Abba So Long

My vintage moment: Fay Weldon

February. Because we have to have somewhere to live I write a cheque for £11,000 for a little concrete house in Belsize Park and move in with the children – my eldest is at Keele University; number two, a thirteen, at Pimlico Comprehensive; the little one, at six, at Primrose Hill Infants. I’m assuming their father will join us.

But he does not. He goes instead to live in the basement of his antique shop round the corner in Regent’s Park Road. I go and visit him from time to time but the truth is unavoidable. I love him to distraction but he can stand being married to me no longer. He has manoeuvered me out of his life. My heart breaks but then it is always breaking.

I learn that notoriety does not make you happy. I am earning well, could buy a house or a car and not notice (at Seventies’ prices) but I am a feminist - and angry women were the most unpopular people in town. Men feared a world in which women did not see their function as ironing men’s shirts. Women feared one in which wifely duties were despised. Husbands feared successful women.

Workwise, it was a good year. I was writing Little Sisters: ‘Most of us live within spitting distance of millionaires. Spit away, if that’s what you feel like.’ Remember Me came out, my novel about a woman who, though dead, sends her ghost out to save her daughter: ‘I am the doctor’s wife, waking. I am Margot, housewife, mother, waking to a world I have made, a warm and homely place, in which others grow, if not myself.’

But no one liked feminists, in 1976. ‘I see your mother’s been writing dirty books again,’ as the English teacher said to one of my sons. At home I did my best to disguise my activities. I removed the fuse from the plug of the TV when an episode of Upstairs, Downstairs that I had written was on. ‘Yes, I did write it but - oh dear - the TV’s stopped working!’

I would tear pages from newspapers and magazines if they mentioned me, and left any bad reviews lying around to comfort my husband. I wrote by hand and not by typewriter to save him from the annoyance of listening to the keys clattering. But none of it worked. I had become unlivable with, as women who earned more than their husbands so often did.

I was distraught. March. It stays cold but the drought begins. Rain seems to have forgotten how to fall. ‘Men only ever leave a woman for another woman,’ a friend tells me. I believe her. Isn’t this what I’d been writing about for so long? And isn’t it more bearable that he goes to another than simply that he is desperate to get away from me? But who could the other woman be? I never find out.

ABBA – So long (rare Ein Kessel Buntes '74) HQ | 4 Color Tv

Benny without a piano! ABBA @ Ein Kessel Buntes. Filmed Thursday seven November 1974. www.abbaontv.com Ein Kessel Buntes (“A Kettle of Colour”) was a television assortment display in the former East Germany, broadcasted from 1972 to 1992. (Wiki.

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