Two scarred children and the shattering testimony that shows how divorce can damage lives forever

The time is around 10pm, and my older sister, Cheryl, and I are woken by the sound of slamming doors, stomping footsteps and Mum yelling at Dad.
Looking for comfort, I instinctively tear out of my room and into Cheryl’s.
‘You’ve been out with that woman again, haven’t you?’ we hear Mum scream as we burrow our way under the duvet in a futile attempt to block out all the noise.
I am seven, Cheryl is 15 and it’s not the first time we’ve been unwilling spectators of our parents’ shouting matches. Far from it. For as long as I can remember, these explosive confrontations have been the norm in the Daubney household.
Normally, after an hour or so, Mum would break down sobbing, and they would patch things up. But this particular night in 1977 takes a rather different turn.
We hear the terrifying sound of them both thundering upstairs, and the door to Cheryl’s room explodes open. For some months, this is where Dad has been relegated to sleeping.
Cheryl starts the night in her old room, until Dad gets back from work or a night out, then she joins Mum in the former marital bedroom.
Now, as Mum storms in, Cheryl and I cower in a corner, our knees drawn up to our chests, eyes clamped shut (if only we could shut our ears, too), our arms intertwined.
But Mum’s attention is on the wardrobe, not us. Throwing a suitcase onto the floor, with one movement she then yanks the clothes rail from its moorings, and tips all dad’s clothes into the case.
Then she throws the case and its contents out of the first floor window and into the garden below, with the words: ‘If you want to be with her, you know what you can do!’
Dad desperately tries to calm her, saying, ‘Please, not in front of the kids!’ but Mum is so angry she’s not listening.
Hugging each other, terrified and wide-eyed, Cheryl and I look on as a domestic Armageddon rages around us.

And even though it was over 30 years ago, I still clearly remember both of us pleading with them to stop, tears streaming down our cheeks, our protests hopelessly forlorn. That fact that Dad — that time anyway — was able to smooth things over with Mum later has not made the recollections any less painful.
It is well documented that family breakdown in childhood can cause psychological distress long into adulthood, with many surveys showing an increased likelihood of children from broken homes turning to alcohol and drugs, suffering from eating disorders and having a greater chance of seeing their own marriages end in divorce, too.
But a new government-funded study has turned attention to how divorce can influence a youngster’s academic prospects.
In particular, the study by the Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre suggests that children whose  parents split up after they turn seven are more likely to have behavioural issues and perform less well in exams.
Younger children studied were not affected quite so badly, perhaps because they were less able to grasp the implications.

Martin said he and wife Diana have started couple's counselling as he is determined not to divorce for the sake of their three-year-old son Sonny, centre

This study is an uncannily accurate reflection of my sister and me. Our parents might have divorced decades ago, but it still casts a long shadow over both our lives.
Their marriage went into meltdown in 1976, due to a string of affairs on my father’s behalf. Though, to be honest, I cannot really remember a time when my parents were actually happy together.
There were windows of blissful truce — at Christmas, or on family holidays — but the emotional backdrop in our Nottingham home was one of almost constant unrest.
They had married far too young and, certainly on paper, had little in common. My dad, a coal miner, was a traditionally minded breadwinner and my mum a frustrated housewife who dreamed of (and eventually succeeded in) being a teacher, and didn’t accept the maxim that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’.

 'Hugging each other, terrified and wide-eyed, Cheryl and I look on as a domestic Armageddon rages
around us.'

Mum gave birth to Cheryl when she was 18, and Dad — only in his early twenties himself — didn’t want to sit around the house on Friday and Saturday nights. So while Mum minded Cheryl — and later me — Dad would go out alone. Handsome, charismatic and debonair, perhaps it was inevitable he’d stray.
When it all began to implode, Cheryl was 13 and gearing up for her O-levels, whereas I was barely six.
And, as the report suggests, in many ways being younger than Cheryl meant I got off more lightly.
Devastatingly for her, when the battle was raging at its fiercest on the home front, she was right in the middle of her O-levels.
There is no doubt in my mind that Cheryl and I are of equal intelligence, though while I gained a degree and ended up becoming a magazine editor, she left school at 16 with disappointing qualifications and for decades had unfulfilling jobs.
The divorce swept away Cheryl’s confidence like a tsunami. She fell behind at school, and blotted out the pain by developing an interest in boys, partying, clothes and punk music. A taste for alcohol followed and it was often I who would nurse her, collapsed on the floor and vomiting into a bowl.
She wanted to rebel — to inflict hurt on our parents as they had on her — and she did it in style.
When they attempted to discipline her, she felt they had no right and ignored them. In any case, most of the time Mum and Dad were too busy arguing to notice. Consequently, Cheryl left school with a modest six O-levels at grades B and C.
Though she went to college, she soon dropped out and took a job as a sales assistant at Miss Selfridge. Five years later, when she applied for a managerial role, she was devastated to learn that the company had introduced a policy which meant that managers had to have a degree, regardless of their experience.

Unhappily married: Martin's mother and father had explosive rows during their marriage but in later years have become friends

While I got into scrapes at school — mainly for fighting, which was my pathetic way of off-loading the anger I felt about my parents’ marriage — my academic journey was a complete contrast to Cheryl’s.
I gained ten O-levels, mostly As, and stayed on for sixth form. In 1988 I left with four A-levels, including three A grades. I performed so well at geography I was offered a scholarship at Oxford, but instead chose Manchester University, tempted there by the buzzing social scene. A successful career in journalism followed.
Cheryl was also the one who bore the brunt of the upheaval when Mum and Dad finally divorced in 1980, after 18 years of marriage.
Even before then, they’d both agreed the marriage was effectively over and found new partners. Dad met Pat in 1978, and they are still together to this day. Mum, meanwhile, met John, a university lecturer who could not have been less like Dad.
Because I was an 11-year-old, I automatically stayed with Mum, as Dad worked irregular shifts. Cheryl, old enough to choose by then, initially decided to stay with Dad in the family home.
When the house was sold Cheryl came to live with us, but that didn’t work either as she hated living with my mum’s new partner. So, in 1986, she emigrated to Spain to take up work as a maid. It was in Spain that Cheryl met her first husband, a US Marine staff sergeant, with whom she moved to America, aged 25.
Although, far from home, her academic limitations no longer mattered — everyone just assumed she had a degree — on a personal level it was a disaster. Cheryl was his third wife, and, too late, she realised she’d married somebody just like Dad — a handsome philanderer. Sure enough, she was divorced within seven years.  
Ever since then, Cheryl has struggled, and failed, to meet an appropriate man. She had a son with a new partner in 1996, from whom she also split, and a second marriage in 2006 quickly ended in divorce.
Despite her directly witnessing the unhealthy consequences of my Mum having married a rapscallion, she was drawn to them, too. And it always ended in disaster.
Cheryl did finally build a successful and fulfilling career for herself in Texas, where she has now settled. She helps run a charitable institution for the severely disabled and has a fine son in Christian, now 14, a gifted science student whom she has mostly brought up alone.
But she admits that her life slipped into a pattern of going for men she didn’t really expect anything of, because of what she witnessed on the home front. ‘I just don’t trust people,’ she says now. I, too, have been affected, though not so badly — perhaps, again, as a result of being younger.

 'The divorce swept away Cheryl’s confidence like a tsunami. She fell behind at school, and blotted out the pain by developing an interest in boys, partying, clothes and punk music.'

The painful experience of witnessing my parents’ problems convinced me that the institution of marriage is a sham, and I have problems with intimacy to this day. Before settling with my partner of 13 years, Diana, I would fall in love at the drop of a hat, but then deliberately sabotage the relationship because, having seen how my own parents’ marriage ended, I felt it was inevitably doomed.
Like my parents, I can be physically standoffish, verbally boorish and emotionally locked down.
So, as my sister has been through two waves of therapy and is now embarking on a new relationship, I have just started my own couples’ counselling with Diana — to avoid the same pitfalls as my parents.
Cheryl and I have spent many hours dissecting our childhood and the impact the catastrophic marriage had on us, but we have never really delved deeply into it with our parents. We’ve always felt they wanted to put it all behind them. I think they’ll find reading this article tough. While Dad knows his behaviour led to the divorce, and still feels guilt for that, I’m not sure either of them has ever realised how deeply we were affected.
But Cheryl and I don’t blame them. Now we’re adults we appreciate that none of us are perfect, and prefer to look to the future.
This has been especially so since I became a father to Sonny in May 2009. I wanted to draw an emotional line in the sand. Constantly poring over the past was exhausting and destructive.
And it helps that becoming a father has cemented our family bonds in a way that was impossible to imagine when I was a child.

A study by the Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre suggests that children whose parents split up after they turn seven are more likely to have behavioural issues and perform less well in exams

Because, ironically, my mum and dad get on better now than they ever have. Maybe they were just two great pals who should never have married. Becoming grandparents has certainly given them a new lease of life and friendship.
They drive together from Nottingham, where they both live, to visit their grandson in London, and are constantly laughing in each other’s company in a way I never witnessed as a child. It is brilliant to see.
The transformation Sonny has brought has been remarkable and cathartic: I just wish he’d come along years earlier.
So, if my parents can put their differences to one side and move on, why can’t I? I certainly now see the extra strains that a child can place on a partnership.
It brings me great joy that in my parents’ twilight years we have all learned to forgive — if not forget.
And it is only now, aged 42, when I have a three-and-a-half-year-old son and have been with the same partner for over a decade, that I believe there may be some sense in marriage — that public declaration of love and commitment.
But it is a huge decision, because I have vowed that I will never, ever get divorced. I want Sonny to grow up in a harmonious environment with a mum and a dad who are in love, and not at war.
As this study — and my sister’s and my own hard-earned life experiences — illustrate, divorce can inflict deep, long-lasting damage on children: especially those who are least equipped to deal with it.

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