She found receipts for underwear – but her husband hadn’t bought them for her

We raised our glasses, a small group of women, to toast my sister on the occasion of her 70th birthday. Gathered around her kitchen table that afternoon, the January sun low across the marsh behind her home, we talked, among other things, about marriage, a state most of us had inhabited or continue to inhabit.

The majority of those present, all in and around my sister’s age, had married in their 20s. They had tripped up the aisle under the delicate weight of their veils at a time in this country when you could smoke on buses but not buy a condom, at a time when the pill was available only on prescription for bona-fide family-planning purposes.

It was a point in our history when there was no such thing as a barring order and years before the prohibition on divorce was removed from the Constitution. And it was decades – nay, aeons – before same-sex marriage would become legal.

Not all of those young marriages survived. One friend calmly described how, many years ago when her children were still small, she found gift receipts for jewellery and underwear among her then-husband’s possessions – items of which she certainly hadn’t been the beneficiary.

‘Grief is a braggart, a blatherskite, a blustering egomaniac refusing to be ignored’

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Hilary Fannin: I recently shelled out 200 quid on cat paraphernalia

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Hilary Fannin: January, when it comes, is always a relief

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Hilary Fannin: A splendid week for Brooklyn Beckham and me

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That small handful of women around the table, their lives tattooed with our unenviable history, represented a resilient, influential generation

The somewhat insouciant guests at my sister’s table, engaged at the time in licking whipped cream off their teaspoons, considered this story. Given that suspicious spouses discovering receipts for negligees and nipple rings in the proverbial sock drawer is among the most hackneyed of plot devices, might not her ex-husband, they asked, have anticipated that he’d be rumbled?

There was no clear answer. I don’t suppose there ever is.

Maybe, I thought, during all those long years when the exits were blocked and couples were tethered to marriages like nags to a yoke, self-sabotage, conscious or unconscious, was some kind of plea. Or maybe I’m being naive.

The story of a watchful spouse finding enlightening receipts among the flaky tobacco bits and scrunched-up bus tickets in the pocket of a jacket left hanging at the end of the stairs resonated with me.

I thought of my own parents and the mayhem and mundanity of their many rows, of the long nights of recrimination, of the music of crockery flung against an unyielding wall, of words said that could not be unsaid; of their young lives wasted in a cycle of rage and reconciliation.

“He did me a favour,” my sister’s friend, whose marriage had finally ended, was saying. “I am so, so happy to be single.”

That small handful of women around the table, their lives tattooed with our unenviable history, represented a resilient, influential generation. Their votes and voices, their insistence on their right to plan their families, to work, to be afforded protection, their debates, energy and acumen, are sewn into our social evolution. (And believe me, I’m not suggesting it’s all done and dusted, or that this country is now a place of equality and respect.)

The next day I rang my sister to thank her for lunch and to ask if she’d liked her presents. One friend had made her a miniature terrarium, another had bought her a beaded cloche hat. I’d bought her a face cream that rashly promised to ameliorate signs of senescence.

There was a pall in the air on that day we spoke on the phone, as media brimmed over with discussion on the need to address male violence against women. My sister had found herself, the morning after her significant birthday, looking back over and evaluating her own life in those terms. She remembered working as a typesetter in the early 1970s, in an almost exclusively male environment. It was a job she was good at, but she was brought into the boss’s office and told that her clothes were too provocative and distracting and that she’d have to go.

She remembered the culture in the advertising agencies she worked in, where her male colleagues sprayed her and her clothes with water and where there was one man in particular who would creep up behind her and unzip her skirt. She was an 18 year-old; she didn’t, she said, have the confidence to fight back. So she left.

She recalled later losing a job she loved, in the display section of a large department store, when she became pregnant. “My wife had a baby last spring,” her male boss told her. “She’s exhausted. You’ll never manage to work and be a mother.”

Our lives might have been so different, she reflected. On the occasion of her 70th birthday, she found herself wondering just who else she might have been.