Penelope Mortimer (the first's) autobiography

Like many Americans who have become acquainted with the work of John Mortimer, I was introduced to it through British television by way of PBS. "Mystery" brought us a dozen or more dramatizations from Mortimer's "Rumpole of the Bailey" (starring the late Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole), and "Masterpiece Theater" dramatizations of the first two novels of his Rapstone Chronicles trilogy, "Paradise Postponed" and "Titmuss Regained," and of his memoir, "A Voyage round My Father" (with Laurence Oliver and Alan Bates as Mortimers father and son). I've subsequently read the books (except for Voyage) and three or four other novels and the 2003 memoir, Where There's A Will.

When I learned from a review of a new biography of Mortimer, A Voyage Round John Mortimer, by Valerie Grove, that his first wife Penelope (1918-1999; his second wife was also named Penelope) had written a novel about their marriage, I decided to read it. Of course, such a book raises far more questions than it provides reliable answers¹, so this morning I started to thumb through Mrs. Mortimer's autobiography of the years 1940-1978 (About Time Too), which include the years of the marriage (1949-1972). I was immediately hooked, and I would have been hooked even if John Mortimer were never mentioned. From the very first page:

My husband [her first, Charles Dimont] was an intelligent and sensitive young man, brought up by a mother who was, or had become, a nonentity, and a teetotal clergyman father who claimed that he had found no reason to change his mind about anything since making it up at the age of twenty-one. In search of mystery their son had taken to drink and the doctrines of heathen religions. My father too was a clergyman, but a man with such an insatiable need for consolation that no faith could satisfy him. No longer finding any comfort in God, he gobbled samples of Communism, spiritualism, nudism, Nietzsche, free love, the Douglas Credit System, Krafft-Ebing, Freud, but was still ravenous. He went through terrible bouts of mourning for some satisfaction he couldn't remember or had never known and during these attacks the house would be chock-a-block with gloom, it was hard to find a breathing space. I inhaled his misery by the lungful, just as I did his tobacco smoke. My mother carried her own supply of wintry air. She and my father never shared a bedroom and I remember witnessing only one occasion when she didn't move away from his touch.

Now that's incisive writing.

I already knew, from studying a section of Mrs. Mortimer's family tree at the beginning of the book, that she had two children by her first husband and one child each by two other men (neither of whom she married) before her two children with Mortimer. But only minutes ago, in checking the dates of her marriages for this post, did I realize that she wed Mortimer the same year she divorced her first husband. When did she have those two middle children? Answer: 1945 and 1948, while she was still married to Dimont. (Actually, the family tree gives the year of the divorce from Dimont and the marriage to Mortimer as 1947, so for a few minutes it looked to me as though the second child was born after their marriage! Apparently not. After discovering that MSN Encarta—see the footnote—says she and Mortimer were married in 1949, I checked her index and found this on p. 39: "John and I were married at Chelsea Register Office on 27th August 1949, the day my divorce to Charles was made Absolute." A significant error in that published family tree! Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1993.)

There was something incisive, too, about the person the writer was, if that's quite the word.
______________

1. MSN Encarta does say that the "unhappy experience of [her] marriage [to Mortimer] was reflected in her best-known novel The Pumpkin Eater, the story of a woman who seeks validation through repeatedly having children, and who having been persuaded by her husband to undergo sterilization discovers that he has been unfaithful."