My mother, Jocasta Innes, who abandoned us

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/may/17/mother-jocasta-innes-abandoned-us

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Mum and Dad are posing at the front door with their young children and the family dog. Everyone is happy and grinning for the camera. Even the dog is smiling. But when I look closely it's not quite as cheerful as I supposed. I'm like a detective in a novel. "Let me see that photo again," I might say. "The picture of the happy family." And the reader will know that something is going to turn out wrong.

I tilt the photo to the light. It's almost 50 years old and to me, the detective, looking back to a moment I can't quite remember, it's all familiar. I even remember the dog. Let's start with the dog.

He's a mongrel called Hamp; the sort of dog you might buy off a man in the pub. The photo was taken in Surrey Square, a stone's throw from the Old Kent Road in south London. It's a nice big Georgian house but the sunlight bleaches the windows, so that you can't begin to see inside. You can't even tell which sort of windows they are.

I am not a dispassionate detective. This is my family. I am the little boy in my mother's arm. It's the autumn of 1965 and, in the background, a fence of split chestnut and wire tilts over a big hole in the ground where a house used to be, before the square was hit in the blitz. We have no way of knowing that another bombshell is about to explode, though now I can almost sense the air trembling, in the silence that people say preceded a direct hit. Something is about to happen that will leave this family with a hole like the hole next door, fenced in and dangerous.

My parents were empire children. By the 1930s, the British empire was not so much a civilising force as a sort of bloated multinational. Richard's father ran a Bombay trading house. Jocasta's father worked for Shell in China, and she was born in Nanking, as it was called. Richard was looked after by a Bombay ayah (nanny), and Jocasta, in China, by her amah.

Jocasta won a half blue at Cambridge University for diving, and later worked on the Evening Standard. Richard worked in film. In this photo, Richard and Jocasta were just into their 30s and had been married for four years.

In the photo, Richard is looking at the dog. The children's expressions are guarded. Daisy is hand in hand with her father, while Jocasta clutches her wrist. I am the baby, in the crook of my mother's arm, turned outwards, back to front: Jocasta holds me like a shield. She looks – what? Braced, perhaps: sea braced, set against the roll and pitch of the deck: feet planted wide apart, knee bent, hips splayed. It's as if the ground is moving under her, and she's just grabbed out. She has a girl by the wrist and a boy as if she had just scooped him up from the pavement, and she looks – in spite of the grin, or perhaps with the grin – as if she is snatching at her children. The windows are impenetrable, and there's a hole in the street and this, our house, is the last one standing in the row, like the domino that's about to fall.

Richard is holding the whole thing together, and Mum's having an affair. In a matter of weeks, she will abandon this family and take on another life.

Jocasta moved in with Joe Potts, a Geordie firebrand who had written two novels and never published another: perhaps her love of life eclipsed his. When the moment had come to collect us, the children, it was too late: John Mortimer, the author and barrister, told Mum the law didn't look kindly on women who abandoned their children. She hadn't a cat's chance of getting custody and Richard, the good father, wasn't letting us go.

Jocasta and Joe lived cheaply in an end-of-the-road holiday resort in Purbeck, where they soon had two little girls and nothing as grand – or reliable – as an income. Joe did a bit of teaching, they swam, fooled about, read Lawrence and John Cowper Powys, and laughed at the pretensions and certitudes of the world Daisy and I innocently represented when we turned up in the holidays, packed for the beach. In London, we had regular mealtimes and outings and school. In Swanage, I battled with Hamp for space to sleep on the sofa in the kitchen. Jocasta and Joe were cavalier and not especially kind. I am afraid Joe teased the dog. Sometimes I'd slip out to the phone box and ring home, reverse charge. There was no phone in the flat.

The detective in me looks back at the photo and – forgetting the children and the husband for a moment – I see Jocasta standing like Jack in the fairytale, primed for adventure. If the ground is moving under her feet, it's because the beanstalk is about to erupt skywards, and she's bound to scramble up it, travelling light, eager and curious to see what's at the top.

Since her death last year, I have read her unfinished memoirs, notebooks full of swatches, recipes and magazine clippings. In a commonplace book, she quotes from a biography of Elizabeth David: "The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking." It's from Samuel Johnson. Beside it she scribbles: "Brilliantly succinctly TRUE."

Mum faced her sudden poverty with characteristic brio. She examined from various angles the shoestring on which they lived, and in 1970 set about writing a guide for others in the same situation. The Pauper's Cookbook was born of greed and experience, an amazingly reliable kitchen companion that has not been out of print since, with its recipes for potato pie, Peking dumplings and ginger ice-cream. From the stove, she raised her eyes to the walls of her – now slightly bigger – home. Paint Magic, her first book on decoration, sold more than 1m copies.

By then, she had moved on again: this time, she took the children, her two girls by Joe. The 1970s were over: so was her country life. She arrived in London and found a job on Cosmopolitan magazine and a doss-house in Spitalfields, from which she cleared 26 skips' worth of crap before settling down to blow-torch and paint brush. She fell in love with the architect next door. Everything happened in her kitchen – arguments and suppers, and the books she tapped out on her Corona typewriter, glass at her elbow, and the meetings she called to run a business.

She was still the principal boy, dressed the part in jerkins, leggings and waisted jackets, – her own brand of chic. She had always been first onstage, getting into film and journalism when London was swinging, into good eating and country living when the 1970s came along, kickstarting the 1980s interest in paint effects and rag rolling. She was seeking adventure, casting her magic beans and seeing where the beanstalks led her.

Had she stayed with her first children, the lives of other children and grandchildren would never have been lived, and none of those books would have been written. There would have been … something different. I look at this picture, and all its little giveaways and metaphors, and think how we lumber through life with our scars and secrets, and they, too, form who we are. We can't step out of our roles, or stroll along the paths not taken and double back.

It's only now when I study this photograph that I wonder: how come the children, with their wary stares, stayed with Richard – but Jocasta took the smiling dog?

The Pauper's Cookbook by Jocasta Innes is published by Frances Lincoln, £12.99