From the Observer archive, 9 June 1985: My years of hell growing up with a mother inferior

Antonia White had a splendid story about Dylan Thomas squashing a fried egg between the pages of a rare book belonging to Augustus John. This memoir by her daughter (Now to My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White) produces a rather similar sensation of appalled and fascinated revulsion. White's reputation rests on a single small masterpiece, Frost in May, based on the author's sufferings in childhood at the hands of her father. While she wrote it, her own two daughters were shut up at the back of her London flat, neglected, unwanted, forbidden to enter their mother's rooms, dreading the sight of her as much as she dreaded contact with them.

As a parent, Antonia seems to have inherited not only her father's bullying insensitivity, foul temper, ruthless ambition and egotism, but also the vanity she so bitterly despised in her mother. The combination, from her children's point of view, was monstrous: "Lyndall and I hated our mother... when she approached me to  kiss me, something in the roof of my mouth fluttered as it does when a cat approaches." Antonia, for her part, saw her children as demonic intruders from the start. A friend, visiting her in hospital after Susan's birth, got the impression that she was afraid the baby would bite. Susan was promptly dispatched first with a nurse to grandparents in the country, then to a children's home for a year and a half.

When Susan eventually attempted suicide at the age of 21, her mother received her home for six weeks before throwing her out for good and threatening to burn any property she left behind. "She has been a financial drain on me from the moment she was conceived," wrote Antonia.

Antonia's first job as a governess at the age of 17 had bought her freedom from her father's love and domination and from her own frantic fruitless efforts to appease him. More than 20 years later, she was still haunted by him ("filthy, beastly old man. I spit on your corpse"), still consumed in her diary by infantile hatred of both parents: "I'd like to fight and kill you both."

Financial independence had been her sole means of escape from home and ever afterwards she was terrified of anything endangering that independence: a financial drain, a hole in her bag, might puncture her fragile security and engulf her again in the terrors of childhood.

This was clearly a form of insanity and Mrs Chitty's painful, absorbing book describes the brushes with madness recorded from the other side, so to speak, in her mother's later fiction. It is no doubt a partial and prejudiced account, but it is extraordinarily free of rancour and admirers of Antonia White will find in it a further memorable instalment of the reckoning begun in Frost in May.

This is an edited extract