THE TIMES – Monday 25 January 2016
Secrets and lies: what the divorce lawyer heard
Husbands cry, wives fight over pets: Mary Banham-Hall has seen it all, she tells Helen Rumbelow.
There comes a point in the career of every divorce lawyer when the idea of romance dies. For Mary Banham-Hall it was when she spent her professional day negotiating for the release of a small girl’s hamsters. The pets were being held hostage in the house of a warring parent. Banham-Hall was trying to prevent the hamster custody case coming before a judge.
“That case was important in my life. I realised I wasn’t really helping. Yes, I got the hamsters out, but it took many hours of negotiating for their release. I know it sounds silly, but the hamsters were a symbol of something. The children had chosen to live with their father, and the mother didn’t want to let their hamsters go as that meant the loss of her children was irretrievable. When the hamsters went, she was devastated. It was tragic. But the court was totally inappropriate. I thought, ‘This is a mad way to sort this out.’ ”
Banham-Hall’s line of work has been brilliant for her marriage. She started in divorce law nearly 40 years ago, shortly after she got hitched. After each day spent with people going through one of the most heartbreaking experiences anyone can endure, she goes home to her husband and vows not to experience it herself. “I know very well I don’t want it to happen to me. It’s true.”
She has also learnt that the process of dealing with family breakdown is in its own crisis. Just under half of marriages end in divorce, with cohabitation even less stable. In any given year about 120,000 couples with children split up (half are married, half cohabiting). Whoever thought to bring squabbling parents and their innocent children into courtrooms designed to prosecute murderers, thieves and tax fraudsters?
The hamsters would become a turning point for Banham-Hall. She moved her practice from traditional law into the new field of mediation. “If you started again with the law, would you design what we have now?” she says. “No. We’re in a silly place.”
A lot of talk has been made over the years about moving divorces to a more collaborative process: the pin-ups are of course Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin who “consciously uncoupled”. Mediation is a recent way of handling divorces in which one mediator helps the couple to come to an agreement rather than each employing their lawyer to fight it out.
Warring couples still aren’t choosing mediation in big numbers, however: a lot, Banham-Hall says, still confuse it with relationship counselling. It is also new and unfamiliar; it feels less tough at atimewhen ex-lovers feel vengeful; and if you were being cynical you might say that family lawyers have no interest in turning away valuable custom towards their cheaper rivals in mediation.
So Banham-Hall, who now mostly mediates, has done something I doubt most in her profession would risk. To publicise mediation she has written a rather racy tale of a marriage on the rocks in the spirit of Joanna Trollope. This novel,Love Lose Live, about a couple called Beth and Simon, has, unusually for the genre, a foreword by Lord Wilson of Culworth, Justice of the Supreme Court. He writes about the “huge frustration” in the profession that couples still don’t use mediation to handle their divorce instead of the traditional route. “Family mediation has vast untapped potential for saving costs for those couples as well as procuring an outcome more satisfactory for themselves than we judges are likely to devise,” he writes.
This is, however, a funny, erotic book too — even Wilson writes of a different kind of frustration in the affair depicted: the “wait for its ultimate consummation is — well almost — as frustrating for the reader as it is for the boyfriend”.
Banham-Hall said she turned to novel-writing because her clients found themselves too traumatised to wade through the non-fiction books on the subject. She once asked a couple to read a book on divorce, and although the wife bought it, at their next session she simply plonked it, unread, on her husband’s lap. By contrast, Banham-Hall stresses, this novel “is intended to entertain”.
The theme of Beth and Simon’s story, which Banham-Hall says is the theme of so many divorces, is that the couple use the law to vent their hurt. This is the greatest mistake of couples facing divorce. Because the law is not meant for this, they and their children end up paying the price, financial and emotional. People in wildly raw separations are simply in no fit state to make long-term decisions about children and property.
So divorce, I say in summary, is the worsttimeto have a divorce? “That is exactly the problem,” Banham-Hall says. “They are faced with a raft of life changes they have to make, before they are able emotionally to cope with them.”
Throughout the novel Beth and Simon’s three children take the brunt of this; early on the oldest child describes the first stage of separation as the day “his childhood ended, he crossed the divide into adult concerns and began looking after people”. Banham-Hall, who is a mother of three, says she deliberately focused on the children’s voices, because “I thought ittimethe parents listened to them”.
Banham-Hall once saw a couple who were so acrimonious they could not let their children take any clothes between their homes; this finds its way into the plot. “We once had a child handed over in a blanket because of the fighting over clothes. The kids dreaded the handover because of the arguing, so the way they coped was to have Daddy’s clothes and Mummy’s clothes, which is an example of children functioning at the parental level because their parents can’t stop fighting. It’s heartbreaking; that’s why I put it in the book.”
When I ask why family law traditionally attracts more female lawyers than male, she shrugs and says: “Probably because they are not afraid of the crying. Some men really find that difficult.” Don’t the husbands cry too? “Yes. They didn’t used to as much as they do now. You do hear parents saying they can’t stop crying, their children are worried about them. So children look after their parents; everything gets very muddled up.”
If there is a theme running through most divorces, she says, “it is grief”. While they think they are using a lawyer to battle their ex for “justice”, really they are out of control of their desires. “There is this powerful instinct to fight because if you don’t you’ll lose out. They are afraid, they say, ‘my spouse will take me to the cleaners’. I’ve heard that phrase so manytimes. What do they think is going to happen? The judges continue to keep settlements and arrangements for children reasonable.”
She finds that couples often come to her “saying their partner has a personality disorder, narcissistic, they’re lying — that’s very common, all these wild accusations. When it all comes out, sometimes it was true but often it was the person who was really lying or selfish was the one who made the allegation in the first place.
“The beauty of mediation is that I am not here to judge. The difficulty for lawyers is that there is a judge, you need to get to the bottom of things. Instead we say, ‘Do we need to agree on what happened here?’ The chances of two people going through a divorce agreeing on what went wrong is slim, but what went wrong for them is so important as their identity is bound up with whether they were right or wrong in the marriage. I help people say: ‘What I say is fine, and what you say is fine too.’ When they understand that they are never going to agree on it but they can agree on what they are going to do about it, that is a happy day.”
I’m surprised when Banham-Hall tells me about her “most disturbing cases”: “It’s where they say, ‘Oh we’re just such good friends.’ ” These couples, she says, want to be in love like the first stage of a relationship, “but you don’t feel the same at the beginning as you do 10, 30 years down the line.”
This is one explanation, she says, of why, as recent research shows, celebrities are more vulnerable to divorce. “Marriage boils down to the nuts and bolts of family life. Celebrities may be living fairytales that are by definition not real. I think we need a deeper understanding of real love.”
Love Lose Live: Divorce is a Rollercoasteris published by Focus Mediation on February 4,marybanhamhall.com