We all know, thanks to Freud and others, that the relationship between daughters and fathers is usually intense in a girl's youth and can have a marked bearing on the remainder of her life, or it can trigger the most difficult and fraught separation as the daughter seeks to determine her adult identity. All these stresses seem to have been present in Judy's relationship with William.
She explains that in writing the book she sought answers to two questions. "First, why did my father become a writer, and, I believe, such a good one? And, second, to what extent do parents shape their children, and their children's lives? Unsurprisingly, my answers to both are incomplete."
She does make a jolly good attempt, though, for her memoir is a thoughtful, often amusing, and deeply sincere effort, beautifully written, and it ends with a most telling remark. She and her mother are sitting together, months after William's death (in 1993, at the age of 82), when "she suddenly said to me, I know you always thought Daddy loved you more than I did. But I did love you. I just couldn't show it."
The first seven chapters deal with life as the daughter of parents who were deeply in love (and remained so) but living in a kind of genteel poverty. William, a school teacher with unfulfilled hopes of a writing career, and Ann. "... they were always by far the most important people in the world to each other, bar none, absolutely none: friends, lovers, children, grandchildren."
The household ( Judy had one brother) seems to have been largely a contented one, although Ann could be a somewhat bohemian mother and William was subject to rages, possibly triggered by memories of his experiences commanding small boats during the war.
A change in circumstances came with the publication (and especially the film) of Lord of the Flies in 1954 - famously plucked from the publisher's slush pile - when William was 43. It also saw changes in her father's behaviour: he saw the Establishment's attitude toward him (a left-winger) as false and intolerant, for many sneered at both his book and its success, and he became prone to see any reversal as directed at him personally.
If these were the perhaps predictable responses by a writer all too familiar with the British class war, they still had their impact on his children. Both suffered from mental anguish and breakdown, David the more so, and while Judy does not attribute this directly to her parents, it's clear William's powers of concentration and need to think out his books sometimes left the children feeling quite neglected.
It cannot ever be easy living with a genius, let alone living up to his expectations. And although his sense of humour was often expressed, it also had a darker edge because there were many times when William did not like himself at all and knew he could be a monster, with resort to the bottle becoming something of a palliative to his guilt in his later years.
There are episodes of great drama recounted in this book, usually associated with the family's fraught sailing holidays, of tenderness, especially in relation to Judy's grandfather, and of happiness with William and Ann when things were going well.
I should think this is one of the best memoirs I've read, and readers do not need to know anything about Golding to appreciate its breadth, warmth, and understanding. Judy Golding is 65, and it has taken a long time (she admits) to come to terms with her life as the daughter of a famous father, but in The Children of Lovers she demonstrates the skills of an excellent novelist with the insight of intimacy. Her father would have been proud of her.
• Bryan James is the Books Editor.
