals, scandals, catastrophes and miraculous strokes of luck.
She relished it all with an enthusiasm that left the buttoned-up British establishment reeling.
Her best-seller The Lives And Loves Of A She-Devil, about the vengeance of a woman scorned, was adapted for a 1986 BBC1 serial that hit TV screens like the first cannonball of a revolution.
Julie T Wallace starred as Ruth, a wife whose husband dumps her for a more glamorous mistress.
Instead of accepting her humiliation, Ruth plots a merciless revenge. The drama, co-starring Dennis Waterman and Patricia Hodge, divided the country with its uncompromising message: Men, beware!
Fay Weldon was born Franklin Birkinshaw in 1931, in Alvechurch, Worcestershire, into a thoroughly unconventional family.
Her grandfather, the prolific novelist Edgar Jepson (author of lurid tales with titles such as The Cuirass Of Diamonds), was a devotee of spiritualism and astrology — a fascination he passed on to his granddaughter.
He was also a keen advocate of free love, and at 69 made his young mistress pregnant. Fay’s parents, Margaret and Frank, escaped the family scandal to New Zealand, where their own marriage disintegrated.
After school in Christchurch, Fay was sent to South Hampstead High School in London to complete her education.
When her father died, she was 17, about to start university and hadn’t seen him for three years.
Julie T Wallace starred as Ruth, a wife whose husband dumps her for a more glamorous mistress
In 1994, she married the poet Nick Fox. He became her business manager and they seemed happy at first
On the night train to St Andrew’s University, she threw away her black armband.
‘I remember the act of will this required,’ she wrote, ‘but I had decided that I was going to be a person without a past, only a future.’
By 22, she was pregnant, by a penniless folk singer at the Mandrake Club in Soho.
‘In 1953,’ she wrote, ‘in the eyes of the world, I was stigmatised as a Bad Girl. There were no state benefits available for the likes of me.’
An abortion was not only illegal but, at £200 (equivalent to £4,400 today), too expensive.
Fay stood on the Albert Bridge, looking down into the Thames and then at the sunset. She had no right, she decided, to end her unborn child’s life, if that meant it would never see a sunset over London.
She struggled to survive, working first as a street market researcher. Threatened with eviction, and with it the prospect of having her baby Nicholas taken into care, she agreed to marry a man twice her age.
His name was Ronald Bateman: the headmaster of a technical college, he was recently divorced. Fay didn’t love him —years later, she accused herself of being ‘a heartless, practical, scheming monster’.
But Bateman had his own schemes. She soon realised that he needed a wife and child to seem respectable. A divorced head teacher was unlikely to keep his job.
He was also a reckless sadist who enjoyed terrifying his young wife by speeding on narrow roads, overtaking and swerving to make her scream. This was an era before compulsory seatbelts, and Fay often had her toddler on her lap.
Bateman was an inveterate voyeur. He didn’t want to have sex with Fay, but he was eager for her to take lovers.
Ron Weldon, an artist, was married to the painter Cynthia Pell but they had separated and, within a couple of years, he and Fay were married
When she refused to sleep with his friends, he found work for her as a hostess in a seedy Soho wine bar.
She described it as, ‘flirting and dancing, dangling of the legs from bar stools, the semi-baring of the bosom. I would leave the house in the evenings dressed up to the nines, low-cut dress, very high heels, net stockings and tightly belted waist. Good girls in those days dressed so as not to be noticed. Bad girls drew attention to their assets.’
Her husband also encouraged her to sleep with a market trader who made it plain he fancied her.
The man took her back to his home, turned the radio up loud and subjected her to a painful sexual assault.
‘Well, what did I expect?’ she chided herself. ‘I could scarcely cry rape, since I had freely put myself in this situation.’
The man’s parting shot was that she ought to count herself lucky. He didn’t usually fancy fat women, he said. In sheer self-loathing, she lost two stone.
Fay then resolved to have sex with the men she chose, not ones picked out by her husband.
A friend she called ‘Ellen’ was working for an advertising agency, wining and dining clients.
Fay joined her, ‘sometimes for foursomes in her flat, or in lay-bys outside London. The fear of discovery added to the danger — and danger added to the experience.’
Instead of being a sordid dead-end, her work ‘entertaining clients’ led to two careers.
One was as a writer: at home, she would lock herself in the bathroom to write a debut television play.
The first script was rejected as too explicit — no one,
